Airpower Over the Gulf in Desert Storm

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duro therefore six months before the war started and we we really effectively use that time to know as much as we can about the Iraqi Air Force they're French and Soviet equipment we probably tell you just about as much as they can tell you about it we were very very well prepared for for the battles that took place you could make the day as busy as you wanted to by studying and uh enough setting up on the threat and things like that being isolated like that and and talking shop all the time really makes you focus on on your job at hand you know more time you have the plan the better and uh you know you can set up your plant your game plan better and have a lot more time to refine it that's that's exactly what we did Barack was extremely uh no unpredictable I think it's what they were gonna do and it just never knew I don't think any was really trusted what Barack would end up doing so we were ready to go but just wondering one that would happen everybody knew the 15th of January was a deadline date by kicking the war off we knew that you know finally there was a light at the end of the tunnel that once the war was over people would be able to go on we were very excited to to get it on with to finally get to do what we've been trying to do for so long with airplanes that have really never been tested with American hands start going north Iraq still had all their electricity so all the cities were lit up with lights you can teabag that off and the partner eyes you can see them afraid he's in tigress along there there's obviously people electricity there's lights along there that was lit up all the little towns were lit up and they started approaching them you can see like little Christmas tree lights just sprinkling all over just everything was just dust sparkling at us that was a triple a beat shot at us that you can see like snakes from the medium-size triple-a just tracer bullets they look like big long snakes coming up in the air my wife and I had a little girl 13 days after the war started taxiing out and uh time to think about you know reflect a little bit and after the first couple weeks of the war yeah I thought about my little girl you know wanted to make sure I got home to see her and uh make sure she had a daddy to see once I got home throughout the brief stepping out to the Jets your entire focus is on on getting the job done and I bring everybody home safely you're so focused on undoing the job and being in position and watching your radar you think you're gonna act one way and then you hope you act one way and once you get up in the air you may act a little different you especially after the war started when we started seeing the poles and stuff and how much support the president had and you know that just made us more proud to go out there and do our job and fight for America because we knew that just about the entire nation was supporting us and backing us up and you know I mean that's an American Trainmen certainly pretty much everyone in the military's dream is to you know to to be united so it was just super to see that every day there is order that comes down it covers every minute every time over target every callsign every tankers are involved every year refueling track it's a team effort that it's unbelievable in scope and everyone has a small part to play and take it together these individual missions come together to form what guys will call a package the largest package I was ever involved on a runway was a 16 f-16 so we took our near four I guess I could figure out about four five thousand feet of runway just lying here crapped up so it it's really you need to sit back there let's say is number ten or twelve and look at all these afterburners light it takes obviously several minutes to get the aircraft airborne so it's really a nice feeling to see all that second tier power up the visibility that aircraft is unbelievable you feel like you're almost outside and all you're looking barely over the nose the wings are well behind you so that's not in your formulation you feel like you're on the end of a pencil and the pencil is a huge jet edge it's still quite appealing to go ahead run the motor up and light the afterburner and get cruising down the runway all - ages of afterburner lighting is always a kick in the pants and it's uh you know I think maybe yeah maybe telling us just have a completely grown up yet but it's it's always a thrill to fulfill the afterburner kick in and that accelerates you down the runway accelerating to takeoff speed which is roughly 150 knots just in just a little over a thousand feet of runway so it it goes fairly quickly we just got the first three here I would expect another ricotta pride okay we better the five get me up over here on the right you go too late that's what they got that's pretty dated we were refueling sometimes six tankers and thirty fighters in a very small piece of airspace just trying to get everybody across the border and it was a phenomenal effort to get the airplanes fueled that many airplanes fuel in such a short period of time to get them off did he give me a quick grip on that tank the refueling itself is a goes real fast the fighter type aircraft take about 4,500 pounds of fuel a minute and your AWACS and larger aircraft can take up to close to 6,000 pounds of fuel per minute so the refueling itself usually goes pretty fast it got to be second nature you know that was time to relax was getting on the tanker and most the time they know they found good weather you know it's pretty easy you know just get you gas and go it's a fastest drive through you can find positive context go to three sub block Anders in contact