Wings Over the Gulf - Episode 3 - Final Assault

[Music] february 26 1991 after a six-week air campaign the ground war against iraq begins grenade come on f-16 fighting falcons were the workhorses of the gulf war more f-16s flew into combat than any other type of aircraft [Music] in the early 1970s the united states air force faced a unique dilemma it was preparing to bring into service the best fighter of all time the f-15 eagle but f-15s cost so much that they could only be deployed in small numbers the west needed an inexpensive fighter to replace the f4 phantom since the soviet union was filling the skies with low-cost high-speed aircraft the soviets believed that even if the west had better planes nato could be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers so in 1972 the u.s air force called for proposals for a lightweight aircraft that could serve as both a dog fighter and a ground attacker the winner was a single engine single pilot general dynamics design the f-16 gd took proven systems from other planes and married them to a highly aerodynamic fuselage price was kept to a relatively low 12 million dollars per plane thanks to a unique production agreement between gd and four nato countries f-16 parts would be mass-produced in america and europe and the monetary risk would be spread among the partners [Music] in 1979 the f-16 went into service with the united states air force by the 1990s 17 other countries were flying it for air defense the popularity of the f-16 is easy to explain it's small very fast and highly maneuverable great characteristics for a dogfighter in the hands of the right pilot it can hold its own against anything flying today and the f-16 has multi-mission capability in other words it can also drop bombs if you look up and try to see an f-16 from 12 13 000 feet coming down the chute in a 45 degree dive or so and you look up at the airplane you will not see it you will not see it at 8 000 feet you might see it and by the time you hear the sound the bomb is going off in your face aviators like the way the f-16 responds in the air and they also like its unique cockpit the airplane seat is set back at a 30 degree angle this helps pilots cope with the plane's 9g turn capability the plane's bubble canopy gives pilots unobstructed vision but the most striking feature of the f-16 is its fly-by-wire control system the f-16 was the first fully electric fighter all control commands are relayed by wires not by cables or linkage controls pilot and machine become a seamless unit bonded by the plane's on-board computer [Music] the f-16s apg-68 radar gives pilots a clear picture of air and ground threats when the falcon is in dogfighting mode it can fire its two wingtip-mounted aim-9 sidewinder missiles as well as sparrow and amram missiles [Music] in august 1990 f-16 squadrons began shipping out to the persian gulf squadrons were drawn from the active air force as well as the air national guard and the air force reserve the 249 f-16 sent over flew out of at least four bases scattered across saudi arabia i've got a little bit over 10 years experience in the military now flying lots of different types of airplanes and when i went to the persian gulf our wing did not take any uh quote inexperienced guys we tended to take guys that had maybe more than 300 hours or so in the airplane in f-16s just so that it it's stacking your team if you have a group of pilots to draw from you want to try to take the the best team you can put together in the gulf war america's team included men and women for air force personnel female crew chiefs and tanker pilots were nothing new but for some members of the coalition particularly the saudis the site of women working alongside men on the flight line was alarming [Music] the saudis were even more unnerved when they saw female officers giving orders to men they reported gold for the scottish foxtrot choctaw relay but the sexual integration of the u.s military was just one of the major changes that followed the vietnam war there's no doubt about it the vietnam experience affected all of us deeply and provided us great insights it started out at the national level the president's secretary of defense who were involved in detail and everything we did and yet they would leave to the military those decisions that were the military's picking of targets for example i think the fact that we fought the war unrelentingly is also an example we're in vietnam we'd use bombing halts and attempt to negotiate and do those kinds of things that would delay the conflict and prolong the suffering i think all of us were death against that turn around anyway zero intercept 160. okay that's 16 on top roger that tallyho 190. my first day in combat shoot yeah i was nervous and i sure i concentrated a lot a lot more than i normally do my head was on a swivel the whole time looking around to see what was going on make sure nobody was going to shoot me but i remember coming back off the target once i got over the adrenaline rush going that wasn't so bad i think i can do that again [Music] during january and february 1991 american f-16s bombed iraqi military facilities tanks airfields chemical factories and supply lines they also attacked iraqi troops in