Between May and August 1972, an F-4 Phantom pilot from Reidsville, North Carolina was credited with shooting down five MiG-21s over North Vietnam. Every one fell to the AIM-7 Sparrow, a radar-guided missile with a reputation so poor that crews joked about it. When he landed from the fifth, Captain Richard Stephen Ritchie became something the United States Air Force has not produced since: a pilot ace.

More than fifty years later he remains the only USAF pilot ace of that war, and no American pilot has made ace in any war since.

The instructor who volunteered to go back

Ritchie left the Air Force Academy in 1964, where he had walked on to the football team and finished as starting halfback in the 1963 Gator Bowl. He came first in his pilot training class at Laredo and, unusually for a second lieutenant, was picked to fly the F-104 Starfighter on flight test work at Eglin.

His first Southeast Asia tour came in 1968 with the 480th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Da Nang, where he flew the first “Fast FAC” mission of the F-4 forward air controller programme. Home again in 1969, he became one of the youngest instructors in the history of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, aged 26, teaching air-to-air tactics to the best pilots the Air Force had. Then he volunteered for a second combat tour.

Robin Olds, who knew a fighter pilot when he saw one, admired Ritchie in terms that doubled as a warning.

The secret box that changed the odds

The Triple Nickel had an advantage almost nobody else did. Eight of its F-4Ds carried a top-secret set designated APX-80, codenamed Combat Tree, which could interrogate the IFF transponders fitted to North Vietnamese MiGs — the very equipment their ground controllers used to tell friend from foe.

Displayed on a scope in the back-seater's cockpit, Combat Tree let a Phantom crew identify a MiG while it was still beyond visual range. In a war whose rules of engagement usually demanded a visual identification first, that was close to a superpower, and it finally made the Sparrow worth carrying.

10 May 1972, and the cost of it

The first big day of Operation Linebacker found Ritchie leading an element as Oyster 3 on the MiG combat air patrol. Warning came from an EC-121 over Laos and from Red Crown, the radar picket cruiser USS Chicago. Oyster flight met the MiGs nearly head-on and scattered them, and Ritchie claimed his first victory.

It was also a bad morning. The flight leader, Major Robert Lodge — a man Ritchie had taught at Nellis — was shot down and killed by trailing MiG-19s. His back-seater, Captain Roger Locher, ejected and evaded on the ground for 23 days before being rescued.

Eighty-nine seconds on 8 July

On 8 July, leading Paula flight with Captain Charles DeBellevue behind him, Ritchie shot down two MiG-21s in an engagement lasting one minute and twenty-nine seconds, tying Robin Olds' five-year-old Southeast Asia record. He described it years later on television.

The fifth

On 28 August 1972, flying F-4D 66-7463 as Buick 01 with DeBellevue in the back, Ritchie engaged a pair of MiG-21s, one head-on. He manoeuvred hard, worked in behind them and fired two Sparrows from more than four miles out, both shots outside the missile's proper envelope.

The first missed. Then the MiG broke hard, which shortened the range instead of opening it, and the second Sparrow destroyed it. That made five.

The man in the back seat did even better

This story cannot be told honestly without Charles DeBellevue, Ritchie's weapon systems officer for four of the five kills. DeBellevue had washed out of pilot training, retrained as a navigator, and finished the war credited with six MiGs — more than any other American aviator in Vietnam. He also received the Air Force Cross.

Of the five American aces of that war, only two were pilots: Ritchie for the Air Force, Randy Cunningham for the Navy. The other three sat in back. That is the real lesson of 1972 air combat, and it is not a flattering one for the cult of the lone fighter pilot.

Ritchie left active service in 1974, served on in the Air Force Reserve and retired in 1999 as a brigadier general, with more than 3,000 flying hours and 800 of them in combat.

Sources: Wikipedia, AcePilots, Vintage Aviation News, Military.com, and the Gathering of Eagles Foundation.