Magnum! The Wild Weasels in Desert Storm by Braxton R. Eisel & James A. Schreiner

Author:Braxton R. Eisel & James A. Schreiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magnum! The Wild Weasels in Desert Storm
ISBN: 9781844159079
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2009-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

I had set the strobe of our radar to level so that it was sweeping out ahead of us at our altitude. At his call, I looked down at my scope and there was the radar return!

Mindful that my best friend was ten nautical miles closer, at the front of our formation, I thought ‘Aw crap! There’s somebody coming straight at us, head on! How did he get by AWACS and the F-15 CAP [Combat Air Patrol]?’

At the same time I told Jim, ‘CW [continuous wave] on! Switches air-to-air’, which told him that I was going to lock this guy up with our radar and he should reconfigure his armament switches from HARMs to the AIM-7 Sparrows we carried in the two aft missile bays.

I was going to lock this guy up, light up his RWR and, hopefully, he’d do a 180 and run away to the north (and maybe into an F-15). We knew that was the Iraqi tactic if they were lit up. If he kept coming, we’d shoot him in the face if someone ahead of us didn’t do it first.

The contact had not responded to IFF interrogation, which, of course, an enemy aircraft wouldn’t. At the same time, I realised it looked just a bit odd. ‘Oh, good! Maybe...please let it be . . . ’ I thought. I said to Jim, ‘Wait a minute, let me lock him up.’

I did and ‘Yes! It is!’ I thought. Our Vc (pronounced ‘Vee sub cee’) or overtake velocity was the same as our groundspeed, which meant the object was stationary in mid-air.

Only one thing did that and looked that way on radar. ‘Miller Zero One, ahh, Budweiser Zero Two, contact chaff! Contact is chaff!’ I told Bart and everyone else in the formation. There was a noticeable pause and then I could almost hear the sighs of relief from the other jets. The call was then echoed a few times through the formation, ‘Contact chaff’ and ‘Roger, understand chaff’. [Chaff is a bundle of metal-coated strips put out by aircraft on both sides as a decoy to searching radars. Harmless in itself, but can be effective as a distracting tactic.]

At one point, we were slightly west of a highway and I could see cars absolutely flying down the road with their lights on, all of them heading south. Then I started to see lots of AAA – some of it white flashes, mostly it was bright red like automobile tail lights, and I could see bright spots in the distance that flew up at an angle without losing speed like AAA; those were SAMs.

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