F-16 Evades SIX Surface to Air Missiles! HUD Footage Breakdown

strike three check right break right stroke three break right sam stand right too strong right three right [Music] what's up everybody it's mover welcome back to the channel today we're going to talk about probably one of the most intense and uh well-known videos on youtube at least in my opinion uh an f-16 dodging surface-to-air missiles over iraq in 1991. so today we're going to take a look at that video and break it down but first let's look at an article from air force magazine four years ago in 2016. and it gives some of the backstory the title of this sub-article is no chaff no flares no problem during the package q air strike into baghdad on january 19th 1991 emmett tulia i think that's how you say it tell ya tulia out flew at least six iraqi surface-to-air missiles and live to tell about it a famous head-up display video of his dancing with sam's remains a teaching tool in the air force today that's the video we're going to take a look at then major tulia flew one of the f-16s aside to attack an oil refinery in baghdad near a bin in the euphrates river intelligence indicated that the iraqis had grouped substantial defenses in the area still tullia was surprised at the intensity of the ground fire as he approached the target any aircraft shells were creating a virtual carpet of smoke and shrapnel in the sky mostly at altitudes from 10 to 12 thousand feet i didn't expect such a big effort on their part he says the first sams appeared just prior to roll in there were two of them sa2s i turned around saw them coming up they went beneath us and overshot tulya says he was getting some additional missile warnings but he dived in and delivered his bombs on the now burning refinery as he pulled off and headed south the electronic countermeasures warnings escalated he was now the hunted not the hunter he looked back and saw two missile plumes he wondered if they were directed at him and it quickly became clear they were then i go oh no time to start maneuvering tulia says he jettisoned his wing tanks to lighten up his f-16 and make it more nimble he remembers thinking the effect of this move was pretty impressive it really did make a difference these two missiles also overshot and detonate detonated harmlessly above his aircraft he turned back onto the egress heading and then two more sams came at him from his left and right rear quadrants tulia began dancing in earnest waiting until the last second before a hard turn to cause the missile to overshoot and detonate far enough away to avoid shrapnel damage to his fighter at this point he was separated from the right of his flight and losing altitude due to his defensive maneuvers it was challenging because i didn't have a lot of chance to gain air speed he said he'd punched his wing tanks and did not have a lot of remaining fuel using the augmented thrust could have made it impossible for him to return to base i guess they're talking afterburner here i was gambling that maybe in mill power i could still get enough speed to maneuver i was lucky because it did work out he says finally he was out of the sam envelope and heading for south of the border at high altitude a fellow 6 14 tfs pilot lag back to keep him company in the end toyo was surprised he had enough fuel to make it back he landed in cutter pulled right off and shut it down i don't know how much gas i had left it couldn't have been much he says walking around the f-16 after tulya and his crew chief discovered that his chaff and flares had not been dispensed he had avoided those missiles without countermeasures utilizing his flying prowess alone i was kind of surprised he says dryly for this exploit major e.t tullia was later one of the distinguished flying cross awesome so let's take a look at the video itself okay so here's the f-16 dodging six iraqi sams on 19 january uh 1991 the way i run this is i'm gonna stop as i see things uh i'll leave a link in the description if you just want to watch it all the way through without me jibber jabbering but uh it's kind of it's a nine minute or ten minute video so to avoid uh playing it through and then coming back i'm going to stop and try to explain as we go so so let's take a look at the video a warning it is pretty intense today's the 19th of january his name is two-year stroke number three mission okay so what he's doing there before every combat mission we title our tapes uh back then it was eight millimeter tapes now it's dvrs but you title your tapes in eor so what you're looking at here is actually the arming crew at the end of the runway and they're arming up all his bombs and missiles and chaff and flare and all that stuff so he's standing there um you know tell him hey keep your hands clear and it's a good time to title your tape so you're saying what the mission is what your target is and what your plan is so he's going to go through all that here and i'll explain what it means i'm going to be attacking the little refinery in the southern part of baghdad back up target is the airfield which is the ip so he basically said he's he's gave us mission number he stroked three wow tot is uh 1343 we use mark 84's 45 high okay so as t.o.t was uh you gave the time so that was in about two hours i think it was 11 something there uh and then he said that he's going to use mark 84s so those are two thousand pound uh general purpose bombs this is back in the early 90s so we're not talking lgbs or anything like that we're just talking gp bombs uh and he said he was going to do 45 high which is a 45 degree dive angle is what he's planned to do which we'll talk about here later in the video of what he actually does and it's high it's a high drag bomb so that changes um planned and minimum release and all that stuff so you're uh for the weaponeering okay right here he's looking