Wings Over the Gulf - Episode 3 - Final Assault

February 26, 1991 After a six-week air campaign the ground war against Iraq begins grenade let's go F-16 Fighting Falcons were the workhorses of the Gulf War More F-16s flew into combat than any other type of aircraft In the early 1970s the United States State Air Force faced a unique dilemma: it was preparing to put into service the best fighter of all time, the F-15 Eagle, but the F-15s cost so much that could only be deployed in small quantities. The West needed a cheap fighter to replace the Phantom F4. Since the Soviet Union was filling the skies with high-speed, low-cost 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 US Air Force called for proposals for a light aircraft that could serve as both a combat dog and a ground attacker.

The winner was a single-engine, single-pilot, general dynamics design, the f -16 gd took proven systems from other aircraft and combined them with a highly aerodynamic fuselage the price was kept at a relatively low level $12 million per aircraft thanks to a unique production agreement between gd and four nato countries the parts of the F-16 would be mass produced in America and Europe and the monetary risk would be distributed among the partners in 1979 the F-16 entered service with the United States Air Force in the 1990s, 17 other countries flew it for defense aerial The popularity of the F-16 is easy to explain it is small, very fast and highly maneuverable, excellent characteristics for an air fighter, in the hands of the right pilot, it can hold its own against anything flying today and the F-16 is capable of multiple missions; 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 parachute at a 45 degree angle.

Dive more or less and look at the plane, you won't see it, you won't see it at 8,000 feet, you might see it and when you hear the sound the bomb will explode in your face. Aviators like the way the f-16 responds in the air and they also like its unique cockpit. The plane's seat is set back at a 30-degree angle, helping pilots cope with the plane's 9g turning capacity. The plane's bubble canopy gives pilots an unobstructed view, but the f-16's most striking feature is its fly-by-wire control system. The f-16 was the first all-electric fighter. All control commands are available.

Transmit over wires, not wires or link controls, pilot and machine become an integrated unit linked by the aircraft's onboard computer The F-16's APG-68 radar gives pilots a clear picture of threats air and land. When the Falcon is in dogfight mode, it can fire its two wingtip-mounted Aim-9 Sidewinder missiles, as well as Sparrow and Amram missiles. In August 1990, F-16 squadrons began shipping to the Persian Gulf. The squadrons were drawn from the active air force, as well as the air national guard and air force reserve. The 249 F-16s dispatched flew from at least four bases spread across Saudi Arabia. a little over 10 years of experience in the military, now flies a lot of different types of airplanes and when I went to the Persian Gulf, our wing didn't take any guys, quote, inexperienced guys, we tended to take guys that were maybe over Approximately 300 hours. on the plane in f-16 just so it's stacking your team, if you have a group of pilots to choose from you want to try to take the best team you can put together in the

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war, the US 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, especially the Saudis, the fact that women worked alongside men on the flight line was alarming. .

The Saudis became even more nervous when they saw the female officers giving orders to the men. They reported gold for the Scottish Choctaw foxtrot relay, but the sexual integration of the US military was only one of the most important changes that followed the Vietnam War. There is no doubt about it. The Vietnam experience affected us all deeply and gave us great insights. at the national level, the president's secretary of defense, who were involved in detail and in everything we did and yet left in the hands of the military those decisions that were the selection of targets by the military, for example.

I think the fact that we fight the war relentlessly is also a For example, we are in Vietnam. We would stop the bombing and try to negotiate and do those kinds of things that would delay the conflict and prolong the suffering. I think we were all against that change anyway, zero interception 160. Okay, that's 16. Also, got it, tallyho 190. My first day on combat shoot, yeah, I was nervous and I'm sure I I concentrated much more than normal. My head was spinning the whole time looking around to see what was going on. No one was going to shoot me, but I remember veering off target once I got over the adrenaline.