and around occupied kuwait f-16s do not carry any laser-guided smart bombs into battle the airplane isn't fitted with the laser targeting devices needed to drop such weapons because their primary targets were military positions in the desert f-16s usually dropped cluster bomb units and 2000-pound gravity bombs weapons with no built-in guidance systems many were leftovers from the vietnam war f-16s dropped these bombs as part of the coalition's strategy of overwhelming force the plan was to hit iraq particularly its ground troops as hard as possible for as long as it took to break their will and force a surrender when bombing f-16 pilots activate the continuously computing impact point ordnance aiming system a device that takes much of the inaccuracy out of dumbbond delivery a computer calculates air speed bomb weight distance to target and other factors so when bombs are dropped they have a high pk or probability of kill however the higher a plane flies the worse the pk our bomb is designed around a very very smart computer in the airplane to once you pickle that bomb off it's a it's a hunk of iron falling to the ground and although it's still a very accurate system you're talking about you know 50 feet uh is is a is a very average bomb from 10 to 15 000 feet but 50 feet sometimes there's a difference between a miss and a hit so our pk was certainly not as good as the very very smart bombers general horner and i were obsessed and that's probably the right word with having the minimum loss of life and so there were restrictions that were placed on all of the airplanes as far as minimum altitudes they could fly during the day and the f-16 was one of the airplanes that had to put up with our restrictions and so we did not expect them to be as accurate as just a plain physics but if you honestly do not believe that the outcome of a war is in question and the only question is how many lives you're going to lose then that's a prudent action [Music] f-16s and many other coalition planes were restricted to medium altitudes because of iraq's vietnam-style tactic of spraying the sky with bullets and surface-to-air missiles if you talked about it statistically i'm sure if you compared the numbers of sams that were situated in baghdad kuwait city area it'd probably be very comparable to what the vietnamese what the pilots he flew in north vietnam faced in the noah area it's really really heavy concentration we just were a lot better to equip to deal with them in this day and age due to the technology that we had by the end of the gulf war two f-16s had been lost to surface-to-air missiles and two others were down by anti-aircraft guns f-16 performance was also diminished by poor weather and later by the oil well fires that fouled the skies the f-16 is at its best on clear sunny days stand by unable to give you a radar there's a 10 000 foot layer kind of a scud layer where the sand would come up uh off the desert the sand there is like a more like a talcum powder than the sand we know in our sand boxes know any kind of wind picked up it come up in the atmosphere so there's always about ten thousand feet uh some type of restriction there and below you can see down you couldn't see out a good bit except after a front came through but not all the f-16s were blind 72 flew with lantern navigation pods containing terrain following radar and a forward-looking infrared sensor perhaps the major test of the f-16s power and versatility came on february 24th 1991 when after six weeks of air assault the ground war began during the last part of the war uh just before and when the army came in uh the sense of urgency of the target sets became more real because now they're going to be risking their lives before it was just us in the airplanes and we fought our own little war but when you added the army in now we knew somebody else was involved that we had to help which now the urgency of whether getting to your target taking out exactly the target they want you to take out i became a real player [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay to support the ground troops f-16s began flying forward air control missions in enemy areas designated as kill boxes kill boxes originated when coalition air planners took a saudi air force map of the gulf region based on a grid of 60 mile squares then subdivided those squares into 15 mile boxes strike planes were then sent to each box to find and destroy targets when the ground war started f-16s were sent on killer scout missions to kill boxes close to front-line troops the killer scout mission where they would actually spot targets and identify them and things were very helpful in systematically treating that ground army because if you take two or four fighter pilots and say okay that's 15 miles square you keep coming back every day until basically there's no ground threat there it's after a couple days they are very familiar with every little sand dune in that 15 mile square f-16s flying killer scout missions were frequent visitors to airborne tankers loitering over kill boxes for long periods of time consumes a great deal of fuel the ultimate purpose of killbox attacks was to overwhelm iraqi forces with a shower of munitions falling from the sky-like rain