Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing tcml-3

by Tom Clancy

  His first choice of aircraft was something of a "no-brainer," being one of the powerful F-15E Strike Eagles flown by the 391st FS, the "Bold Tigers." Thus, several days before we flew down to Nellis AFB, Nevada, for Green Flag 94-3, we all went down to the 391st FS headquarters building to watch him suit up and go on his flight. The first stop was to meet Lieutenant Colonel Frank W. "Claw" Clawson, the 391st's commanding officer, who gave John the opportunity to choose who would chauffeur him around the sky this day. John, no fool, asked for one of the senior pilots in the squadron, and got one of the best, Lieutenant Colonel Roger "Boom-Boom" Turcott, the squadron's operations officer. This decided, we were shuttled off to get ready for his adventure.

  First stop was a quick check from the squadron flight surgeon. After a look with a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, he was pronounced fit for "limited, low-altitude flight." This is because he does not have a current altitude chamber card (issued after an annual pressure chamber test to certify a flyer's tolerance to the low pressures above 15,000 feet/4,572 meters altitude), or a centrifuge certification (similar to the chamber card) which would allow him to pull the maximum Gs that the modern USAF is capable of pulling. Not that any of this was going to be a limitation, for the flight he was going on was to be an actual low-altitude training flight, practicing bomb and missile deliveries on the 366th's range at Saylor Creek, some twenty miles from the base. As the medical officer was finishing, he smiled and said he would see John afterwards, just in case he needed something for nausea or anything else.

  The next stop was the cockpit simulator, which is kept in a small room in the headquarters building. Here, we were met by Captain Rob Evans, who ran us through what John would be doing in the backseat of Boom-Boom's aircraft. Evans then demonstrated what not to touch unless directed to by the pilot (the stick, throttles, and ejection seat handles being key items!), and how to use the ACES II ejection seat in the event of an emergency. It is incredibly simple actually. All you have to do is straighten yourself up in the seat and pull one of the two yellow ejection-seat handles. The canopy transparency is then jettisoned, and the seats eject, the WSO's first, followed by the pilot's. From that point on, everything happens pretty much automatically, including seat separation and parachute deployment.

  Now it was time for the preflight briefing. Moving over to the squadron briefing room, John sat down with Boom-Boom, Claw, and the other five crewmen who would be on the flight. One thing that was made clear to us was that with training dollars as scarce as hen's teeth these days, this mission was going to run exactly like any other training sortie. Every part of the planned flight was discussed, and then loaded from a planning computer onto a 32K data transfer module (DTM) cartridges. All Boom-Boom would have to do is stick the DTM into a small slot in the front cockpit of the F-15E, and the bird would pretty much know where to go, what to do, and how to do it. Flight and equipment safety rules were restated and reinforced. Finally, as the meeting broke up, each of the other aircrews wished John a hearty "good luck," and then we headed down to the 391st Life Support Shop.

  Series researcher John D. Gresham just prior to his ride in a McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle of the 366th Wing's 391st Fighter Squadron. He is wearing a standard USAF issue HGU-55 lightweight flight helmet with an MBU-12/P oxygen mask and a CWU-27/U Nomex flight suit.

