A-10s over Kosovo

by Christopher E. Haave Kimos

  We also put tactical deception to good use. During the first week of KEZ operations, ABCCC announced in the clear over strike frequency, “The KEZ will close in 10 minutes,” followed later by, “The KEZ is closed. All aircraft must depart the AOR.” We understood that the CAOC had directed ABCCC to make those calls. We suggested to the CAOC that code words should normally be used for “KEZ open” and “KEZ closed,” particularly when they were used in the clear. We then worked through our CAOC rep to set up a “head fake”—that is, announce that the KEZ would close and then go back in to look for any targets that might think it was safe to move and had broken cover. Capt Michael J. “Hook” Shenk Jr. describes that mission well.

  Capt Ripley E. “Rip” Woodard’s story has nothing to do with employing ordnance, but is simply a feat of courageous airmanship that saved an aircraft with a dual-engine flameout under particularly harrowing circumstances. It is a must-read—twice—that makes it easy to understand why he won the Koren Kerrigan Safety Award in 1999.

  One tactical innovation that had enormous potential and just didn’t work out was the employment of a joint A-10 and Apache helicopter team. The US Army had based Apaches in Albania. We had worked with these helicopters before and had some joint tactical-employment doctrine, but some tactical concepts needed to be adapted to reflect the Serbs’ 360-degree, ground-based threat to aircraft. Because the CAOC’s Apache and A-10 reps assumed we would operate together, they worked out a few “practice” sorties during the last week of April. We also looked for additional opportunities to further our orientation. Without compromising our planned KEZ missions, we attempted radio or visual contact with the Apaches as they progressively flew more ambitious training sorties in northern Albania.

  To form an effective team, we needed to discuss several issues in detail: CSAR procedures, target identification, and responses to particular threats. We looked forward to the Tirana conference to hammer out those tactical details. As it turned out, Tirana was an operational-level decision meeting between general officers and not one where worker bees could engage in stubby-pencil work. Regrettably, the Apache briefers were not familiar with our KEZ operations and briefed employment concepts and tactics that had been developed during the Cold War. General Short was understandably uncomfortable; he and General Hendrix decided, at that time, not to go forward with Apache operations.

  The A-10s and Apaches didn’t fly together in combat; therefore, their potential for success in the KEZ remains pure speculation. Our opinions differed significantly on whether we could have developed workable tactics, but most of us thought it would have been worth the try. The level of military pressure necessary to force a Serbian capitulation was eventually applied to the Serb army by the KLA during a two-week period in early June. Perhaps that same level of pressure could have been applied by the Apaches within days or hours in early May.

  Some people may consider the A-10 a Stone Age jet, but its very limitations may have been the catalyst that led to our success. When human ingenuity, born out of necessity, is combined with a cultural desire to find creative solutions to difficult tactical problems, tremendous feats can be accomplished. Such feats accounted for a lot of destroyed enemy armor in the KEZ, and the Hog community should never forget the human traits that led to those results.

  The First Night CSAR

  Maj Phil “Goldie” Haun

  Day 4: 27 March 1999. So far so good, if flying an A-10 for seven hours behind a KC-135 in a holding pattern over the Adriatic, while NATO’s air armada wreaked havoc over Serbia, is “good.” The really sad part was that flying nighttime airborne alert was a great mission compared to what most of my squadron mates were doing. They were either sitting ground alert or just watching the war go by from the sidelines at Aviano. We had only been tasked to provide CSAR support as Sandys. Our job was to respond to a jet being shot down and to be overhead in the A-10—one of the most lethal war machines ever created—to orchestrate the pilot’s rescue. So far no one had been shot down, which was a very good thing, and, as a consequence, our operational involvement had been limited.

  That night I was scheduled to fly during the graveyard shift. My wingman, Capt Joe Bro Brosious, and I were to take off at midnight. As we traveled from the hotel to the squadron, NATO cancelled its strikes for the night because of bad weather. The CAOC then cancelled our first airborne-alert CSAR two-ship and placed the squadron on ground alert. Capts Buster Cherrey and John “Slobee” O’Brien had been scheduled to fly first and were now pulling ground alert as Sandy 30 and 31.

