A while back, I read a nice little article written by a B-52 radar navigator. His plane and three others were attending one of the big training exercises. They had been flying for about a week under extremely severe restrictions — ingress at 15,000' from the West, egress at 18,000' to the North, no jammers, etc. Needless to say, the other participants were picking them out of the sky left and right.
On the night before the last exercise, which was to be a simulated nuclear attack, the bomber squadron commander walked into the office of the guy who was running the exercise and said that the BUFFs weren't going to fly the next day. Since his people weren't getting anything out of the exercise except for morale bruises, he didn't see the point in racking up airframe hours. After a heated debate, the exercise manager agreed that the bombers could fly their own attack the next day — no restrictions.
The author and the other radar navigators spent the whole night working out the attack plan.
The next day the B-52s came into the target region from four directions at altitudes ranging from 250 to 500 feet at full throttle with every electronic countermeasure cranked to eleven. They criss-crossed over the target at less than 200 feet altitude in what's called a lay-down attack, where the bombs are intended to soft-land to allow the bomber a chance to depart before special relativity is experimentally proven once again. The total time over target was less than two minutes and none of the SAM sites even got a lock on them. One defender fired a (simulated) missile, but it was during the egress phase, was a wild shot with no chance to hit, and left the firing plane directly over ground zero at the moment when the bombs would have gone off. An F-18 was "shot down" when he obliviously flew directly behind one of the bombers.
The author stated that they returned to base and had just begun the debriefing when the general in charge of the defense team literally kicked the door open and started screaming. The author went on to say that it was exactly like the scene from "The Dirty Dozen". The offended general was red-faced and ranting about how the bombers had cheated and about how their crews' mothers and fathers had never known each other's last names. All in all, a supremely satisfying moment, from the report.
Of interest is the fact that all of the fighter pilots were amazed by the abilities of the B-52s. The pilot who had been shot down had no idea that he was anywhere near the bomber, let alone in its tail cone. The pilot who had made the wild shot only noticed the plane because it was flying so low that the shadow was completely black against the ground.
As an aside, the sight of four B-52s coming in at full throttle from all different directions at 200 feet must have been pretty damn impressive, if not to say deafening. When we lived in Austin, there was an annual airshow at Bergstrom Air Force Base. Since it was an old SAC base, there were always a couple of B-52s, which were enormously popular for the amount of shade they produced. They would always make a low pass at about 500' and it was one of the highlights of the show to have your chest rumble.
No comments:
Post a Comment