Reply #109: As long as he could launch and land on an Aircraft Carrier

[Thothmes]

the Navy would have a cockpit for him. He was fully carrier qualified, he had between 90 & 100 arrested landings on a carrier, a third of them at night.
That was good enough to send him against Hanoi 23 times. remember in those years, the Navy need anyone that could drop bombs on North Vietnam. As long as you could drop bombs, what happened in previous years ashore did not matter that much.