That wasn't so bad. I think I can do it again during January and February 1991. American F-16s bombed Iraqi military installations, tanks, airfields. chemical factories and supply lines, also attacked Iraqi troops in and around occupied Kuwait. F-16s do not carry laser-guided smart bombs into battle. The aircraft is not equipped with the laser targeting devices necessary to launch such weapons because its primary targets were military positions in the desert. The F-16s typically dropped cluster bomb units and 2,000-pound gravity bombs. Weapons without built-in guidance systems. Many were remnants of the Vietnam War. The F-16s dropped these bombs as part of the coalition's overwhelming force strategy.

The plan was to hit Iraq, particularly its ground troops, as hard as possible for as long as necessary. to break their will and force surrender. When pilots bomb the F-16 they activate the continuously calculating point-of-impact artillery targeting system, a device that eliminates much of the inaccuracy. Outside of dumb delivery, a computer calculates air speed, bomb weight, distance to target, and other factors, so when bombs are dropped, they have a high spike or kill probability; However, the higher a plane flies, the worse the peak. Our pump is designed around a very, very smart. computer on the plane so once you remove that bomb, it's a piece of iron that falls to the ground and although it's still a very precise system that you're talking about, you know 50 feet, uh, it's a very average 10 bomb at 15,000 feet, but at 50 feet there is sometimes a difference between a miss and a hit, so our pk certainly wasn't as good as the very, very smart bombers, General Horner and I were obsessed and that is probably the right word to have minimal loss of life.

That's why restrictions were placed on all airplanes as to the minimum altitudes they could fly during the day and the F-16 was one of the airplanes that had to endure our restrictions, so we didn't expect them to. Be as accurate as simple physics, but if you honestly don't believe the outcome of a war is in doubt and the only question is how many lives you are going to lose, then that is a prudent action for the F-16s and many other coalitions. 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 talk about it statistically, I'm sure if you compare the number of Sams that were located in the city of Baghdad, Kuwait. area, would probably be very comparable to what the Vietnamese faced, the pilots who flew in North Vietnam in the Noah area. It's a really very intense concentration, we were just much better at equipping ourselves to deal with them today because of the technology we had at the end of the Gulf War, two F-16s had been lost to surface-to-air missiles and another two They were shot down by anti-aircraft guns. The F-16's performance was also diminished by bad weather and later by oil.

Well the fires that polluted the skies, the F-16 is at its best on clear sunny days, I can't give you radar, there is a 10,000 foot layer like a scud layer where the sand would come out of the desert, the sand there. It is more like talcum powder than the sand we know in our litter boxes. Any kind of wind that picks up, goes up into the atmosphere, so there's always about ten thousand feet, uh, some kind of restriction there and underneath, you can see down. I couldn't see much except after a front appeared, but not all F-16s were blind. 72 flew with lantern-type navigation pods containing a terrain-following radar and a forward-facing infrared sensor, perhaps the most important test of the F-16's power. and versatility came on February 24, 1991, when after six weeks of air

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the ground war began during the last part of the war, just before and when the army entered, the sense of urgency of the objectives became more real because now they're going to be risking their lives before it was just us on the planes and fighting our own little war, but when you added the military we now knew that someone else was involved and that we had to help, which now is the urgency to get there to your destination.

Target by eliminating exactly the target they want you to eliminate I became a real player It's okay to support the ground troops The F-16s began flying forward air control missions in enemy areas designated as kill boxes The 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 and then subdivided those squares into 15-mile boxes. Attack aircraft were then sent to each box to find and destroy targets when the ground war began. The F-16s were sent on killer scout missions to kill boxes near the frontline troops, the killer scout mission where they would actually detect targets and identify them and things were very useful in systematically dealing with that ground army because if you take two or four fighter pilots and you say, "okay, that's 15 square miles, you keep coming back every day until there's basically no ground threat, after a couple of days you're very familiar with every little sand dune in those 15 miles." square.

The F-16's flying killer scout missions were frequent visitors to the air tankers that loitered over the kill boxes for long periods. The ultimate goal of the Killbox attacks was to overwhelm them. Iraqi forces with a hail of munitions raining down from the sky, a terrifying display of air power was expected to break the will of the Iraqi army throughout. During the Gulf War, F-16s attacked Iraqi army soldiers and the elite Republican Guard. Studies have shown that when a military unit, no matter how capable or motivated, falls below the 50 percent combat strength level, it becomes nearly useless.

The coalition hoped that the air would be constant. The attacks would cause so many desertions, surrenders, injuries, and deaths in the Iraqi ranks that their entire frontline force would fall below the 50 mark. However, their goal was not to kill every Iraqi soldier on the battlefield. We could kill a lot of people if we wanted to. for example, cluster bomb units in large areas when in reality we used, for example, laser guided bombs against tanks and the enemy knew this and immediately, as soon as they parked their tank, they ran away and you saw the slide 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 the loss of life on the front side, right there the tanks were key targets for the F -16.

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 like these on or near Iraqi armor. They were somewhat effective, although not as lethal. Iraq's frontline tanks as maverick missiles When the ground war began and killing tanks became a priority a maverick was the F-16 pilot's weapon of choice as only one missile was needed to destroy an Iraqi tank a seventy maverick A thousand dollars equals one and a half-million-dollar T-72 tank, but air-to-ground attacks are not always as simple as bombing a lone tank in the desert.

On February 26, Joint Star surveillance plane detects massive convoyof Iraqi troops withdrawing from Kuwait City along the road to Basra. F-15ES F-111S A-10S and F-16S are sent to bomb the hundreds of tanks, trucks and cars escaping Kuwait The extent of destruction caused by hours of constant air-to-ground attacks is terrifying over weeks of observing lasers Guided bomb attacks on bridges and bunkers had conditioned the public to view the Gulf War as an elaborate computer game in which distant targets were destroyed with almost magical precision. The attack on the Basra highway brought home the reality of war and the lethal potential of aircraft.

Getting back into perspective, there was nothing clear about this attack and the fact that coalition aircraft had launched an all-out

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on a retreating army raised troubling moral questions in the United States. If the coalition had allowed the Iraqi army to withdraw unmolested, would air power have been misused? I was surprised by a question a journalist asked about when we attacked the retreating forces and they said it wasn't that much extreme violence. I think that was the term used. I think you're missing the point: war is extreme violence and the way to stop suffering. is to end the war as quickly and decisively as possible, if you are going to go into this adventure where you take human lives and lose them, you have a moral obligation to end it as quickly as possible and that is why the way we fight this war With so much intensity and unwavering pressure on the enemy until it was

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ly over and we achieved our objectives, the overall performance of the F-16 in the Persian Gulf is a bad question to ask because I'm not going to tell you it was great because I thought it was a wonderful aircraft. , very capable, I felt very comfortable and very safe flying it, mechanically it holds up, I mean, if you look at the output generation in the Persian Gulf. war and compare it to the sorority generation in the Vietnam War, it's, we've come a long way because you can take, you can take the F-16 and fly that plane three times in four hours and because we did it uh but the dedication of the pilots none of us ever went down the slide, I'm just going to remove all this stuff so I can get out of here I went down every time, you know, I owe Uncle Sam these five seconds down the chute.

I owe it to him. That's my job. That's what he pays me for, so I'll do the best I can for him. How did it go, friend? Good job. Dude, that was ugly, huh, this is the A-10 Thunderbolt 2, better known as the wild boar in an era of stealth fighters and smart bombs. The A-10 is a primitive aircraft, it is neither fast nor elegant nor cutting edge. I'm here from southwest operations control. 3.8 The A-10s were the most vulnerable fighter aircraft in the Gulf, but they were deadly efficient in their mission, destroying enemy tanks. Very very nice although it looks like an old design the A-10 is one of the youngest aircraft in the air force inventory it was developed by fairchild industries in the 1970s to defend nato nations against ground attack Soviet The A-10 is built around a 21-foot Gau-8 Avenger gun that spits out 4,200 rounds per minute.

The A-10 can remain over target areas for hours, swooping down to attack with the cannon firing low. , which exposes the boar to ground fire, but the aircraft is protected by its strong titanium airframe and redundant systems. All major aircraft systems are backed up. It was built to take severe punishments and bring its pilots home. The A-10s have been in service since 1977, but they have never been a favorite of air force leaders, who generally prefer high-tech, high-flying aircraft like the F-16. 10 is anything but high-tech, in fact the plane looks and flies more like a World War II-era fighter.

The warthogs fly using stick and rudder controls, not onboard computers, although they do carry some advanced systems. The A10's cabins are still dominated by old-fashioned dials. and evaluates that this lack of sophistication may be an advantage the a-10 are much less expensive than the f-16 and receive punishment their supersonic cousins ​​would have difficulty surviving but when the 1980s ended the a-10 seemed destined for scrap the collapse of the eastern bloc made possible the possibility of fighting a ground war in europe the remote a-10s were dispersed among a few air force units the air force reserve and air national guard piloting the a-10 during more than 10 years we had already practiced with the eastern europe scenario flying against eastern bloc countries low altitude scenarios working closely with the army doing the closest air-ground support type of things however in the persian

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everything was totally different In a low-medium intensity conflict we increased our altitude to stay away from the triple-A.

We were more concerned about the ground threat that the Gulf War pushed the warthog to the front lines, but it was rumored that the Air Force had not wanted to send the A's. -10 at all because they feared the slow-flying planes would be easy prey for Iraqi anti-aircraft guns. I heard stories about how we prevented the A-10 from being deployed. That is absolutely false. They arrived at the appointed time and went to the appointed place and served magnificently. We used the A. 10 and the F-16s, AV-8s, and F-18s to provide sort of a critical strike system against the Kuwait theater, plus the A-10s were invaluable for doing things like search and rescue. and scud hunting in the western area.

During the daylight hours of January 17, 1991, the A-10s were among 668 coalition aircraft that took off for the first massive assault of the Gulf War. The missions were long and the pilots were pushed to their physical and mental limits. I flew three missions in the first one. day, a total of about eight hours of flying and about 12 hours in the cockpit when you came back from a mission you didn't even get off of, you refueled while you sat there with the engines running going over with intelligence people what I knew where you went and how it all worked, they gave you updated information and then you moved to another slot where they put the bombs and weapons on board, basically it's 12 hours in the cockpit, we don't really train for that, but you It's really not like that, it's never comfortable in a single seat cabin with an injection seat, however we have done it before and you can do it over and over again, at the end of the day they really have to help you out of the cabin. 10 were in constant danger of being attacked by Iraqi surface-to-air missiles to stop the sams f4g.

The wild weasels were dispatched with radar-seeking missiles with their radars neutralized. Iraqi soldiers fired blindly to the noise of the planes, but the A-10 is relatively quiet, so the Iraqis called it the silent weapon nine times out of ten when you approach a target you concentrate so much on the bombing that you can't really think about the triple-a if you do it you're going to have a terrible pass, you usually hear it from your teammates saying they're shooting you pretty good, triple-a, you better start moving, stop at the cloud, hopefully they're just going with a Visual Type of shot at you, but still, we've seen it all and they said you're probably only going to see 30 to 40 percent of the triple A that they're shooting at you, so that's just with the tracers and the rounds that explode.

You, the rest of the things you never saw, he doesn't move, he's going to live, what are you?, you look dead, what are you?, you look like something, okay, don't think there are three guys in that tank, You just made a maverick, do you think? Well, you know it was just a tank and I think you depersonalize it yourself if you don't, it's like knowing there are people out there shooting at you like you don't, if you think about it. It's intense and you sit there at night between these visceral attacks and then, yeah, it will drive you crazy.

Many kids go to church frequently, all of a sudden, and then see things in different ways. You sit around a lot, watch the sunsets while you're heading back to the border, you have another hour of flight, just go back to home base so you can watch the sunset and think about things and it's your time to walk away and forget about What you are doing. a little bit of time and yeah, it takes a lot of discipline to think about what you're doing, the reasons why you're doing it and I'm sure everyone had to think about that and you.