  I turned my attention to more interesting work. In two days our squadron would begin leading daytime attacks on the Serbian army deployed in Kosovo. I was in charge of planning those attacks, so I drove over to wing intelligence, on the other side of the Aviano runway, to review its information. I had just started looking at some Kosovo imagery when an airman in the room yelled, “An F-117 has been shot down!”

  That couldn’t be right! The strikes had been called off for tonight. We didn’t even have Buster and Slobee airborne. Later I would learn that, although the NATO strikes had been cancelled, the F-117 was part of a US-only strike.

  Someone handed me a set of coordinates and the pilot’s name and rank scribbled on a yellow sticky. I raced back to the squadron and pulled up as Buster and Slobee were stepping to their jets. I gave them the information I had and talked strategy with Buster for about 30 seconds. We decided to have the MH-53J Pave Low helicopters launch when Sandy 41, our second set of A-10s flown by Capts Meegs Meger and Scrape Johnson, were refueling on the tanker. Sandy 41’s job would be to contact the helicopters, update them on the rescue plan, and then escort them to the survivor.

  Weapons troop inspecting an IIR Maverick and IR illumination rockets prior to a night mission (USAF Photo by TSgt Blake Borsic)

  I craved more information. The F-117 had to be a Black Sheep from the 8th FS, the only F-117s deployed at Aviano at the time. I grabbed Lt Glib Gibson and sent him to the 8th to get as much information as possible. Glib quickly procured copies of the pilot’s (call sign Vega 31) route of flight and, most importantly, his ISOPREP card, which contains personal data that only the pilot knows and won’t forget even under a lot of pressure. A pilot reviews that information prior to each combat sortie. Glib, acting on his own initiative, made the important decision to drive out on the flight line to give the ISOPREP-card information to Buster right before takeoff.

  Meanwhile I was performing my cat-juggling act at the squadron. I had intelligence pull maps and plot the survivor’s coordinates. I was relieved when I saw that he was within 20 miles of the Croat-Serb border and well clear of major threats. CAOC personnel were on the phone wanting to know our plan. I told them the time we wanted the helicopters to launch and that they should muster as many air-refueling tankers as possible. Gas equals time in operations such as this, and there was no way to know how long it would take us to complete this mission. The F-16CG (Block 40) and F-16CJ (Block 50) squadrons had volunteered an additional six jets apiece for the mission. Thirty minutes after first notification of the shoot down, I was giving the most important briefing of my life, informing the F-16s on their roles in what proved to be the largest CSAR since Vietnam.

  Capt Meegs Meger gets ready to take off in the rain at Aviano. (USAF Photo by SrA Jeffery Allen)

  The F-16CGs carried targeting pods and could drop laserguided bombs. My intention was to slow down the Serbian army’s search for Vega. I selected the intersections of major lines of communication, near where I believed the survivor to be located, as potential strike targets. Still, I was concerned about the availability of gas on the tankers and didn’t know when we would need the strikes, so I decided to keep the F-16CGs on ground alert until we needed them. From Aviano they could hit those targets within an hour. As it turned out, we never launched the F-16CGs because low-level clouds over Serbia would have made it impossible for them to see their targets and the initial survivor coordinates proved to be in error by more tha
n 40 miles.

  Plot of initial coordinates for Vega 31

  The F-16CJs carried the HARM and had the “Wild Weasel” defense-suppression mission. It was their job to keep the radar-guided SAMs in the belt around Belgrade from shooting us down. I wanted the F-16CJs to launch ASAP. Those six jets would join the eight F-16CJs already airborne that had been a part of the strike package when Vega 31 was shot down.

  I concluded the briefing in 20 minutes. Joe Bro and I then powwowed and updated our information before we stepped to our jets. Our job was to support Sandy 30. My individual call sign and, since I was the flight lead, our flight call sign was Sandy 51; Joe Bro’s individual call sign was Sandy 52. Joe Bro and I planned to come off the tanker with a full load of fuel just as Sandy 30 flight would be reaching its bingo fuel and required departure for the tanker. We had no idea how long the rescue would take. Using this strategy, Buster and I could swap out being the on-scene commander and ensure that a Sandy flight would always be with the survivor.