at the camera coefficients and he's also doing the camera check the dive toss check which you'll see in a second and that that's just yeah so there he is so you do a dive toss check and all that's doing is checking to make sure that the camera the hud camera is aligned with what he's seeing and that's for debrief purposes for assessing where the symbology is so the core uh the camera coefficients are actually either on the canopy or in the books you write them down and you make sure that it matches so uh that's all the ground stuff that was just the uh legalese it's a lot more complicated now with jdams and stuff like that there's a lot more stuff you have to say but uh that's the basics uh you know canopy coefficients all the different uh uh stuff he has to say prior to uh going on the missions just titling the tapes target at the border bomb some army battalions right now alternative game plan is worth nail 01 is our airborne fact coordinator 28 35 45 north 47 5206 east just inside the kuwaiti border okay so he's given uh what their plan is they've got a forward air controller that's gonna talk them in for their target uh that's that's helping the uh the package there the q package general stuff on the hud just so you're aware left side is calibrated air speed so right now he's uh 330 knots these are block 30 i think big mouth aircraft so just really early software uh because this is the early 90s so they were brand new jets i mean 86 to 88 so you know they're they're probably a five six year old aircraft he's uh at altitude here so a little over uh right at 24 000 feet uh he's in sim right now that's his indicated mock that is his uh max g pulled so if you look at how much gs he's pulled so far that's what he is unless he reset it that's his current g so when we look at the g's that's where that is radar altimeter so that's his altitude above the ground uh this is his steer point these are his radio frequencies and this is the time this is all his iff stuff so uh and these are pitch ladders that's five degrees up five degrees down and that's his heading that's all change when he changes master modes but just to give you a basic idea what he's looking at alpha dump three southeast and uh gonna work out thank you plan back here in just a second all right so he's ingressing the target area now 0.9 mach doing a dip check to make sure it looks like what it's supposed to look like they're up at twenty okay one's got a spike that means uh his radar warning receiver is receiving uh radar energy from something he doesn't say what it is he might say it here in a second but it is something it could be another enemy aircraft or it could be uh something from the ground uh ground track radar or something like that all right so the film switch now he's in okay so they go picture clean which aywax is saying there's no air-to-air threats in the area right now so at this point he switched to ccrp that's his current g altitude airspeed is all the same that's the locator line to the target or to the current selected uh steer point there and that is a bomb fall line for ccrp so it's a constantly computed release point which you'll switch to ccip which is the constantly computed impact point here in a second it's clear tally target so he sees the target clear no problems it's 40 degrees off right here you can see he's on a three zero zero heading he looks like he's offsetting to get his roll in clear target's not clear he says stroke looks like the target's clear that's target is not clear so now they're going back and forth one sand is clear once they is not he's seeing the triple a step three stroke one's got sa2 launched so what the sa2 is it's a russian developed surface-to-air missile i think it's back in the 50s it's a very old missile system mainly used vietnam and then proliferated to other countries they've done upgrades and stuff but at this time it's just a real big missile it's actually 35 feet long so like a telephone pole uh coming at you so a little easy to see uh compared to like other missiles like an air-to-air missile or something like that and doesn't have a whole lot of in-game maneuverability so you'll see he's doing a lot of what's called last ditch maneuvers here there that give him the ability to out maneuver the missile in game uh to defeat him so he's defending he's calling out what he sees that's the missile launch indication [Music] you're on your own stroke three you're on your own so one guy just said he jettisoned so he's defending for a missile he's last ditch he doesn't want to uh get hit so he's jettisoned to give himself some more maneuverability so one of them jettisoned and easy dressing he's like i got rid of my bombs i'm going home and tanks uh he's already defeated two missiles you're right okay so remember he said he was going to do a 45 high he's at 25 degrees so he's a very shallow so whereas you know he's about 45 degrees what he was looking for now he's a little bit more shallow um it works uh it would obviously be something to debrief but he's just been defending no one's going to fault him for for for that uh the biggest thing to watch is this dud queue uh here because he doesn't want obvious want to dud the bombs so they don't uh fuse and explode uh but the threat with being shallow like that is you're outside your parameters so we have weaponry parameters that we're supposed to meet and we're supposed to be within our dive angle within our release airspeed and our release altitude window and he's kind of outside of that but it will be an effective attack so it doesn't really matter all right so 145 got 25 released under g uh that's kind of a safe escape and remember he's looking at flack and there's another now they're popping off uh missiles at him his wingman's calling out stroke three you've got a missile launch at you they're just trying to