IL A-4 Skyhawk was built to bomb things. It was small, light and nimble, and in Vietnam it hauled bombs and rockets into some of the most heavily defended airspace in history. Shooting down enemy fighters was the job of the Crusaders and Phantoms flying above it.

On 1 May 1967, over Kep airfield north-east of Hanoi, Lieutenant Commander Theodore R. "Ted" Swartz of attack squadron VA-76 broke that rule. Flying an A-4C from the carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, he shot down a North Vietnamese MiG-17 with an unguided Zuni rocket meant for ground targets. It was the only air-to-air kill scored by a Skyhawk in the Vietnam War.

A flak-suppression job at Kep

Kep was one of North Vietnam's main MiG bases, and on 1 May 1967 it was the target of a Navy strike. Swartz and his wingman, Lieutenant John Waples, were on a defence-suppression mission: their job was to hit the anti-aircraft guns so the bombers could get through.

As they started their attack run, according to accounts drawn from Peter Mersky's Osprey history of Navy and Marine Skyhawk units, they saw MiG-17s on the runway and fired their Zunis, destroying two of them on the ground.

The MiG that got in front

As the Skyhawks pulled away from the target, a third MiG-17 attacked. Swartz manoeuvred defensively, and the MiG ended up ahead of him, a position no fighter pilot wants to be in with an enemy behind.

Swartz fired his remaining Zuni rockets. They were designed for trucks, bunkers and gun positions, not for a manoeuvring jet fighter. One of them crippled the MiG, which went down behind a hill. Waples, according to these accounts, saw it fall and then a plume of black smoke rise.

That same day an F-8E Crusader pilot of VF-211, Lieutenant Commander Wright, also shot down a MiG-17 with a Sidewinder missile, and a USAF F-4C crew downed another. Swartz's kill, scored with a ground-attack weapon from an attack aircraft, was the one that stood out.

Why a Zuni kill was so unlikely

The Zuni is a 5-inch, unguided folding-fin rocket fired from pods. It has no seeker: it goes where the aircraft is pointing when it leaves the rail. Hitting an aircraft with one requires the target to fly through a very small piece of sky at exactly the right moment.

IL MiG-17, for its part, was one of the most dangerous threats US pilots faced over North Vietnam. It was slow by the standards of the Phantom, but it could out-turn almost anything the Americans flew and carried heavy cannons, as the photograph below of a MiG-17 attacking an F-105 shows.

Not the only Skyhawk kill in history

Swartz's victory was unique for the US Navy and for the Vietnam War, but not for the Skyhawk itself. In May 1970, an Israeli Air Force A-4 flown by Colonel Ezra Dotan shot down two Syrian MiG-17s over southern Lebanon, one with unguided rockets and the other with cannon fire.

In American service, though, there was only ever one. Swartz himself told the story decades later in a live interview with Air2Air, embedded below.

Sources: Wikipedia (VA-76; Douglas A-4 Skyhawk; List of US aerial victories of the Vietnam War), The Aviation Geek Club, Aviation Wings, Peter Mersky