Desert Storm Air War by Jim Corrigan

Author:Jim Corrigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811765893
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2017-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

January 18, 1991

0650 Local

The Tactical Air Control Center suddenly resembled the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at the height of a sell-off. Aircraft needed to be yanked from assigned missions and sent out into western Iraq. Planners thumbed through the mammoth Air Tasking Order, the campaign’s daily game plan, looking for available planes. Liaison officers worked the telephones, frantically calling squadrons around the theater with new orders.

Lieutenant Darren Hansen and another A-10 pilot were among those tapped for Scud hunting. “Just before we walked out the door we got a priority call from Riyadh, and they stopped us. They said we were going to Al Jouf. I had never even heard of it,” Hansen recalled.1 “Now we are sitting in our jets, holding, waiting for more information, and they come running out with a map. They unfolded it and said, ‘Right here it is, see?’ I’m saying, ‘That’s five hundred miles to the west—what are we going to do way out there?’”

The A-10 drivers journeyed west across Saudi Arabia, making a quick refueling stop along the way. When they finally landed at Al Jouf, which barely qualified as an airstrip, they looked around and realized it was a Special Forces forward operating base. An army ground crew refilled their tanks while a colonel briefed them over the radio.

“Basically, he said, ‘Here are some coordinates where you might find Scuds. Good luck and Godspeed,’” Hansen remembered. “We could see that we were going at least seventy miles into Iraq, without a map, without knowing exactly what a Scud or Scud launcher looks like, and we were doing that in an A-10.”

The A-10 Thunderbolt II was built strictly for close air support. Manufacturer Fairchild Republic never envisioned the plane straying more than a few miles from the battlefront. The A-10’s imagined purpose was shredding Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers as they pushed across Western Europe. The rugged little jet was meant to pop up from behind a mountain, pour fire on an advancing column, and then retreat to a forward airstrip for more fuel and weapons. Forays deep into enemy territory went beyond its design specifications.

The A-10’s problem was speed, or rather, a distinct lack of it. Two turbofan engines operated quietly and efficiently but topped out at about five hundred miles per hour, roughly a third of the F-16’s speed. Viper pilots made jokes—an A-10 cockpit had no clock, just a calendar; the A-10 was at serious risk of bird strikes, from behind. Yet this plodding, snub-nosed airplane, known universally as the Warthog or simply the Hog, held several Scud-hunting advantages over its supersonic colleagues. The most important was loiter ability, or time over target (TOT).

“Scuds started popping up all over the place and the question was: Who are we going to send after them?” said an A-10 pilot working at the TACC as a liaison. “There were already packages of F-16s airborne. Instantly they could divert some of them out to western Iraq where the Scuds were being launched.

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