generate angles and problems and stuff and that's what you see so stroke four got hit i understand you're hit negative bad guy squat negative so they're calling the status on his wingman his wingman's just been shot down so he's just trying to get him out of bad guy land and at this point he's punched off his tanks [Music] there's you can see the missile contrails and this is just [Music] and that's all he's doing is he's trying to maneuver to to generate problems for the missile guides strokes flow south so flow south they're trying to they've egressed ingress north they're trying to go back home south all right now he's getting low now he's into that anti-aircraft artillery zone so they're telling him to climb back up to get out of that area and there's another sam launch at him so they're just popping off missiles adam [Applause] [Music] oh god that one must have been close you can see at the bottom he's pulled six and a half g's still there stroke three is still setting southeast so he says he's still there this is back before data link and link 16 and saddle and all that stuff so all they had was visual maybe air their attack and i don't think they had the air to attack end up right now yeah so the only way they could get back together was visual so it's it's hey you still there because the the the train the the strike package has already dropped their bombs and going home one guy stays behind to to be with him but he's like hey you know because he's trying to visually find him while not getting shot down himself so he's like hey you still back there because this is i mean this is real life they just had one get shot down and they're trying to rally forces and get out together so there's another so defending six that's an sa-6 um so that they must have switched sa-6 is a much more formidable uh missile that's not um you know the sa-2 yeah it's a big 35-foot telephone pole the sa-6 is much more capable has a lot more in-game energy so defeating it is a lot more challenging than the sa2 oh wow and dude there he goes there's up and over every time he thinks he's got a break there's another sam that's after him he just needs to get out of there and that's six and a half g's on your body so i mean this is a physical workout for him it's incredible now he's getting he's risking getting down on the triple a being down to 10 000 feet he's out of breath i would be too that's incredible happy [ __ ] every time he thinks he's safe he's he's defending against another missile this is incredible so that's one of the other flights saying hey what's your posit in relation to steer 0.9 so they're just trying to get back together to see where everybody's at rally the forces now he's down below ten thousand feet but he's egressing he's on the right heading so he's maneuvering to try to defeat the target acquisition radar he's gone the dogfight mode and air-to-air and he's climbing amazing got himself real slow at 200 knots so he doesn't have a whole lot of maneuvering potential at this speed so it goes back to nav mode which is the center position and that's it so he he got himself out of bad guy land oh man uh i yeah that's a i recommend watch it without me talking it's a it's a very intense uh thing so the big thing they talk about he didn't have any chaff flares i don't know so i flew the block 30. uh obviously i flew the block 30 15 years after this uh 17 years after this so a lot of software has changed but usually when you use chaff flare i don't know how it was back in the early days of the block 30 but he may not have ever hit the sema switch the countermeasure switch because i don't ever hear it say chad flair chaff flare that might have been something they added later or he may have been hitting it and nothing was coming out but to me that explains why he came back and nothing was out because he just never hit it but that's really interesting um you know if he was hitting it nothing was happening or whatever but he defeated six sams and i think a couple were sa2 so the big telephone poles and a couple were sa-6s which are uh really uh lethal surface-tier missiles and that's impressive i mean that just goes to show you you know his head was outside the whole time trying to find the missile because in order to defeat it in game if you're not using counter measures you're not using jamming or anything like that you have to physically defeat the missile with the jet and he did that i mean he physically defeated the the uh the missiles by making the miss in game uh we talked about it with behind enemy lines and a couple that other pakistani movie missiles don't chase so once they once they're defeated that's it they fly off into nowhere um he is not being chased by one missile he's being shot at by six and i think something like this would have made for much more realistic and much more interesting tv than what they did where they did the wiley coyote missile that you know plays chicken with them and then flies around and then chases them around the mountain and all that stuff so uh anyway but this is a really intense video uh check it out it's a fascinating story the whole operation is fascinating so the end two f-16s were lost uh this f-16 that we see made it back safely but there were a lot of lessons learned that came out of the planning and execution phase of the strike mission and how we lost two f-16s but really interesting hud tape uh very intense and man just scary stuff so anyway i hope you guys are having a great week hope you guys enjoyed it thanks for watching we'll see you next time excuse me [Music] oh [Music] actually fine with the doors off [Music] don't be a douche that's rule number one make them tell you now

Channel: C.W. Lemoine

Views: 910,771

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Id: TJE5gDDnq9s

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020