Saturday, June 21, 2014

Shooting Fish In a Barrel

Bosnia February 24, 1994 "Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel"

It's not all Eagles and MiGs around here. F-16 Falcons..ahem... Vipers... have contributed plenty to the US's reputation of dangerous skies. The Following is from the UK's 1999 Air Force Year Book and was one of the first published accounts of the action in question.

I have other interviews of this account that I'll be adding over time. So keep coming back!

BACKGROUND
On February, the 86th Wing's 526th FS Black Knights arrived at Aviano with its Block 40 F-16s to take over NATO duty just as the alliance and the UN were locked in a stand-off with Serbian forces around Sarajevo, after a mortar round had killed a dozen people in a market.
Three weeks later the squadron played a key role in the shooting down of four Serb aircraft. As a result of that short engagement, Captain (now Major) Bob "Wilbur" Wright became the highest-scoring F-16 pilot. At the time, for operational security reasons, the USAF refused to identify Wright publicly because he was still flying missions over Bosnia as part of Operation Deny Flight. It was several months before he was named when the (then) Lockheed Fort Worth Company presented him with the Dryden Semper Viper Award, for "superior airmanship".

SHOOT DOWN

The engagement began just after 0530 hr on 24 February 1994, when a NATO Airborne Early Warning Force Boeing E-3A Sentry detected a flight of six fast jets heading southwards from Banja Luka towards central Bosnia. It later transpired that the Soko G-2 Galeb aircraft had taken off from Ubdina air base in the serb-held Krajina region of Croatia. Wright and his wingman, the then little known Captain Scott O'Grady, were on combat air patrol over Mostar in southeast Bosnia, using the callsign Black 04 and 04. They were serving with teh 526th FS, which had been detached for temporary duty to Aviano from Ramstein AB in Germany.
A fighter controller onthe AWACS vectored the two pilots to intercept the Serb aircraft. At the same time, the AWACS began issuing radio warnings to the Serbs, ordering them to land or exit the UN-mandated "No-Fly Zone" - otherwise they would be ngaged. They did not respond to the warnings.
At 0542, Wright and O'Grady issued their own warnings to the Serbs, which were also ignored. This was just after Wright had seen the serb aircraft make bombing runs on an arms factory in the Muslim-held town of Novi Tarvnik. Wright saw explosions on the ground and requested permission from NATO's Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Vicenza to engage. Under the UN and NATO rules of engagement, NATO had a "single key" in such circumstances, so the CAOC was almost immediately able to clear Wright to react to the blatant breach of the "No-Fly Zone".
The Galebs were now heading northward, trying to drop to low level to use the mountainous terrain to hide from any NATO radar surveillance. Wright, however, was on their tail. At 0545 he launched his first AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-toAir Missile (AMRAAM) at the Galebs. The semi-active radar-guided missile easily found its mark on the first Galeb, which was flying at some 5,000 feet. The remaining Galebs had dropped to a few hundred feet ot make their escape back to Ubdina. Wright pressed on, closing into AIM-9 Sidewinder range. He launched two missiles, which were seen to impact and turn the Serb aircraft into fireballs. No parachutes were seen by the F-16 pilots.
With his missilesa ll but exhausted and his fuel running low, Wright now handed over the chase to O'Grady, who had been flying top cover for his flight lead. O'Grady dropped down to engage and fired Sidewinder but it did not lock-on, and missed. Black flight was now approaching "bingo fuel" so they pulled off to refuel from a KC-135R Stratotanker orbiting over the Adriatic Sea. Another pair of 526th FS F-16Cs, Knight 25 and 26, had been vectored by the AWACS to take over the intercept. At 0550 Knight 25 managed to get in behind teh remaining 2 Galebs. He got a good lock and downed one of the aircraft with a Sidewinder.
By this time, the Serb aircraft were close to the international border and the F-16s had to break off the pursuit because NATO was not empowered to engage aircraft outside of Bosnian airspace. The remaining Galebs were were able to return unharmed to Ubdina. Within minutes, news of the first offensive military action in teh history of the NATO alliance was flashed around the world. Wrighta nd a number of his colleagues later gave a number of media interviews about the incident, using their callsigns as identification, but they quickly returned to operational flying.

No comments:

Post a Comment