markets hi for three will be in railroad +56 base Plus 56 we came back across the border with much less gas and we had programs and we weren't able to make it home to our base and we cried - hey wax for a tanker than we needed gas there was no tankers available but a tanker on his way home to his home base mission completed heard our pleas and turned around headed north and basically Ron David with us even though he was on his way home and hooked up with us again is enough fuel to just as a sunrise ride and gift enough fuel to bring our jet home that was typical the the kind of things that tankers did for during war and you any volunteer leader their needles whispers I'm a night out dream sorry good question though maybe a bit reserved now my heart said being pretty fast and I'm not thinking about anything but doing the job that I've been trying to do right then at that moment and what and that is basically working my radar the best I can I'm worried about the I'm worried about them having anyone airborne to shoot down or interfere with all the strikers I was flying is number three position most of the time I had it pretty good in a sense of finding targets because his lead would go down and his bombs would explode that's when they would start shooting obviously the downside of being three or four is they're the ones that get shot at a lot the ease in which the air war was presented to the people you know it looked like a pushover but to those that faces in the early days it was not a pushover and the fact that it became very easy was was because of some hard-fought battle in the early weeks your Adrenaline's flowing because this is the real thing and especially day two when they've shot like crazy at you and you know what to expect then and they know what to expect them and you're hoping they don't pick up on the tactics on all the airplanes that we're fine food three sorties the very first day of the war and you know you come back and do you think okay well I can do this but as it dragged on after about thirty days of you know doing sorties every other day or every day in some respects then you've heard start to crawl out of airplane go and I sure hope that's the last one we would Landin without shutting down just pull it right into a called hot cut for fueling so with the engine running they'll just taxi on up and we'd blow up all the tanks again and we go into the air into our you know our parking spot as soon as we shut down immediately weapons would start loading up the next next weapons and in any other minor maintenance involved in the turnaround of the aircraft the airplane with with good maintenance and I gotta put a good plug for our meanest guys I own a lot of beers they did a super job for us and that's what April did keep it flying all the time you come back from mission and they put your immediately onto alert so you could get scrambled again for another one I would say normally you're probably doing something within six hours we've lost on you ended the missions and at least the duration of the missions were we're fairly demanding especially initially so I guess practical things came to mind first when we're gonna get the chance for the next meal or figure out what our what our sleep cycle might be for the next stage we had much more freedom freedom of the skies over there than we would normally have at home whereas at home you would almost always be under radar monitoring or radar control ours was more or less radar advisories unless we were actively involved in a mission in talking to the airborne airborne warning and control people but as far as coming back to the to the local base typically we would have very little need to talk to them outside of 50 miles so we would go hundreds of miles basically just talking to talking to people for advisories but not really being under any active type of radar control the f-117 was the first aircraft to go into next to drop ordnance we arrived in within seconds of the beginning of the war Baghdad was lit up they obviously didn't know we're coming they weren't expecting us in the first series of bombs that we dropped to take out their communications network were famous almost a total surprise from then on trips into the Baghdad area and some of the larger airfields were almost always met with fairly intense Tripoli fire normally the aircraft would would get into the target unobserved drop its bombs and then be shot at on the way out because we were able to get in there unobserved I think that helped us avoid of majorities it's her play and helps allow for the fact that we never didn't get hit by so much as a bullet the f-117 consisted of roughly three percent the total number of aircraft used within the theater of operations and yet we were able to strike some forty to forty five percent of these strategic pinpoint targets that were that were hit during the war but even I was amazed at how well we did in combat with almost two thousand missions against some of the most highly defensive targets in Iraq and the aircraft performed superbly not only were we able to put ordnance directly on target where we needed it but the aircraft came away without so much as a scrape the technology worked the accuracy of the systems worked and the pilots were able to really not have some tough targets with amazing accuracy soft technology has proven itself to be a force multiplier it allows you to get either closer to your target or to your targets unobserved and basically in an air-to-air combat or whether it's an air-to-ground the guy can get in closest the guy can get the first shot is normally the guy who wins with in the Persian Gulf Theatre the aircraft has picked up the nickname of Shaba or ghost I would seem to be quite fun to that considering