it was hoped that a frightening display of air power would break the will of the iraqi army throughout the gulf war f-16s attacked soldiers of the iraqi army and the elite republican guard studies have shown that when a military unit no matter how capable or motivated drops beneath the 50 percent combat strength level it becomes all but useless the coalition hoped that constant air attacks would cause so many desertions surrenders wounds and deaths in the iraqi ranks that its entire frontline force would fall below the 50 [Music] mark [Music] their goal however was not to kill every iraqi soldier on the battlefield we could kill a lot of people if he wanted to using for example cluster bomb units over large areas when in fact we went with for example laser-guided bombs against tanks and the enemy knew this and immediately as soon as they parked their tank they'd get away and you'd see the slip trenches appear around the tanks so every target we looked at we looked at in terms of how to limit the loss of life and how to destroy those systems that would cause loss of life on the front of the side right there tanks were key targets for f-16s apache gunships and a-10s iraq had the fourth largest army in the world and tank warfare was one of that army's strengths f-16s often dropped cluster bomb units such as these on or near iraqi armor they were somewhat effective though nowhere near as lethal to iraq's top of the line tanks as maverick missiles when the ground war began and tank killing became priority one maverick was the f-16 pilot's weapon of choice [Music] since it only took one missile to destroy an iraqi tank a seventy thousand dollar maverick equal to one and a half million dollar t-72 tank [Music] but air-to-ground attacks are not always as straightforward as bombing a lone tank in the desert february 26th joint star's surveillance aircraft spot a massive convoy of iraqi troops retreating from kuwait city along the highway to basra f-15es f-111s a-10s and f-16s are sent in to shell the hundreds of tanks trucks and cars escaping kuwait the extent of the destruction caused by hours of steady air-to-ground attacks is frightening weeks of watching laser-guided bomb strikes on bridges and bunkers had conditioned the public to view the gulf war as an elaborate computer game in which far away targets were obliterated with almost magical precision the attack on the road to basra brought the reality of war and the deadly potential of airplanes back into perspective there was nothing clean about this attack and the fact that coalition airplanes had launched a full force assault on a retreating army raised troubling moral questions back in the united states should the coalition have allowed the iraqi army to retreat unmolested was air power misused i was amazed at a question one newsman asked about uh when we attacked the retreating forces they said wasn't that extreme violence i believe that was the term used uh i think that misses the point war is extreme violence and the way to halt the suffering is to get the war over as quickly and decisively as you possibly can if you're going to enter into this adventure where you take human life and lose human life you have a moral obligation to get it over as quickly as possible and that is why the way we fought this war with such great intensity and unyielding pressure on the enemy until it was finally over with and we'd accomplished our goals the overall performance of the f-16 in the persian gulf is a bad question to ask me because i'm going to tell you was great because i thought it was it's a is a marvelous airplane very capable i felt very comfortable and very safe flying it it mechanically it holds up i mean if you look at the sortie generation in that in the persian gulf war and compare it to sorority generation in the vietnam war you it's it's uh it's we've come a long way because you can take you can take the f-16 and fly that airplane three times in four hours and because we did it uh but the dedication of the pilots none of us i never went down the chute going i'm just going to pick all these things off so i can get out of here i went down every time going you know i owe uncle sam this five seconds right down the chute i owe it to him that's my job that's what he pays me to do so i will do the best that i possibly can for him how'd it go buddy good job buddy it was ugly huh this is the a-10 thunderbolt 2 better known as the warthog in an age of stealth fighters and smart bombs the a-10 is a primitive airplane it is neither fast nor elegant nor state-of-the-art [Music] okay i'm in from the southwest ops check 3.8 [Music] a-10s were the most vulnerable combat planes in the gulf but they were deadly efficient at their mission destroying enemy tanks [Music] very very nice although it looks like an old design the a-10 is one of the youngest planes in the air force inventory it was developed by fairchild industries in the 1970s to defend the nato nations against the soviet ground attack the a-10 is built around a gun the 21-foot gau-8 avenger cannon which spits out 4 200 shells per minute a-10s can linger over target areas for hours swooping in low to attack with cannon blazing low exposes the warthog to ground fire but the plane is