  Official U.S. Air Force Photo

  The Life Support Shop is so named because its equipment is absolutely vital to sustaining life in the variety of conditions that a combat pilot may encounter. These can range from the freezing temperatures and oxygen starvation of high altitudes to staying afloat in the water following an ejection. The technicians in the Life Support Shop tend to take a holistic approach to fitting gear to a particular individual, and watching them fit John with his gear was like seeing a turtle getting fitted with a new custom-made shell. You start with underwear, which can just be what you wear normally. While some pilots do wear Nomex (a fire-resistant fabric produced by Dupont) long underwear, especially in cold weather, the bulk of them wear normal "jockey-style" briefs and undershirts, though the new crop of female tactical aviators also usually wear a firm sports bra to help ward off the effects of Gs on those sensitive areas. Aircrews also like to wear thick socks to help their boots fit well and to keep their feet warm in the event of a cockpit heater failure. Next to go on is an olive-drab CWU-27/P flight suit, which is really comfortable and sharp-looking, considering that it is designed to resist flame for a period of time. It seems to have a million pockets for "stuff" all over the sleeves and legs, which John promptly began to fill with things needed for the coming flight. Most important of these were several small manila envelopes, containing plastic bags in case he suffered from the in-flight nausea and airsickness that is more common among flight crews than you might think. Stuffed in one of the leg pockets went another vital piece of survival gear, a "piddle pack." The male version of this item is basically a plastic zip-lock bag with a strip of dry sponge inside to soak up and hold the urine, while the female version is essentially a diaper which is donned before flight. Currently, the USAF is working hard to improve both models, which are vital on long missions and overseas deployments. Next come flight boots, the choice of which is left to the individual aircrews. For additional warmth, you can also add a Nomex CWU-36/P "summer" flight jacket, or even a rubberized "poopy suit" (the name is derived from the fact that when you sweat in one, there is nowhere for the moisture and odors to go!) for flying in arctic conditions over water. Along with the suit go a set of GS/FRP Nomex flying gloves, with leather palms, which are wonderfully comfortable.

  On your head goes a cotton skullcap to help absorb sweat and keep your head cool, followed by one of the new USAF HGU-55 lightweight helmets. Weighing only about 30 oz./.85 kg., these are lighter and smaller than the older HGU-33, and are easier on the neck muscles during high-G maneuvers. The HGU-55 is equipped with the new MBU-12/P oxygen mask, which fits quite nicely, though John later wished that he had shaved his beard to get a tighter seal on his face. Once John's helmet was fitted, on came the G-suit, a girdle for the abdomen and legs. It is composed of a system of pneumatic bladders, which inflate to squeeze the lower body and keep blood from pooling there. This helps aircrews to better tolerate the G forces of high-performance aircraft that can lead to a blackout.

  At 1320 hours (1:20 PM), clad in what seemed like a mountain of clothing and equipment, Boom-Boom, John, and the rest of the training-flight aircrews boarded a blue step van to ride out to the flight line. Carrying his helmet and knee board in a green bag, and waddling out of the van with a decided stoop, John was helped into the rear cockpit. Meanwhile Boom-Boom completed a walkaround of the aircraft, an early-production F-15E, equipped with F100-PW- 220 engines, which appears to have flown in the 1991 Persian Gulf War with the 4th Wing. While Boom-Boom completed his check, several technicians were strapping John in, making sure the various oxygen and telecommunications lines were properly hooked up. Both cockpits of the Strike Eagle are roomy and spacious, with lots of room for people who are John's size (he's over 6 feet 3 inches/1.9 meters tall). There's plenty of room to store personal gear, maps, and other things in a small compartment on the left, slightly behind the seat. On either side of the seat are the hand controllers for the sensor/ weapons systems, with the control stick and throttle column exactly as they are in the front seat. The instrument panel is dominated by the four MFDs, the two outside screens being smaller color displays, while the two inner ones are larger monochrome "green" screens. What makes these MFDs unique is that unlike normal computer displays, they function perfectly well in bright daylight. The whole cockpit is laid out in an incredibly efficient manner. It just makes logical sense to do things that way.

  By 1340 hours, Boom-Boom, John, and the rest of the crews were strapped in and ready to go. Boom-Boom then yelled to John to get ready for engine start, as the crew chief plugged in a special microphone/headset designed for use in areas with high noise levels. When he was ready
, Boom-Boom fired up the engines with a whine and a roar and began to get the avionics spun up and settled. This took several minutes, as the navigation system aligned itself and the rest of the systems warmed up. In the cockpit, the ear-splitting noise is muffled by the helmets, headsets, and the aircraft structure, although you can feel the power almost immediately through your butt. It is something more than you feel with a powerful V-8 automobile engine… more like a motorcycle engine at full tilt. Both John and Boom-Boom snapped in the bayonet clips on their oxygen masks, and Boom-Boom turned up the air-conditioning system to keep a flow of cool air going into the rear cockpit to help keep John comfortable.

