In late April 1980, our crew was flying over the Arabian Sea in a big, black and green, C-130 without any national markings, when all the sudden an F-14 was sitting off the right wing. We were about FL 180 minding our own business, just killing time until we could RTB so this came as somewhat of a surprise to us, especially since we had an EWO who was supposed to alert us of such things.
We had taken off from Masirah Island about an hour earlier and had another hour or so of droning before we could go home. We’d been on Masirah for about a week or ten-days and the routine had become somewhat loose.
As we stared at our new friend (he seemed pretty friendly because he was waving at us), and wondered why he was there. Then it dawned on the pilots and me that perhaps those weren’t waves, so much as numbers, as in a UHF frequency.
We dialed up the UHF to say hi, and they came back with a simple question. “Did we happen to know the IFF/SIF codes for today?” Duh!
In our scramble to get out of the heat and into the air someone had forgotten to set the codes or to even turn on the set. It had been turned off for a mission a couple of days earlier.
Once we turned on the set, dialed in the codes and told him we should be good now, he waggled his wings, selected AB and went screaming off towards the heavens. About 30-seconds later his wingman came over the top, also in AB, and also climbing for the stars.
About this time the EWO woke up and asked what all the excitement was?
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