protected by its rugged titanium shell and redundant systems all the aircraft's major systems have backups the plane was built to take severe punishment and get its pilots home [Applause] a-10s have been in service since 1977 but they have never been favorites of the air force leadership who generally prefer high-tech high-flying aircraft such as the f-16 the a-10 is anything but high-tech in fact the plane looks and flies more like a world war ii era fighter warthogs are flown by stick and rudder controls not by onboard computers though they carry some advanced systems a10 cockpits are still dominated by old-fashioned dials and gauges this lack of sophistication can be an advantage a-10s are far less expensive than f-16s and they take punishment their supersonic cousins would have difficulty surviving but as the 1980s ended the a-10 seemed destined for the scrap heap the collapse of the eastern bloc made the possibility of fighting a ground war in europe remote a-10s were scattered among a few air force units the air force reserve and the air national guard flying the a-10 for over 10 years now we had practiced with the eastern europe scenario flying against eastern bloc countries low altitude type of scenarios working close with the army doing the type of things air-to-ground closer support however in the persian gulf it was all totally different in a low medium intensity conflict we jacked up our altitude to stay away from the triple-a we were mostly worried about the ground threat the gulf war thrust the warthog into frontline combat but it was rumored that the air force hadn't wanted to send the a-10s over at all because they feared the slow-flying planes would be easy prey for iraqi anti-aircraft guns i heard stories about how we held the a-10 from deploying that's absolutely untrue they came at their appointed time and went to their appointed place and served superbly we used the a-10 and the f-16s av-8s and f-18s to provide sort of a fundamental attack system against the kuwaiti theater of operations in addition the a-10s were invaluable in doing things like search and rescue and scud hunts out in the western area during daylight hours on january 17 1991 a-10s were among the 668 coalition aircraft that took to the air for the first massive assault of the gulf war missions were long and pilots were taxed to their mental and physical limits i flew three missions on the first day a total of about eight hours of flying time and about 12 hours in the cockpit when you came back from a mission you didn't even get out you hot pit refueled as you sat there with engines running going over with intel people on what you did where you went and how it all worked out they gave you current intel and then you moved over to another slot where they put the bombs and guns on board basically is uh 12 hours in the cockpit doesn't really we train for it but you're really not it's never comfortable in a single seat cockpit with an injection seat however we've done it before and you can do it over and over it's by the end of the day they actually have to help you out of the cockpit a-10s were in constant danger of attack from iraqi surface-to-air missiles to stop the sams f4g wild weasels were sent in with radar-seeking missiles with their radar neutralized iraqi soldiers fired blindly at aircraft noise but the a-10 is relatively quiet so quiet the iraqis called it the silent gun nine times out of ten as you're rolling in on a target you're concentrating so much on the bombing run that you really don't can't think about the triple-a if you do you're going to have a lousy pass you're usually hearing it from your wingmen saying they're shooting you up pretty good triple a you better start moving you pull into off into the cloud hopefully that that they're only going with a visual type of shot at you but uh yet we've seen it all and they said that you only see probably about 30 to 40 percent of the triple a fired at you so that's the just with the tracers and the rounds that are blowing up around you the rest of the stuff you never seen [Music] he's not moving he's going to live [Music] what are you you look dead what are you you look like something okay you don't think that there's three guys in that tank that you just put a maverick you think well you know that was just a tank and i think you you de-personalize it yourself if you didn't you it's sort of like knowing that people are out there shooting at you as uh if you don't if you think about it tube intense and sit there at night between these gut attacks and then yeah it's going to drive you crazy a lot of guys go to church a lot all of a sudden then they see things different ways you do a lot of sitting uh watching the sunsets as you're coming back over the border you have another hour of flight just get back to the home base so you watch the sunset and you think about things and it's your time to to move off to the side and forget about what you're doing for a little while and and yeah it takes a lot of uh i guess discipline to think about what you're doing what you're the reasons you're doing it and i'm sure everybody had to go through that in their mind and you know everybody came out with it fairly well the a-10 was the least sophisticated