  Joe Bro and I stepped just as Buster and Slobee, Sandy 30, were taking off. I thought that the timing should work well. Meegs and Scrape’s two-ship, Sandy 41, would get airborne in another 30 minutes. I performed the preflight inspection on my A-10. The jet was configured with two IIR Maverick air-to-surface missiles, seven white-phosphorous (also known as Willy Pete) rockets, seven night-illumination rockets, and 1,000 30 mm rounds for the gun. We were not carrying any bombs, but Meegs and Scrape had CBU-87 cluster bombs if we needed them. I climbed into the jet, and, while performing my cockpit checks prior to takeoff, I heard Meegs relay on the victor radio that Buster had contacted the survivor and had an updated position for him. When I pulled out my map and plotted this new set of coordinates, my heart sank. Vega was south of Novisad and just west of the suburbs of Belgrade—in the heart of Serbia.

  Actual location of Vega 31

  My heart was pounding a mile a minute as I took off from Aviano AB. This base in northern Italy, located at the foot of the Dolomite Mountains, provided a spectacular view at night, particularly when I put on my NVGs. The weather was clear, with a big full moon overhead. Unfortunately, the weather did not remain clear for long. Twenty miles south of the field I entered very thick clouds as I continued my climb to altitude. Looking at my wing, I could see that I was picking up some light rime ice. Though not dangerous to flight, the ice was degrading my weapons as it covered the seekers on my Mavericks and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles. I continued my climb to flight level (FL) 290 to get above the clouds and start subliming the ice off my missiles.

  Magic, the call sign used by the crew of the NAEW, gave me a vector to the air-refueling track. I sent Joe Bro over to a separate frequency to contact Moonbeam for an update. Moonbeam was the ABCCC EC-130 aircraft that also served as the airborne mission coordinator during CSARs. It had responsibility for coordinating with the CAOC and Magic to ensure the timely flow of all the resources the CSAR operation needed.

  Except for the icing and the survivor being in the suburbs of Belgrade, things were going pretty well. However, I was in for a shock when I keyed the mike to transmit on my UHF (uniform) radio—it was dead. I desperately tried to reset it by switching it off and on. Nothing. This was not good since the UHF was my primary radio and the survivor had only a UHF radio. In frustration I beat on the radio trying to pound it into life. Nothing.

  I was over Bosnia—cruising at 300 knots in silence. I turned my radio off, raised my eyes up to the stars above, and prayed, “Lord, I’ve never prayed to you like this before, but I need your help like I’ve never needed it before. There is a man on the ground out there who needs me, and I can’t help him if this radio won’t work. Lord, I need you to fix this radio, because I can’t do it by myself.” I gently turned the radio back on and heard the angelic voice of Magic, wanting to know why I hadn’t responded to his radio calls.

  Under my breath I said, “Thank you, Lord,” and keyed the mike to respond. Once again the UHF radio went dead. The A-10 carried three radios: UHF, VHF-AM, and FM. The UHF and VHF radios have good range, but the FM was good for only a few miles and useful only between jets in the same flight. I called Joe Bro on our interflight Fox Mike: “Two, my UHF is dead. I need you to talk to Magic.” I left my UHF off for a couple of minutes and then turned it back on. I could hear Joe Bro talking to Magic. At least I could monitor UHF. This was going to be painful but workable. I could hear what was being said on the radio, but I had to call Joe Bro on Fox Mike and have him relay my calls on UHF. This just proved what the Rolling Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you’ll get what you need.”

  We continued to the tanker track located over the center of Bosnia. The A-10 was not designed for high-altitude flight. Loaded with munitions, we could not refuel above 20,000 feet. Fortunately the KC-135, Franc 74, was at FL 200. Descending out of FL 290, I picked up Franc going in and out of a broken cloud deck. We pulled in behind him just as he reentered the clouds. My refueling went without a hitch, but Joe Bro had trouble opening his air-refueling door. He had some icing around it and couldn’t get the handle to move. I still don’t know how he did it. We were flying at night, in the weather, and he was on the wing of that KC-135. While still flying the aircraft, Joe Bro unstrapped from his ejection seat to get better leverage on the handle and somehow forced the air-refueling door open.

