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Prvi put cujem za ovo, ovde tvrde/misle da je iracki MIG-29 oborio iracki MIG-23 tokom borbe sa F-15, slucajno. Dalje je spomenuto jedno(od dva) od obaranja F-15E.
Air Force Magazine, januar 1993.
Citat:An F-15E flight leader describes how it was on fifty-eight combat missions in the Persian Gulf War.
During Operation Desert Storm, Air Force Capt. Tim Bennett served as a flight leader with the 335th Tactical Fighter Squadron, flying a total of fifty-eight combat missions in the F-15E dual-role fighter. Captain Bennett recounted the experience to Barry D. Smith.
We were based at Al Kharj AB in central Saudi Arabia. We lived in tents the whole time. The base was home to five squadrons of F-16s and F-15Es, so there were flight operations twenty-four hours a day. The noise and cold made it hard to sleep. After a while, I would get into a routine where I went to bed about 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., slept for eight hours, got up, took a shower, ate, and then went over the squadron plan for that night's mission. We were slightly undermanned in our unit and, if you were a flight leader or an IP [instructor pilot], you flew a lot.
On the first night of the war, when you were stepping out to your plane, you thought, "Holy --, here we go." You are obviously scared, but you know you have a job to do. We knew we were going to get shot at, but, at the same time, we didn't know what that would feel like and whether or not they were going to be able to hit us. Once you got into the airplane, you had so much to do that things just flowed along.
I remember hitting the tanker and going across the border; everything just seemed-not routine, but these were things we had been doing over and over. The thing I remember most was going over the border just after the F-117s had hit and all the AAA [antiaircraft artillery fire] coming up. I looked out at that damn AAA, and my mouth instantly went dry. I just couldn't believe the amount of stuff that was in the air. I thought to myself, "And I'm only seeing every eighth bullet!"
We went past Baghdad, to an airfield called H-2, to hit fixed Scud sites. We wanted to hit all the fixed sites before they could launch against Israel. H-2 was looking real bad because they put up some fighters that night to try to get us. We had twelve planes going in there. My wingman was about two miles behind, using his FLIR [forward-looking infrared] to keep us in sight. About eighty miles out from H-2, we got some radar contacts from some MiG-29 "Fulcrums" and MiG-23 "Floggers." They knew where we were and were moving to get us.
Spiked by a Fulcrum
We got spiked by a Fulcrum radar, which was picked up on our radar warning receiver. We could see them coming down. They knew there were more than one of us and were trying to find the end of the train to work up the rear of the formation. We got spiked and lost it, got spiked again, and lost it again.
Everybody in our formation could keep pretty good track of them on radar and would lock a missile on to them as they approached. We didn't want to shoot unless we had to so we wouldn't give our positions away. We figured there were two Fulcrums and three Floggers out there.
One MiG-29 came down the left side of the formation. We could see him on the radar. He was beginning to move across our formation. I could begin to see his image in the head-up display [HUD], which displayed the FLIR image from the navigation pod. This gave me a small window to see the sky and terrain in front of me as if it were daylight. He didn't know I was there, but he was trying to roll in on the F-15E about six miles in front of me. Then, all of a sudden, he just hit the ground and exploded. I could see the wreckage spread out along the ground.
It is unbelievably disorienting to fly low at night and work off of radar with only yourself in the cockpit. The MiG pilot was trying to converge on an aircraft moving at 600 knots at 100 feet altitude. He just got too low. It was pitch black, with no moonlight or lights from any cities. We would not even have seen him if not for our FLIR systems. We could see that it was a MiG-29 Fulcrum and that he just flew into the ground trying to maneuver behind the guy in front of me.
Another F-15 crew in the front of the formation had seen another MiG-29 come down on the right side. He took a shot at that one because the MiG had a radar lock on him. He was afraid the MiG was going to shoot missiles head-on at him at low altitude. The AIM-9 missile went stupid and missed the MiG.
After the mission, we put all the HUD FLIR tapes together to figure out what happened next. We think this MiG-29 came around and got into a beam position on us and lost his radar lock, but we think his radar was in automatic acquisition mode and locked onto one of the Iraqi MiG-23 Floggers. The Floggers didn't have the systems to get down low with us and were up about 2,000 feet trying to get an infrared lock from the heat of our exhaust. The MiG-29 then shot a missile and destroyed the Flogger.
No Fun at All
There were some nights over there, especially during the first two weeks, when the AAA and SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] were really bad. I was on both missions when we had F-15Es shot down. Those weren't fun at all.
The most memorable night for me was February 16, when we went into the Basra region with twenty-four airplanes. The first eight-ship was going north of Basra to hit bridges. Our eight-ship was in the middle, with our squadron commander, Lt. Col. Steve Pingle--a Vietnam vet and about as cool as they come-in the lead. Our target was a powerplant up a river near the coast. The last eight-ship was going to hit a petroleum refining and storage area in northern Kuwait.
We dropped off the tanker and went to low altitude to get down under the early warning radar. We flew just to the west of Kuwait, continued north, and turned east. As soon as we turned the corner, about fifteen miles from the target, after we had gotten past the SAM sites, we were going to pop up to medium altitude to get over the AAA.
The AAA was heavier than I had ever seen it. What we didn't know was that two Republican Guard divisions had moved onto the road along our route of travel. I will never, ever, forget what that looked like. It was just a wall of AAA.
Down low, there was an illusion of going down a tunnel because the AAA just kind of parted in front of us and passed over the top of the aircraft. It was so thick I just squeezed down into my seat and waited to get hit. What else could I do? I couldn't turn around. I couldn't go left, couldn't go right. My whole philosophy was, "I'm going to get through this stuff as fast as I can."
You could tell when a strand of tracer was heading your way by the look of it, and you just jinked a bit to get out of its way. There was so much muzzle flash on the ground that it looked like daylight. I felt vulnerable as hell because I was sure they could see me in all that light.
Then we popped up to about 16,000 feet and got above most of the AAA. The 57-mm and bigger guns could still get to us, but it wasn't as bad. Luckily, they never shot any SAMs at us. We were each carrying five Mk. 84 2,000-pound bombs. We rolled in and pounded that powerplant using the FLIR targeting pods.
When we turned to go home, we were only about six or seven miles from the southern group hitting the petroleum facility. Those guys had a really hard time because they had SAMs shot at them as well as AAA. That was where we had an airplane shot down and lost a crew. They were headed toward two SAM sites and did a loft delivery, where they use the energy of a climb to toss the bombs onto the target. We think they got hit in the climb. When the others got back and reviewed the FLIR tapes, the guy who was behind [the airplane shot down] had him on the FLIR and showed him taking a hit, rolling over, and going into the ground.
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/1.....nnett.aspx
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