strike airplane in the gulf but it was also one of the deadliest the 144 a-10 sent to southwest asia flew almost 8 100 missions they destroyed more than a thousand enemy tanks and thousands of other vehicles and artillery pieces a-10s can carry up to sixteen thousand pounds of ordinance on eleven external stations including cluster bombs and maverick missiles for ground attack and aim 9 sidewander missiles for air-to-air combat but more often than not pilots used their avenger cannons against tanks and in a first against an iraqi helicopter i rolled in on a helicopter so oh from about twelve thousand feet uh nobody had fired an air-to-air missile off an a-10 we had we this first time of course we're carrying them and wore the aim nines so i tried to lock on with the a9s and they just wouldn't do it because of the the hot background and the helicopter looking down from that altitude i tried two lock ons unfortunately i remember to arm up the gun once i couldn't get a lock i decided to put a few bullets through him so maybe 75 bullets i told my wingman if he had a shot to take a shot he tried but his slant range was too far off so he missed and then i just pirouetted over and put about 300 rounds into it and there wasn't much left after that maverick was the a-10's other primary tank killing weapon these 500-pound guided missiles reach supersonic speed when they hit their targets and not even the best armor can survive a direct hit there are two types of mavericks television guided missiles are used in daylight the missile sees contrasts between objects and backgrounds maverick is a fire and forget weapons so when a pilot fires his missile the video image cuts off infrared mavericks which were used in great numbers in the gulf detect targets based on differences in temperature since metal cools at a slower speed than sand it was easy for pilots to spot tanks in the desert okay i've got what appears to be a building and some uh distinct hot spots around it roger that's your target [Music] should be mavericks were sometimes used by a-10s equipped with pave penny pods pave penny detects the laser beams used to mark targets by laser designation planes a-10 pilots have earned their reputation as down and dirty fighters by making the most of the limited materials on hand for instance the pilots of the 355th tactical fighter squadron the only dedicated night flying a10 unit in the gulf cited targets by using the video system from their infrared mavericks as a sort of poor man's forward-looking infrared [Music] scanner the knight fighters also employed the primitive but effective tactic of dropping flares such as these over their targets a-10 pilots sometimes wore night vision goggles and sighted targets through regular binoculars ground troops or other pilots called in airstrikes then a-10s flew in dropped their blinding flares and strafed and bombed targets at will [Music] the iraqis did their best to hide their armor to little avail here a nightflying a-10 has spotted an iraqi tank hidden under netting designed to hide its infrared hot spot the shape of the tank is obscured but the tank tracks around the netting are easy to see by the end of the war iraq had lost over ninety percent of its tanks ninety percent of its artillery and fifty percent of its other armored vehicles in the kuwait theater of operations the iraqi soldiers who survived the non-stop air assault were those who learned to put as much distance between themselves and their weapons as possible okay we got people running gosh personally i don't know i i stopped counting i stopped counting the number of missiles i fired i stopped counting the bombs i dropped it just as i said i guess someday in my mind it will come to me but i sort of push that off to the the corner of my mind it's uh you just go from day to day and you write your letters home and then you go to sleep and you get up for your next mission so but if i i can't even begin to tell you how many tanks i just didn't keep count the problem we faced with the a-10 was the fact that because of its slower air speeds it was more susceptible to enemy ground fire with about 10 percent of our forces we suffered over half our casualties on the air force the united states air force side through the a-10 i think the marine corps had a similar problem with the av-8 because the way the engines are located along the center line of the aircraft and heat-seeking missiles would strike the middle of the airplane rather than the tail so uh you have to look at each aircraft's design and weigh its strengths and weaknesses to know where to use it in the battle the a10s were superb however they were more vulnerable to the enemy defenses that vulnerability was offset by the a-10s amazing resilience pilots flying into anti-aircraft fire were particularly thankful for the titanium bathtub the super hard cockpit shell that shields them from flack boy that hummer was trying hard to blow you out of the air look at that that's right the hog can't take some hits huh i'm telling you i isolated both hydraulic systems as soon as i was hit the right system went to zero and all the lights in the world came up missile went off and i thought it was a sam going by so i started kicking flares