  Around the cockpit, the various strip indicators and warning enunciators all switched to a "green" condition, and Boom-Boom called over the radio to ground control for permission to taxi down to the east end of the ramp. This done, at 1355 they followed the other three F-15Es down to the arming pit, where they parked for a time. There, the ordnance technicians removed the last of the safety arming pins from the BDU-33 practice bomb dispensers; and Claw Flight got ready to roll onto the runway. Sharing the pit were several F-16s from the 389th FS which were going out on their own training hop. Mountain Home is a busy place year-round, and this day was no exception. After about a ten-minute wait, the final clearance for takeoff from the tower was received, and at 1415, Lieutenant Colonel Clawson rolled Claw-1 out to takeoff position. Pushing his engines to afterburner for takeoff, he was off the ground in a few thousand feet, and headed out over the south side of the base to wait for the rest of the flight to form up.

  When their turn came, Boom-Boom and John in Claw-2 taxied to takeoff position, and Boom-Boom dropped the flaps and told John to grab the handlebar above the instrument panel and hang on. As Boom-Boom slid the throttles all the way forward, the twin F100 engines roared. Boom-Boom released the brakes, the afterburners belched flame, and the Strike Eagle literally leaped down the runway. Unlike airliners, which seem to take forever to accelerate to takeoff speed, the Strike Eagle seems to fling itself off of the earth. At 130 knots/241 kph., Boom-Boom rotated the aircraft upwards, and just seconds later, as they passed 166 knots/307 kph., they took off. As soon as they were off the ground, Boom-Boom retracted the landing gear and flaps, getting the Strike Eagle cleaned up for their flight to Saylor Creek Bombing Range; then he retarded the throttles to a more civil "dry" setting, to save fuel as well as wear and tear on the precious engines.

  The feelings of flying in a high-performance fighter are fundamentally different from an airliner, even the supersonic Concorde. It's a raw, almost wild experience, like a ride on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The view out of the bubble transparency is simply amazing. You feel exposed, sitting as you do with your shoulders well above the canopy rails, almost sitting on top of the jet. And since low-level flight is where the Strike Eagle earns its pay, the feeling of the world going by in a hurry is more like a super-fast helicopter than any airliner you have ever ridden. It also needs to be said that flying the Strike Eagle is something like riding a wild horse: The older-style controls of the F-15E are a bit "twitchy" and require a delicate, almost "kissing" touch on the stick to keep the big bird from wallowing around the sky.

  Boom-Boom Turcott has that soft touch, and he needed it this day; the air over the Idaho desert was decidedly unpleasant. While the base was under bright sunshine and a hard but steady wind, the range was under a heavy cloud cover, with intermittent snow and rain falling. This is a rough combination, and Boom-Boom was working hard to keep John from having to use one of the vomit bags in the pocket of his flight suit. In fact, several of the other WSOs in the flight were also having problems with motion sickness, and eyeing the bags in those little manila envelopes. Despite the popular notion that aircrews have cast-iron stomachs, almost every flier has occasional bouts of airsickness and vertigo. In fact, the ability to rapidly recover from such maladies is greatly respected among aircrews.

  Meanwhile, as the flight transited out to the Saylor Creek Range, Boom-Boom took the opportunity to show John a few things about the territory, and about the F-15E. As they flew just a few thousand feet over the canyon of the Snake River, he had him power up and unstow the FLIR turret on the AAQ-14 targeting pod under the belly of the fighter. The crews of LANTIRN-equipped aircraft usually keep the targeting FLIR turrets in the stowed position, since dust and sand tend to pit and erode the optical windows. The targeting FLIR is normally controlled by the right-hand controller, and is aimed via a small dish-shaped switch which uses the WSO's finger movement, much like a mouse on a computer. There are also two other controls in this cluster, one called a "coolie hat" and the other the "rook" or "castle" controller, because of their shape and feel. These two manipulate the two right-hand displays, which show the FLIR video, radar displays, and other sensor and weapons-related data. There is an identical controller on the left side of the cockpit, which mostly controls the ring laser gyro-based INS. The INS drives the most noticeable and dynamic display, the left-side color MFD, called the moving-map display. This MFD displays a full-color navigational chart of where you are, where you are going, and how you are oriented.

