RE: Black Smoke???
Side track, sorry. Time to insert funny F4 / Smoke story.
I was a Crew Chief on F4's at Ramstein AB Ger. During one of our Flugtag air shows I was off duty wondering around the static displays with a group from my squadron. We came across a US Army tracked AA missile launch vehicle loaded with aim-7's with a soldier proudly showing it off to the gawkers. See, we had Army on base as our airfield defense. After telling him we were Ramstein F4 crews he was especially excited to give us, the actual people he was there to defend, the VIP tour. All was going well and we were mildly impressed that the DOD saw fit to give the Army something this advanced to play with, until he got to the IFF. He was trying to explain when they would engage a hostile and he was pointing at what we knew to be a pretty widely used, familiar transponder. It went something like this… "When the green light comes on it's hostile and we engage… no, uhh, when the green light comes on it's friendly and…" "…it doesn't matter we only shoot at smokers, we don't have any jets that smoke." I think at that point we lost a couple of the aircrew in our group so they could go puke.