after that and you know when you see a missile come at you and you're in a four ship you wonder who it's locked onto and and yeah i guess you're you see a lot going on and you react and triple a going off near you it's scary and then it's tough sometimes sometimes they'll have to take you off of a schedule and say well why don't you go do this on the ground for a while give you a day off just prop your feet up and relax but there's not much they can do we're glad it was a short war you know it was i don't know how else to keep you from getting burned down other than give you the day off or two we did have guys that you know just said well i you hold your hand up just like in the old football games i need out coach and then and pretty much we let it go with that during the gulf war a-10s attacked a wide range of targets including tanks artillery and bunkers [Music] a-10s work near but generally not directly alongside advancing army units low-level search and destroy missions were handled primarily by the army's fearsome apache gunships the massive assault kept iraqi ground forces from maneuvering if they tried they were pounded by tanks artillery and air power [Music] [Music] at all the air attacks cut enemy soldiers off from food and water constant bombing left thousands in shock soon the coalition army found itself overwhelmed by surrendering troops by the end of the war more than 86 000 iraqis were in custody when i talked to you all before and you asked me what we were going to do if we had to go to war and i told you we were going to kick ass and that's exactly what we did [Applause] general h norman schwarzkopf commander of coalition forces expected the ground phase of the war would last three weeks in fact it took just 100 hours to recapture kuwait and neutralize the iraqi army but ground forces moved so quickly and the speed of combat was so fast that coalition attackers mistook some of their own invading army for retreating iraqi soldiers at least 11 americans were killed and 15 wounded from air-to-ground friendly fire we had some friendly fire issues and they are disturbing there's no doubt about we had an a-10 hit a marine vehicle i believe we had marines rolled in on a marine column we had an a-10 hit two british vehicles or two a-10s and we had a number of incidents ground to ground now in taken in total this number is relatively very very small it's minute but the problem is nowadays with the lethality of modern airplanes if you have one incident it results in seven or eight fatalities or in past wars such an incident might reflect a damaged vehicle or a wounded person so we have to work this issue very very hard roger reason i'm asking is need to find out if this is a friendly or not yeah they put in a lot of restrictions to try to protect against the friendly fire episodes they put a lot of restrictions on anything that was going to do air-to-ground in close proximity to the troops we had trained years of working with the army but the army basically with their attack helicopters took care of most of the threats in their general vicinity we worked further north anywhere from three to five miles we were able to watch the tanks roll across the border and watch them attack different iraqi positions but normally they'd want us away from their actual sphere of influence it was like a blitzkrieg all over again with our tanks rolling through 40 50 miles an hour shooting on the run over the course of 43 days more than 2600 aircraft flew 110 000 sorties that crushed iraq's defenses and left its troops battle weary and anxious to surrender laser-guided weapons let us drop fewer bombs for greater effect than in past wars but it should not be forgotten that the ultimate result of a massive military offensive is massive loss of life the chief difference between this war and others is that the balance of casualties was wildly uneven coalition forces lost roughly 200 soldiers in combat the iraqi army lost at least 100 000. here americans bury an iraqi soldier killed during operation desert storm one of the things from desert storm that bothers me deeply they call it the nintendo war the idea that it's nothing against my computer against your bunker or my bomb against your truck it loses sight of the fact that there's great suffering and death involved in war and we must never use war as a solution to anything other than as a last resort so if we learn anything from desert storm i hope that is that we don't want war that war doesn't work and that a would-be aggressor in the world will think twice before he engages in war i hope that on our side that our people don't think that war is some sort of a bloodless mechanical thing it is a terrible terrible thing and we must be very very careful of how we enter into war and what we expect to get out of it was the gulf war a successful campaign to liberate a powerless nation from the clutches of a fascist invader or was it a violent dispute over control of the world's oil supply was the war a watershed event that saw the united nations act as one to tame a powerful rogue state were diplomatic sanctions given enough time to work these questions are still being debated and perhaps years will pass before the gulf war's historical significance