Pilot who pulled off daring rescue in Vietnam War
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, Mr. 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. Mr. Pardo realized that its twoman crew would be forced to eject over enemy territory and face capture or worse.
Flying beneath the compromised plane, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Colo.
His first marriage, to Barbara Pardo, ended in divorce. Along with his wife, whom he married in 1992, Mr. 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, Mr. 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.