Bob Pardo, Pilot in Daring Rescue in Vietnam War, Dies at 89

Bob Pardo, a fighter pilot who during the Vietnam War kept a wingman’s damaged plane aloft in a daring feat of aviation that became known as “Pardo’s Push,” died Dec. 5 in a hospital near his home in College Station, Texas. He was 89.

His wife, Kathryn, said the cause was lung cancer.

In March 1967, Pardo was on a mission over North Vietnam in an F-4 Phantom when anti-aircraft fire hit his plane, inflicting damage, while more badly ripping into the fuel tank of another fighter in the strike force. Both jets pulled away to head home. But the second plane had lost too much fuel to make it to safety. Pardo realized that its two-man crew would be forced to eject over enemy territory and face capture or worse.

Flying beneath the compromised plane, Pardo told its pilot, Capt. Earl Aman, to lower his tailhook — a metal pole at the rear of a fighter used to arrest its landing. At 300 mph, Pardo nudged his plane’s glass windshield against the tip of the pole. For almost 90 miles, he pushed the other plane as both jets hemorrhaged fuel, until they crossed the border with Laos. Both crews ejected by parachute and all four men were rescued.

When they returned to their airfield, Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand, Pardo faced criticism for the highly unorthodox maneuver, which may have saved the lives of Aman and his weapons officer, 1st Lt. Robert Houghton, but came at the cost of Pardo’s aircraft.

“When we got back to Ubon, they didn’t know whether to court-martial me or pin a medal on my chest,” he recalled in an interview with an Air Force publication in 1996. “Some people felt I should have let Earl and Bob eject and take their chances, so I could land my aircraft safely.”

“Pardo’s Push” entered Air Force legend, an extraordinary act of aerial ballet, but one that would never be prescribed in any pilot manuals or flying simulators. Only once before, during the Korean War, was a similar rescue maneuver ever performed.

The military did not honor Pardo for decades. In 1989, he was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry.

The citation described him pushing Aman’s aircraft to safety. “The attempt was successful and consequently allowed the crew to avoid becoming prisoners of war,” it read.

In a subsequent interview, Pardo said he thought of words his father had told him when he made the decision — a risky one since the windshield could have shattered.

“My dad taught me that when your friend needs help, you help,” he said. “I couldn’t have come home and told him I didn’t even try anything. Because that’s exactly what he would have asked me. He would have said, ‘Did you try?’ So I had to be able to answer that with a yes.”

John Robert Pardo was born March 10, 1934, in Lacy Lakeview, a suburb of Waco, Texas, to William Roland Pardo, who installed pipelines for a gas company, and Lucille (Williamson) Pardo, a homemaker. He graduated from high school in nearby Hearne, Texas, in 1952 and enrolled at the University of Houston. He dropped out to work briefly with his father before enlisting in the Air Force in 1954. He was awarded his pilot’s wings the next year at Bryan Air Force Base in Texas. He was stationed at bases in Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Missouri and Maine before his tour of combat in Vietnam in 1966-67.

After a 20-year uniformed career, he retired in 1974 as a lieutenant colonel and worked in corporate aviation, including as a pilot for the Adolph Coors Co. in Golden, Colorado.

His first marriage, to Barbara Pardo, ended in divorce. Along with his wife, whom he married in 1992, Pardo is survived by a sister, Stella Gordon; a son, John Robert Pardo Jr.; a daughter, Angela Fresh; two stepsons, Scott Arnold and Kevin Arnold; 10 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

In Southeast Asia, Pardo was assigned to the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron when his strike force took off from Thailand on March 10, 1967, to bomb a steel mill 30 miles north of Hanoi, the capital of what was then North Vietnam.

With the backing of China and Russia, North Vietnam was fighting South Vietnam, which the U.S. supported. The Vietnam War was a major conflict of the Cold War. It cost the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers and an estimated 1 million to 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

Between 1965 and 1968, the U.S. Air Force and Navy carried out an intense bombing campaign of the North known as Operation Rolling Thunder to destroy infrastructure. The tonnage of U.S. bombs dropped exceeded U.S. bombing in the Pacific in World War II. North Vietnam’s defenses included anti-aircraft batteries, missiles and Russian-made MiG fighter jets.

Pardo’s and Aman’s F-4 fighter-bombers were hit about 40 miles from the steel mill, Pardo recalled in a 2019 interview with the San Antonio Express-News. Aman began climbing after taking fire.

“I knew something was bad wrong because of his fuel state, so I started climbing with him,” Pardo recalled. “When we got up to, oh, 30,000 feet, he leveled off and he was streaming fuel.”

Pardo knew Aman’s plane would not be able to make it out of North Vietnam to rendezvous with a flying refueling tanker. At first, he tried to push Aman’s plane by sticking the nose of his own jet into a rear port, but there was too much turbulence. Next, he tried to maneuver directly under the other jet and give it a piggyback ride, which also failed.

Then he conceived of pushing Aman’s tailhook. A tailhook pole was used by the Navy’s version of the F-4 Phantom to land on aircraft carriers. The Air Force used it for emergency runway landings, when the hook snags a cable stretched across tarmac.

Pardo told his wingman to shut down his engines and carefully made contact with the tailhook using his own plane’s windshield.

“If he so much as bumped the windshield, he would have had that tailhook in his face,” Houghton, who was in the rear seat of the injured plane, recalled in a 1996 interview. “We’re talking about glass here. It was phenomenal flying, nothing less.”

Pardo recalled: “I can’t remember how many times the tailhook slipped off the windshield, and I had to fight to get it back in place.”

After one of Pardo’s own engines caught fire and he shut it down, the two planes began rapidly losing altitude, sinking 2,000 feet per minute. They crossed the border with Laos at an altitude of only 6,000 feet, leaving them just two more minutes of flying time. Both crews bailed out soon after, floating down to the jungle by parachute. They were rescued by U.S. helicopters.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .