What you’re seeing is just the media trying to create a big news story – when there really isn’t one here. The same thing happens in nearly every country in the world, if it’s not Bears and carriers, it’s the ‘Spice Girls’ in the UK (who whomever is popular today) or the French Presidents new wife. It’s all for the ratings.
The overflights and interceptions are taking place just as they have for 40 years (despite a ‘break’ over the past several years…) Just look around, there are literally thousands of photographs of what seemed to be almost every USAF, USN, and NATO aircraft in service flying alongside the Bears, Badgers, Mays etc. They were everywhere. I’m sure the Russians have just as many photos of their aircraft flying alongside of Orions, Nimrods, Atlantics and more.
And truthfully, Cold War or not, as long as both sides were over international airspace, there really wasn’t anything that could be done to stop them. Accoring to international law we – or they – generally have the right to fly from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’, and it doesn’t really matter if there might happen to be a US Carrier Battle Group – or a Russian, Chinese, or whomever’s, directly in between.
Since both sides knew that the other side would be coming to visit, as it were, certian guidelines had to be drawn up, both for the individual crews safety, and to avoid any “diplomatic unpleasentness” which could ensue from an encounter gone wrong. Not to say that all of these encounters between potential foes were completely friendly, but the guidelines, in general, helped to eliminate, or to at least minimize tragedies such as the Badger crash near the USS Essex during 1968.
Mike
Here’s a Soviet Slava-class cruiser as seen from a TARPS equipped Tomcat back in 1984. (Hard to believe what you can find on EBay…)
I’m glad you’ve enjoyed reading the posts, I’ve had a lot of fun putting them together.
Keith’s unit from Hill was, as I recall, one of the few Viper units in the Gulf to have the capability to designate and drop PGM’s, and do a lot of night flying, so PhantomII wasn’t completely off the mark. We flew only duing the day and only with Mk.82, 84’s and a wide variety of flavors of CBU’s.
Sort of an odd exception were these bombs that were dropped off by a C-130 one night on the ramp. They were strapped four to a pallet, looked like WWII bombs with box fins, and the Herc guys didn’t appear to be very careful around them. There wasn’t anyone around to pick them up, so we went out to take a look – they were fiberglass-bodied leaflet bombs that we carried on at least several missions.
Mike
The weather in the Gulf region is usually pretty nice during this time of year, and it really had been in Qatar. Highs in the 60’s and 70’s with comparatively low humidity was a whole lot nicer than the 120+ and 90% that we had a few months ago. Unfortunatly the weather in Iraq and Kuwait hadn’t worked out quite a well. Iraq was going through a ‘100 year winter’, cold, cloudy, with heavy rain and in places, snow. All of this made bombing quite a bit more difficult for our guys who went north each day – it also made it a lot more difficult to find the SCUD launchers, hidden in the western deserts, that the Iraqis had been using to launch missiles against Israel.
Out weather, as I said, was nice, so it wasn’t a big deal to be in and out of our chemical gear during alerts and decon inspections. The SCUD alerts were beginning to become less frequent, not due to the lack of ballistic missiles being fired, but due to the policy of setting off the alerts. Over the first few days of the war whenever a missile was detected, no matter the projected target, the entire theater was alerted, now it was a little more more specific. If Riyadh was the target we wouldn’t end up in the bunker, but if the direction was towards Daharan or Bahrain it was time to ‘go visit the Canadians’. While we had some pretty nice ‘bunkers’ that doubled as porches, or ‘hootches’ in front of each tent, ‘at work’ most of the shelters were basically low square walls of sandbags, maybe three feet high, that we were supposed to hide behind. On the other hand, the Canadians, whith whom we shared our hangar, half buried square cross-sectioned reinforced concrete pipe, overlayed with a thick layer of sandbags, with heavy doors, water, food, and telephone communication to their command post. You can guess where we normally went when the sirens went off. “This is shelter #5, we have four Canadians, and sixteen ‘others’ inside…”
It was now the 21st of January, the fifth day of the war and things were definatly becoming a routine. Things were picking back up in phase as we were preparing to receive our first ‘combat phase’ aircraft. Our phase plan had been approved and we were told that it was going to form the basis for F-16 inspections in the theater. Not too bad for something that we basically hashed out on the back of Chinese take-out menus and scrap paper. Our plan wouldn’t leave anything out of the typcial phase package, but we wouldn’t put anything else in either. Instead of depaneling the entire aircraft, we would only take off the access panels that were absolutely necessary for other work to start. Then each panel that was required to remove for inspection, would be pulled, inspected, faults corrected, and immediatly closed. Our QA inspectors had given us quite a bit of leeway, he told us what he really wanted to see, and the rest we had authorization to close on our own. I still didn’t know how the phases would go, or how long they would take (well, we’d been told that we had basically a day, due to flying hours and the fact that we definatly weren’t going to be the ones who made an aircraft miss a mission…) A lot would depend on just how the aircraft continued to fly in the demanding desert and wartime environment, although as far as that went the birds were doing great, probably even better than when we were back in Spain.
We were worried that we still hadn’t heard anything about either of our guys that went down the day before yesterday. I don’t think that anyone really expected to hear much about Mike Roberts, but we really thought that we’d have heard that Jeff Tice had been rescued and was on the way back, but he’d just dissapeared.
Photo via Gary Lane, 401AGS OIC. From the website photo gallery.
The war went on, as we did each day we stood out in front of the hangar as the aircraft departed for their morning mission, and were in place out at EOR as they returned, the same in the afternoon. As we prepared to head out to EOR that afternoon though work spread through the hangar, likely from Ops, that an aircraft had gone down. “D*mn, not again.” It was that same feeling back from two days before, but within minutes we heard the news that the pilot had already been rescued and the low feeling changed to high, just that fast.
Once the pilots came out of debreif we got out own, less formal, debreif in the hangar: They had been attacking a target on the Kuwaiti coastline, under Iraqi SAM and AAA fire, when Jon Ball, the 614th Ops Officer flying 87-0224, had dropped his Mk.84 (a two-thousand pound, general purpose ‘dumb’ bomb) just after coming off of the wing, the bomb detonated and the ton of explosives and shockwave tore through the aircraft. He was able to guide the crashing aircraft back out over the Gulf and eject. Within a short time he was picked up by a Navy helicopter that hadn’t been far away. The rescue helo had transported him to the carrier for medical attention. Immediatly an investigation was started concerning out Mk.84 and their fuses, had the fuse been improperly set by a weapons crew rushed to load bombs during a long shift, or had it been a one in a million accident? The investigation would tell, but fortunatly this time we were getting our guy back. Although we didn’t know Jon’s condition, it was an incredible weight that had been lifted off of us. To celebrate, instead of dinner at the chow hall that night we went over the the Hardees/KFC, just outside of the Tent City entrance for chicken, and nothing goes better with chicken, than some of that ‘special mouthwash’ that the guys back in Spain had sent over in the CARE package…
Mike
3.7 million pounds of ordinance, 1303 sorties, 42 days. The ‘Forgotten 1000’.
Visit the Lucky Devils in the Gulf War at: http://www.lucky-devils.net
I’d woken up in a much better mood on the 20th of January, the fourth day of Desert Storm, than I’d gone to bed the night before. We all knew that the chances of losing aircraft and pilots was always there, but it was a shock when it happened. Hopefully when I got to the hangar I’d hear that they’d picked Tico up during the night and that he was on his way back.
I was running early that morning, so before I left Tent City to go over to the hangar I stopped off at the Rec Center to catch up on CNN and to see if I could find a recent Gulf Times (Qatar’s English language newspaper http://www.gulf-times.com) or even better, a Stars and Stripes. The news that came from either was pretty limited, but any news was better than nothing. Probably one of the best parts of working with Transit Alert (which was also among my duties) was occasionally getting real news from the States as airlifters were transiting through. I was once lucky enough to talk a C-141 crew out of a day old Sunday edition of the New York Times which we all read ‘cover to cover’ for about two weeks…
Just as soon as I opened the door to the Rec Center and stepped in, I heard “Look, there he is!” as several Crew Chiefs rushed towards me (I’m now thinking Holy Crap, what have I done now???) The night before, after I’d gone to bed, the Camel and the Star C-130’s had come in with supplies and mail, one of which had also carried the letest issue of the Air Force’s “Airman Magazine”. The crew chief’s held up a copy, open to the inside of the back cover, printed on which was a page of ‘airmen doing their part’ in Operation Desert Shield – one of those airmen was me, in a picture taken a couple of months before, sitting on the wing of 87-0228, Mike Robert’s jet that had been lost the day before over Baghdad. They explained to me that ‘it would be better for all of us’ if I didn’t have my picture taken with any more of our jets, and not being one to tempt fate too often, I agreed. It is the only picture I have of me with one of our aircraft. Having your picture taken with a jet before a mission is ‘old school’ bad luck, dating back to WWI, where pilots would refuse to fly if they’d been photographed prior to going up.
I grabbed a binch of copies of the magazine and carried them back to the tent, they’d be good things to send back to all of the relatives – probably even better than the MRE fruitcakes that I sent everyone at Christmas. All the way to the hangar I heard a lot of ‘hey, you’re the guy in Airman’ (but didn’t sign any autographs…)
The mood was still dark on the flightline, we were still missing two of our own. There was no word from Tico up in Iraq which troubled everyone. Last night we all felt the chances were so good that the Rescue guys would have gotten him, but when they arrived over the area, there was no sign of him.
We’d also lost two of our aircraft. As a crew chief, your airplane is more than just a machine. You know it inside and out, its personality (every jet has one, and they’re all different) they may be made of metal and plastic and wire, but they might as well be alive as much as they can become a part of you – afterall, you probably spend more time with your jet on a day to day basis than any member of your family or any of your friends. Trying to lighten the mood, one of the guys said, “What’s even worse, was that 228 and 257 were two of the last three jets that had gone through Phase. At least the Iraqis could have shot down the ones that were due inspections…”
I was worried about what I’d see when the pilots came out of Ops that morning on the way to the jets. They’d had two friends blown out of the sky from amongst them the day before, and from seeing ET’s tape the night before, it was obvious that even a second of distraction could be the difference between coming home and not. I was worried that I’d see what I’m sure that they were all feeling, after yesterday’s mission, and how it would affect everyone else on the flightline. I hadn’t had to worry though despite what they’d been through in the past 24 hours. As each pilot walked out of the Ops doorway on the way to their awaiting jets, they touched the top of the doorframe – on which hung a hand painted sign that read “God Bless Mr. and Tico.”
As Col. ‘Orville’ Wright, the Lucky Devils Commander put it: “The motivation and commitment on the faces of our Lucky Devils as they walked across the flight line on the morning of the 20th to attack the enemy and avenge the loss of one their brothers was clear and, had the Iraqi military been watching, scary.”
I don’t know what the ‘protocol’ was, but whenever I walked through the Ops doorway, I touched the same sign. In that moment the darkness that had hung over us, and me personally, lifted. The war was personal now, and it had hit home close to all of us. We were no longer fighting just to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, we were fighting for our own two friends who were still up there. Somewhere.
Mike
3.7 million pounds of ordinance, 1303 sorties, 42 days. The ‘Forgotten 1000’.
Visit the Lucky Devils in the Gulf War at: http://www.lucky-devils.net
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