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Sabre Pilot

Air Force F-86 pilots wore a mix of World War II and newly-issued flight gear. This pilot has a flying suit and goggles from WWII, but he is also wearing a newer B-15 flight jacket and a post-WWII hard-shell helmet.

He is equipped with an oxygen mask for the thin air at high altitude, and a "g-suit" for dogfighting. The Korean War was the first time Air Force fighter pilots wore g-suits as standard equipment. MiG-15 pilots did not have g-suits.

During extreme maneuvers, blood drains from the head and causes blackouts. The "g-suit" automatically squeezes the body and restricts blood flow so that it drains slower from the upper to the lower body, allowing the pilot to make tighter turns.

Engaging a fast target maneuvering in three dimensions is an extremely complex problem -- even more so when the firing platform is also moving. Sabre pilots had the advantages of a ranging radar (to calculate distance to the target) and much better gunsights than those on the MiG-15s.

Mark 18 Gunsight
Early model F-86As carried the Sperry Mark 18 reflector gunsight, which was essentially the same type used on the propeller-driven Mustang in WWII. The Mark 18 gunsight computed how far to aim ahead of a moving target -- or "lead."

The pilot adjusted the switch to match the wingspan of the enemy aircraft (33 feet for a MiG-15), manually adjusted the range to the target, and aimed through a dotted circle projected on the slanted piece of glass.

A-4 Gunsight
The A-1CM (and later A-4) gunsights quickly replaced the Mark 18. These gunsights automatically calculated the range to the target from the radar in the F-86's nose, giving the pilot one less task to worry about in the heat of combat. These advanced gunsights could also be used to aim bombs or rockets.


Click here to return to the MiG Alley Overview.

 

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Related Fact Sheets
North American F-86A Sabre
Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15bis
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