is decided but it is certain that the conflict was a turning point in the history of warfare for the first time a massive round-the-clock strategic air campaign was directly responsible for a decisive victory over a well-defended enemy after 80 years air power fulfilled its deadly potential [Music] figure out how much gas we got we go beat on it with our knuckles fuel floor 40 gallons he'll figure it out all right where where is he are you figuring it out i hope he will he's intermittent fuel flow at 140 as we can tell when he's coming in and i'm transferring gas i think in any recent war if you ask any fighter pilot who his hero is he'd probably say the air-to-air tanker guys i myself can remember in vietnam being over hanine island almost out of gas and here comes a 135 way up north of where he ought to be because of the enemy threat and turning around falling in behind and getting enough fuel to get home tonight is an example going as far as we did when i finally pressed across the border into saudi arabia i was the point where i was very low in fuel we were on either side of the tanker's wing and proceeded across the border and we traveled about 50 or 60 miles when another unit apparently was rolling in on the outskirts of baghdad and baghdad which hasn't been doing a whole lot against us because they can't see us was apparently responding to all these conventional airplanes that they saw and they were putting on another fantastic light show which even from 80 or 90 miles away it was painfully apparent to our tanker crew and you could see the wings do this a little bit as they pondered whether this was the direction they were going or we were going but to their credit they they continued on they are people who are dedicated to getting us the gas and getting us where we need to that takes a lot of guts to be sitting in there an airplane loaded with gas and going into harm's way the strategic air command deployed 256 kc-135 tankers and 46 kc-10 tankers during the gulf war tankers are flying gas stations air refueling gives gas-guzzling fighters and bombers the ability to stay in the air this was crucial in the gulf war where some strike aircraft had to fly a thousand miles to their targets then a thousand miles home again every aircraft from every service as well as many coalition planes used u.s air force tankers [Music] [Music] there was one position there and i forget the name of it where it was a common tanker position pretty much there and i go to this o'malley you can go to this spot and uh and find airborne fuel go there top off bring it back to the ship and basically uh have a lot of gas airborne for uh returning strikers the kc-10 extender first flew in 1980 the air force has 59 in its inventory the kc-10 was based on the commercial dc-10 and it combines the task of tanker and cargo carrier in one body it can service all us military aircraft and many nato planes the kc-135 stratotanker looks like a boeing 707 but it was designed to carry heavy fuel loads it first flew in 1956. 633 are now in service the stratotanker is closely identified with another even longer serving sac airplane the b-52 stratofortress like the b-52 the kc-135 has been updated and redesigned over the years the air force expects it will continue flying well into the next century coming in on the right deck i shot there there's up on the lead now a little bit [Music] one common problem most military pilots have faced is the phenomenon of vertigo vertigo often hits you when you're trying to hook up to a tanker during a rainstorm in pitch-black weather your body tells you that your plane is crooked and you're going to crash your instruments say you're fine it takes a great deal of discipline to trust the machine not your senses [Music] refueling gets to be second nature every guy that flew fighters over there probably did 200 plus hookups during the war we met tankers about 70 miles from our departure point and we refueled with the tankers all the way down through the gulf and into our destination over in the emirates but uh shoot ten maybe eight refuelings quite a few especially when you load up the a6 with ten thousand pounds of ordnance ten one thousand pound bombs there's a lot of drag out there and you can suck down an enormous amount of gas and it was always a little comforting to know that there was a tanker up there and you could hit it once you came out of bad guy country okay you've got an awful lot of airplanes floating around the area how do they know which one goes first you know the unsung heroes in this world are the tankers because they feel the skies of saudi arabia and iraq and iraq yes there were tankers over iraq refueling fighters and bombers during operation desert storm tankers flew approximately 15 sorties refueled forty six thousand aircraft and offloaded one hundred ten million gallons of fuel i'm all right here honey yeah tanker and the next ones are coming in number two i've got one more set to receive this big move up there it's too bad [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Tim Corbett

Views: 521,446

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Id: nLHSMUpckMY

Length: 51min 19sec (3079 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020