We know that everyone understood it pretty well. The A-10 was the least sophisticated attack aircraft in the Gulf, but it was also one of the deadliest. The 144 A-10s sent to Southwest Asia flew nearly 8,100 missions. They destroyed more than a thousand enemies. tanks and thousands of other vehicles and artillery pieces. The A-10s can carry up to sixteen thousand pounds of ordnance at eleven external stations, including cluster bombs and Maverick missiles for ground attack and aim 9 side missiles for air-to-air combat, but more often than not, the pilots did not use their avenger cannons. against tanks and, for the first time, against an Iraqi helicopter, I arrived in a helicopter, so from about twelve thousand feet, no one had ever fired an air-to-air missile from an A-10.

We had this first. This time, of course, we were carrying them and using the aim nines, so I tried to lock on with the A9s and they just wouldn't do it because of the hot background and the helicopter looking down from that altitude. Unfortunately, I tried two bindings. I remember putting the gun together once I couldn't close it, I decided to put some bullets through it, so maybe 75 rounds. I told my partner that if he had a shot, he should shoot. He tried, but his slant reach was too great. so it missed and then I just did a pirouette and fired about 300 rounds at it and there wasn't much left after that Maverick was the A-10's other main 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 during the day. The missile sees contrasts between objects and backgrounds. Maverick is a fire-and-forget weapon, so when a pilot fires his missile, the video image. cuts off the infrared breakers that were used in large quantities in the gulf detects targets based on temperature differences since metal cools at a slower rate than sand it was easy for pilots to detect tanks in the desert well i got what it looks like be a building and a few different hot spots around it, roger, that's your goal should be the mavericks were sometimes used by A-10s equipped with Pave Penny pods Pave Penny detects the laser beams used to mark targets using laser designation.

The pilots of the A-10 aircraft have earned their reputation. as downed and dirty fighters making the most of the limited materials available, for example, pilots of the 355th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the only unit dedicated to night flying a10 in the gulf, cited targets using the video system of their infrared mavericks As a sort of Knight Fighters they also employed the primitive but effective tactic of dropping flares like these on their targets. A-10 pilots sometimes wore night vision goggles and observed targets through regular binoculars. Ground troops or other pilots were requesting airstrikes at this time. The arriving A-10s dropped their blinding flares and strafed and bombed targets at will.

The Iraqis did everything possible to hide their armor, but to no avail. Here an A-10 flying at night has detected an Iraqi tank hidden under a net designed to hide its infrared hot spot. The shape of the tank is obscured, but the tank footprints around the net are easy to see. By the end of the war, Iraq had lost more than ninety percent of its tanks, ninety percent of its artillery, and fifty percent of its other armored vehicles in the Kuwait theater of operations. operations the Iraqi soldiers who survived the continued air attack were those who learned to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their weapons.

Okay, we have people running. Gosh, personally, I don't know. I stopped counting. I stopped counting the number of missiles. I shot, I stopped counting the bombs, I threw it just like I said, I guess someday in my mind it will come to me, but I leave it in the corner of my mind, it's uh, you just go from one day to the next and Write your letters to home and then you go to sleep and get up for your next mission, so if 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 due to its speeds slower air force was more susceptible to enemy ground fire with about 10 percent of our forces we suffered more than half of our casualties on the air force, the us air force side through the a-10, i believe That the Marine Corps had a similar problem with the AV-8 because the way the engines are located along the centerline of the plane and the heat-seeking missilesThey would hit the center of the plane instead of the tail, so you have to look at the design of each plane and weigh their strengths and weaknesses to know where to use them in battle.

The A10s were excellent, however, they were more vulnerable to enemy defenses. That vulnerability was offset by the A-10s. The amazing endurance of the A-10s was particularly appreciated by the pilots who flew into the anti-aircraft fire. titanium tub the super hard cockpit cover that protects them from the skinny boy that hummer was trying so hard to knock you out of the air look at that, that's right, the pig can't take a few hits, hey, I'm telling you, I insulated both hydraulic systems like As soon as they reached me, the correct system was reset and all the lights in the world came on.

