Northern No-Fly, and get a fire light just before I got to the ingress Tanker. Checklist makes me shut it down, even though I am confident it is a false light (F-4 had quite a few of them).
Squadron Commander is on my wing; he know the checklist says "Land as soon as possible." I wanted to go back to Incirlik (about 50 minutes; VFR). He says no, you're going to the closest...Batman."
Batman (real spelling and pronunciation) is in Eastern Turkey, and the center of the rebelion between indigenous Turks, and the Kurds.
Weather is about 600 ft; 1-2 miles in rain. Hilly; big mountains are a short distance east of there. Only approach is a TACAN, or an ASR.
So, against my judgment, I am forced into the approach. I contact their "approach control," get bounced to another freq for the ASR. The channel is bad, and it would have been tough with someone who spoke english, but this guy was babbling in something I'm not even sure was Turkish.
At this point, it is obvious that "ATC," if it can be called that, is going to hinder, not help. We try to find the approach plate for the TACAN.
We do, and dial it up. Get a feeble lock, and start out towards final. The Boss' insistence on landing at Batman, and the ASR fiasco, has cost a lot of time and gas....I'm running out of options; I can't make Incirklik any more.
It gets better: the TACAN is intermittent. About 69% of the time, off-air. And it isn't pointing where the INS says the airport and the TACAN are.
My backseater laughs and says "Too bad we can't shoot a HARM at their radar antenna..we have Range Quality 1 on it!!" RQ-1 meant an extrememly high positional accuracy of location on the Radar Warning Receiver, which in the F-4G was the APR-47.
I looked at my RWR scope, saw what he said, and put it on the nose. Using their airport radar and my RWR scope as a "navaid," I had to make my instrument scan RWR-HSI-Airspeed-Altitude.....
Well, it worked, but it was that, or nothing.
The story is even funnier when we were taken to their control tower, and there were (I am not making this up) goats, chickens, and rabbits foraging around the base of the tower, or the tower controller who proudly told me "I am married to my cousin!!", or the enlisted guys who said we could not have a beer on base, but gave us all the whiskey we could drink.
But that's for another time.