  Coming off the tanker, we climbed out of the weather, leveled off at FL 270, and turned east towards Serbia. I contacted Sandy 41 (Meegs) on victor, and he told us to continue to the Bosnia-Serbian border. Meanwhile Sandy 30 (Buster) had located Vega 31 and had everything ready for the rescue—everything, that is, except the helicopters. We were still waiting on the two MH-53 Pave Lows and, as I learned later, an MH-60 Pave Hawk. Initially Meegs had not been able to get hold of them, and when he finally raised them he discovered that the helos, call sign Moccasin, did not have the fuel on board to execute. The helicopters had been airborne about as long as Buster had been. Instead of launching at the time I had passed through the CAOC, they launched 90 minutes earlier and had been holding in Croatia, just east of the Serbian border near the first set of wrong coordinates. Later I learned that the time passed by the CAOC had been given in local time instead of Zulu time (Greenwich mean time). Local, or Central European, time is two hours ahead of Zulu time in March, so Moccasin thought he was already half an hour late and requested permission to launch immediately. This simple mistake, by someone not familiar enough with combat operations to know that all times in combat are expressed in Zulu, turned the rescue into an all-night affair and nearly cost the survivor his freedom.

  Buster aborted the pickup and sent everyone to his respective tanker—everyone but Joe Bro and me. The survivor, Vega 31, was concerned with the life of his radio’s battery and turned it off for 45 minutes while the helicopters refueled. Joe Bro and I were the only ones with gas, so our job was to monitor the survivor’s frequency in case he needed to talk to us. I set up a north-south holding pattern just west of the Serbian border, where we listened and waited. We were in dangerous territory, near the place where an F-15A had shot down a Serbian MiG-29 Fulcrum just two nights before. I focused my attention to the east, where the MiG bases were located. Although the weather over Bosnia was bad, I could see into Serbia and make out the lights from the villages and towns all the way to Belgrade. A thunderstorm was building over Belgrade, which prevented me from making out the lights of that city. As the minutes ticked away, I watched the weather rapidly deteriorate. It appeared that the clouds over Bosnia were now pouring into Serbia. A very low cloud deck was moving east, and I could see town after town disappear beneath a blanket of clouds. Why did Moccasin have to launch early? We’d have had Vega 31 out of there by now. There was no way an A-10 Sandy could fly beneath that cloud deck—nor was I sure that even Moccasin could still make it.

  While I was contemplating such negative thoughts, Joe Bro added a new thought: “Hey, what’s that to the west?
” I looked up to see two contrails heading our way. They had to be a set of friendly NATO fighters from the Bosnian CAP. We watched as they began to perform a classic pincer maneuver. I thought they must have been committing on some MiGs, although I hadn’t heard any warnings from Magic. It soon became apparent that they were really interested in us, as my radarwarning receiver screamed at me, and the lead aircraft began a descent and turned our way.

  I was in no way interested in being a part of a friendly fire incident, so I turned to put the fighter on the beam and kept turning to keep him in sight as he converged within a mile. As the fighter continued to converge, I saw a bright flash coming from his jet. Thinking the worst, I immediately started putting out chaff and flares as fast as I could push them out. Joe Bro was behind me doing the same thing. I was relieved when I realized the fighter had only ejected a flare and had not launched a missile at us. When he came alongside me, I saw that it was an F-16CG. The pilot had on NVGs and had pulled up to identify us. Satisfied, he climbed and departed to the west, leaving Joe Bro and me to clean out our flight suits and refocus on the task at hand.

  Meanwhile Sandy 30 had refueled and was heading our way. Buster saw the flares and wanted to know what was up. I calmly said that all was well, passed on-scene command back to him, and turned towards the tanker for my second refueling of the night.

  I gave the lead to Joe Bro since I couldn’t talk on the UHF radio. I slid back to a position about three miles behind his jet and let him work for a while. Magic’s crew members were in over their heads on this one. It seemed that they had no idea how many jets were out here, and they could not provide us any help in locating our tanker. This was going to be sporty since the A-10 has no radar. Fortunately our tanker, Franc 74, was awesome and held in a sucker hole for us. I was running really low on gas. I saw the tanker first and called his position to Joe Bro. The tanker was below me going in the opposite direction, so I executed a descending turn and joined on the boom. Joe Bro finally spotted the tanker and informed me that some jet was already on the tanker. That jet, I told him, was mine. He then joined on the tanker.