The missile went off and I thought it was a passing Sam so I started kicking flares after that and you know when you see a missile coming towards you. and you're in a ship of four, you wonder who's trapped and yeah, I guess you see a lot of things happening and you react and triple an explosion near you, it's scary and then it's hard, sometimes, sometimes they'll have to get you out of a schedule and say, well, why don't you do this on the floor for a while? We give you a day off, you just put 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, other than give you one or two days off.

We had guys you know, they just said well, you raise your hand like in the old football games I need our coach and then and we pretty much let it go with that during the gulf war the A-10s attacked a wide range of targets, including tanks, artillery and bunkers. A-10s work close to, but usually not directly alongside, advancing Army units. Level search and destroy missions were primarily handled by the Army's fearsome Apache gunships. The massive assault prevented Iraqi ground forces from maneuvering if they tried, they were hit by tanks, artillery and air power in all airstrikes that cut off enemy soldiers from food and water.

Leaving thousands of people in a state of shock, soon the coalition army was overwhelmed by the surrender of the troops. At the end of the war, more than 86,000 Iraqis were detained when I spoke to all of you before and you asked me what we were going to do if we had to leave. to war and told them we were going to kick ass and that's exactly what we did, General H Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of coalition forces, expected that the ground phase of the war would last three weeks, in fact, it only took 100 hours to recapture Kuwait and neutralize the Iraqi army, but the ground forces moved so quickly and the speed of combat was so rapid that the coalition attackers mistook part of their own invading army for retreating Iraqi soldiers.

At least 11 Americans were killed and 15 wounded by friendly air-to-ground fire. friendly fire problems and they are worrying, there is no doubt that we had an A-10 that hit a marine vehicle. I think we had marines rolling in a column of marines. We had an A-10 that hit two British vehicles or two A-10s and we had a number of ground-to-ground incidents now in total, this number is relatively very small, it is minuscule, but the problem today is with the lethality of the modern aircraft, if you have an incident, it results in seven or eight deaths or in past wars, such an incident could reflect a damaged vehicle or an injured person, so we have to work on this issue very, very hard, the reason why What I am asking is I need to know if it is a friendly or not.

Yes, they put a lot of restrictions in place to try to protect against friendly fire

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s. They put a lot of restrictions on anything that was going to do air-to-ground in the vicinity of the troops that we had trained for years working with the army, but the army basically with their attack helicopters took care of most of the threats in their vicinity. general. We worked further north between three and five miles. We could see the tanks advancing across the border and see them attack different Iraqi positions, but normally they would want us away from their actual sphere of influence.

It was like a blitzkrieg all over again with our tanks rolling at 40 or 50 miles an hour firing on the run for 43 days. More than 2,600 aircraft flew 110,000 sorties that crushed Iraqi defenses and left their troops battle-weary and eager to surrender. Laser-guided weapons allowed us to drop fewer bombs to achieve greater effects than in past wars, but we must not forget that the end result of a massive military offensive is a massive loss of life. The main difference between this war and others is that the casualty toll was tremendously unequal coalition forces lost approximately 200 soldiers in combat the Iraqi army lost at least 100,000. here the Americans bury an Iraqi soldier killed during operation Desert Storm one of the things about Desert Storm that made me It is deeply annoying, they call it Nintendo's war, the idea that it is nothing against my computer against your bunker or my bomb against your truck, it misses the point that there is great suffering and death involved in war and we should never use war as a solution. nothing more than a last resort, so if we learn anything from Desert Storm, I hope, it is that we don't want war, that war doesn't work, and that a possible aggressor of the world will think twice before starting one. war.