asking here for some executives on the name of the aircraft I fear to ground airplane is not a glory airplane it was built to take a lot of hits and it looks like it's already been taking a lot of hits before it leaves the production line basically the a-team can stick around and talk to different point people on the ground and can talk to other airborne assets and then figure out what the target is so it's a methodical type of approach to things it's a VFR type airplane you know visual flight rules no clouds very good weather usually and we had a lot of bad weather over there we had guys that pop through the clouds and then found targets because I used to move stuff under or the oil slicks and stuff but the weather wasn't real that's a 50% of days out there you had to work through the holes here to here is a lot you go it's one one machine against another machine versus order mud you have all kinds of realms of things you're in take out of tank and take out a triple-a batteries you're gonna take out a missile battery you know you just not gonna see the 50 role in an ear-to-ear f15 roll in on it on a SAM site or anything that's not their job if you talk to any f15 guys after this last war they'll say you know they helped camp overs at 20 plus thousand feet while we did our work and they were pretty so I think the brunt of jokes are gonna stop it's still an ugly airplane but it is lost on the farm it went well and we all had the feeling like fine we just couldn't believe we could be that overpowering or that they were planning some kind of surprise attack that they were going to move their forces obviously the exodus of aircraft into Iran was that was a concern we really couldn't figure out why if they were still intact why they weren't fighting back to the degree that we were expecting or if they were planning something else later on as the war went and the biggest thing I think for all of us is to keep the piece of razor's edge I guess you know we couldn't get lackadaisical or sloppy I think we wondered you know what's the big surprise was the mother of all battles really going to be and was he gonna unleash this wrath on us the apprehension slowly worked its way out to the point where you really didn't think about it that much it was you didn't want to become complacent but at the same time you didn't have the lump in your throat anymore at the beginning I thought you know we got a job to do we're going to do it but as as the war continued in this the oil wells force it on fire and as the atrocities came out that we're being performed against the lady people and then to the ecology in the region I got mad about it I just I just thought whatever has to be done to and us to get this done right from a tactical standpoint on the Iraqis side they did the smart thing by keeping them on the ground so we got a lot of them on the ground but they would have lost a lot more if they kept them flying you see on the TV is the end game basically once you've found the target keeping the crosshairs on it is pretty darn easy and the hard part is is getting to that point and fighting your way into the target defeating the defense's the triple-a the missiles and then acquiring your target just being able to find your specific building in a complex and the rules we play with there we're very very strict if you couldn't find your target you didn't drop the minute that we turned around and started heading south to the part Iraq there was always a tendency to a certain amount of relief but I think the the conscious thing that we that we really forced herself to do was make sure that we didn't let down once we cross the border back into saudi airspace and we knew there was no ground threats that would be active against us then there was a little more time for for reflection I got phone calls from all kinds of guys letters from all other guys around the world and you know you're actually getting practice your profession I always on pieces my profession you are our nation's child you are a mother's prayer you are a gentle touch you are the ones we love so much you take to the skies with the dog know and the job to be done your freedoms like shining strong you go on and on anywhere be there you are you are the gong and our nation welcome home you are the spirit behind the soul you are the spirit of America feeling the loneliness of loved ones you left behind you keep us close to your heart we keep you close in our minds you are the friend keep strong you are the spirit of America you are the young and I mention you are the steering while the spirit of America you are the spirit of Lee on ego like thunder follow freedom you are my Mason's child you are a mother's prayer your freedoms like anywhere in you are our nation's own you are the spirit welcome home you are the spirit one of America day and night my wait then I get home welcome home for the serviceman or thank you for a job well done we're behind you we're proud of you it's just so evident all over the place we experienced that as we as we flew through Spain as we flew through Newfoundland all across the United States is that support is there and it's not just from the Americans it's Indian the entire world seems to be very supportive of world where we did over there a lot of the Flyers that flew in combat felt that they were lucky to be home and not only were they home their friends were hoping everybody was

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Channel: Jason Edwards

Views: 176,280

Rating: 4.5282393 out of 5

Keywords: Desert, Storm

Id: 2L65BtDJCYI

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 32min 24sec (1944 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2011

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