Quote:
Originally Posted by M-technik-3
For a country that had so much poliferation of manpads they were barely used,
|
And wasn't that an absolute, freakin' miracle?
I had that thought e
very single time I ran the Combat Entry Checklist.
(Of course, that thought was immediately followed by "Engineer, mark the AOR entry time on the forms" over the intercom. If you were there, you know why.)
That being said, it was a complete license to steal and fly something bigger than a 747 in some pretty extreme (i.e. fun) ways. Max-power, blacked out takeoff, suck up the gear and flaps, hold the jet to 50' over the ground, wait until you get to 320 knots, then pitch pitch pitch and aim for the ceiling while still at max thrust and bleeding airspeed as you climbed. You went up like a homesick angel and were out of the WEZ before you knew it. It would have been a good trick for a Bad Guy to successfully track you on that one.
I wore NVG's once in-theater. Never, ever again. It looked like the Fourth of July down there-- it seemed like every whackadoodle in-country was firing their AK at you even if they couldn't see you. I was happier *knowing* they were shooting at me, but not having to *watch* them shooting at me.
I did have to dump the bucket once or twice in-country on a SAM Alert from the ALE. THAT was like Zeus throwing lightning bolts at you. The ALE detector would light up and you'd hear a very loud "Deedle Deedle Deedle" in your headset. At the same time, you'd feel and hear a series of very loud thumps as the flares disbursed. And it got very bright for a couple of seconds as you honked into a 45 degree bank turn. All of that happened pretty much at the same time and tended to focus your attention nicely.
On a semi-related note: I went to a classified threat/tactics class for airlifters a long time ago and they had a captured SA-16 MANPAD that was wired up to a battery and computer as a trainer. You could track and fire on an aircraft (WITHOUT the missile launch, thankyouverymuch) and the computer would calculate whether or not you would have successfully scored a "hit" on the target aircraft.
Since there were a bunch of C-17's and KC-10's flying around the pattern, a couple of us gave it a try.
With LITERALLY less than 20 seconds of instruction after touching the SA-16 for the first time ever (Track, wait for tone, superelevate, pull trigger)-- we scored about a 90% kill rate on every aircraft we tried for in the pattern-- and the couple that we missed were simply poor aspect shots.
Admittedly, the jets were flying vanilla patterns and not doing tactical hijinks, but still.....
THAT.... pretty much showed me how lucky (and defenseless) we were out there in Indian Country. The Bad Guys in Iraq and Afghanistan should have been blowing aircraft out of the sky left and right.
To this day I don't understand why they didn't.
R.