I hope that, for our part, our people will not think that war is some kind of mechanical and bloodless thing; It is a terrible, terrible thing and we must be very, very careful how we go into war and what we hope to come out of it was the Gulf War, a successful campaign to free a powerless nation from the clutches of a fascist invader or was it a dispute violent for control of the world's oil supply, the war was a turning point event in which the united nations acted as one to tame a powerful rebel state if diplomatic sanctions were given enough time to work out these issues yet are being debated and it will perhaps be years before the historical significance of the Gulf War is decided, but it is certain that the conflict was a turning point in the history of warfare for the first time a massive 24-hour strategic air campaign of the day was directly responsible for a decisive victory over a well-defended enemy after 80 years air power fulfilled its deadly potential find out how much gas we have we have to hit him with our knuckles fuel floor 40 gallons he will figure it out well where is he where are you finding out I hope it does it has intermittent fuel flow at 140 as we can tell when it comes in and I'm transferring gas I think in any recent war if you ask any fighter pilot who their hero is they would probably say the guys in the air-to-air tanker planes that I myself remember in Vietnam were over Hanine Island almost out of gas and here it comes. a road 135 north of where I should be due to enemy threat and turning around, staying back and getting enough fuel to get home tonight is an example of getting as far as we did when I

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ly crossed the border into Saudi Arabia .

It was the point where I had very little fuel. We were on either side of the wing of the tanker and we crossed the border and traveled about 50 or 60 miles when apparently another unit was arriving on the outskirts of Baghdad and Baghdad, which has not. been doing a lot against us because they can't see us apparently it was responding to all these conventional aircraft they saw and they were putting on another fantastic light show that even from 80 or 90 miles away was painfully obvious to our tanker crew. and you could see the

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doing this a little bit as they pondered whether this was the direction they were going or the direction we were going, but you have to admit that they continued, they are people who are dedicated to getting us fuel and taking us where we want. .

It takes a lot of guts to be sitting there on a plane loaded with gasoline and going into danger. The Strategic Air Command deployed 256 KC-135 tankers and 46 KC-10 tankers during the Gulf War. Tanker planes are flying into gas stations to refuel in the air giving gas guzzling fighters and bombers the ability to stay in the air, this was crucial in the gulf war where some attack aircraft had to fly a thousand miles to their objectives and then a thousand miles back home, all aircraft from each service, as well as many from the coalition. The planes used US Air Force tankers.

There was a position there and I forgot the name where it was a common tanker position pretty much there and I go to this o'malley you can go to this place and find fuel in the air, go there. To top it all off, bring it back to the ship and basically have a lot of gas in the air for the 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 combines the task of tanker truck and cargo transportation in one body. It can service all US military aircraft and many NATO aircraft.

The KC-135 stratotanker looks like a Boeing 707, but 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 older transport aircraft, the B-52 Stratofortress. Like the B-52, the KC-135 has been updated and redesigned over the years. The Air Force expects it to continue flying well into the next century Entering the right deck I shot there There's up in the lead Now a bit A common problem that most military pilots have faced is the phenomenon of vertigo. Vertigo often hits you when you try to connect to a tanker during a storm.

In very dark weather your body tells you that your plane is crooked and you are going to crash your instruments tell you that you are fine it takes a lot of discipline to trust the machine, not your senses refueling becomes second nature For everyone who flew fighter jets there they probably made over 200 connections during the war, we met tankers about 70 miles from our departure point and refueled with the tankers along the gulf to our destination in the emirates , but we shot ten, maybe eight. There's quite a bit of refueling, especially when you load the A6 with ten thousand pounds of ordnance, ten thousand pound bombs, there's a lot of resistance and you can suck up an enormous amount of gasoline, and it was always a little comforting to know that there was a tanker there. up and you could hit him once you got out of bad guy country.

Okay, you have a lot of planes floating around the area. How do you know which one goes first? You know that the unsung heroes of 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 the tankers flew approximately 15 sorties, refueled forty-six thousand planes and they unloaded a hundred and ten million gallons of fuel, I'm all Here, honey, yes, tanker and the next ones come in number two. I have one more ready to receive this big movement up there, it's a shame that