  Moving back to the right-hand controller, you find that with a little practice, the targeting FLIR is quite easy to use, and has a field-of-view that can see almost everything in the lower hemisphere of the Strike Eagle. There are also several magnification settings, which can easily allow you to determine what you are looking at from a considerable range. Once you get an object centered up in the scope, you can lock it up and the FLIR will track it, no matter what maneuvers the pilot chooses to lay onto the bird. This proved useful, as John found when Boom-Boom gave him a mild demonstration of the Strike Eagle's maneuvering capabilities by pulling some hard turns at one of the navigational waypoints; the FLIR stayed steady on a telephone pole on the desert floor below.

  Even though they only pulled about 31/2 Gs in these maneuvers, it was a telling experience for John, who is a big, burly sort of man. It felt like everything on his body began to head towards his feet, and he found the movement of his lips and cheeks towards the bottom of his face particularly eerie. As soon as Boom-Boom would start a run and the Gs came on, the G-suit around his waist and legs inflated to keep the blood from pooling in his abdomen, thus avoiding a blackout. Despite the stresses of the Gs, John found that he still could work the controllers and continue doing the tasks Boom-Boom asked him to perform. In fact, one of the surprises was that despite his relative lack of experience with the LANTIRN system (and rising nausea), he was easily able to learn the routine with the controllers, and he even managed to fire up the APG-70 radar and lock up Colonel Clawson and his WSO (callsign "Fuzz") in Claw-1. He also managed to take a couple of SAR radar maps with the APG-70.

  By then they were at the Saylor Creek Bombing Range, which was experiencing a series of intermittent snow/hail/rain showers. These made the air fairly rough during the runs that followed. Boom-Boom again followed Claw- 1, and set up the arming panel to drop one BDU-33 practice bomb on each run. John's job on each run was to lock up the aiming point, so the video recorder could evaluate the accuracy of the run. This involved slewing the FLIR turret around until the desired target in the array was centered in the screen, and then selecting the lock button to start the system autotracking. At the same time, the ground-based television optical scoring system (TOSS) would score each bomb dropped. What followed was a pinwheel of F-15Es, with each making a run about every thirty seconds. Boom-Boom and John started each run by lining up the target array on the nose of Claw-2 and putting the aircraft into a shallow 15deg dive. As soon as John would lock up the target with the targeting FLIR (or the APG-70 radar), the weapons delivery system would begin computing the proper course to the target. This was displayed to Boom-Boom as a steering cue, on the HUD; all he had to do was aim the "fly-to" box at the steering cue, and the computers did the rest. Despite the high crosswind in the target area, the crews of all four Strike Eagles were easily scoring "shacks" (direct
hits) on their desired targets. The idea of this exercise was to see how accurately each crew could place a "dumb" bomb on the target, with the assistance of the Strike Eagle's weapons delivery systems. Despite the popular public notion that Desert Storm was a war won with "smart" munitions, the vast majority of the bombs dropped were unguided, and this will be the case for some time to come. Thus the need to stay in practice with the older-style weapons. After each run, Boom-Boom would pull Claw-2 off to the right and climb back to several thousand feet AGL to set up for the next run. Each time, as they banked overhead, Boom-Boom and John could see the runs of Claw-3 and -4 off to their right as they hit the ring of targets on the TOSS range.

  When their supply of BDU-33s was expended, Claw Flight moved over to the Maverick missile target array a few miles away. The first of these was a circular array of oil drums (called Target 101). These showed up nicely on the targeting FLIR when warmed by the sun, which was breaking through the clouds from time to time. The 391st is the only Strike Eagle unit in the USAF equipped with the IIR Maverick missile, and they are quite skilled with it. Their tactic is to make side-by-side runs at the targets, two at a time, starting at 11 nm./20.1 km. with a 30deg split and a 10deg climb to the pushover at about 8 nm./14.6 km., then a 30deg merge with a 5deg dive at the weapons release point, and an egress (pilot talk for leaving) at about 2 nm./3.7 km. They then make a right-hand turn, with the number-two aircraft falling in behind the leader. This gives them time to acquire multiple targets, if desired, and hit them all on the same pass. Boom-Boom and John in Claw-2 made their first pass on the left side of the circular array, locking up three of the barrels and delivering three simulated missiles fairly successfully. It struck John then that less than an hour before, he had never touched an F-15E. Now he was delivering ordnance well enough to actually hit things.