GRANBY
On 18 Jan 1991 I was in the ‘Brass nut’ in Keflevic with the rest of the crew from 2 sqn NAB Geilenkirchen nearing the end of a 2 year tour learning to fly the AWACs before returning to join 8 squadron which was just forming at Waddington.
We had arrived in Iceland that day on a routine deployment. The American news on TV started to show amazing pictures of the opening bombardment in Iraq.
Thinking that we were well out of the way we continued to enjoy the delights of Kef in January - minus 3 with sleet and a howling gale!
At about 10pm the captain - a great guy from Holland whose previous tour had been flying Dutch F5s- came rushing in to say that early next morning we were to RTB Geilenkirchen ASAP- pick up some war kit and proceed to Preveza in Greece which we did and duly arrived at about 9 PM.
The following evening we were at F290 over southern Turkey controlling the next massive airstrikes on Iraq - air refuelling at midnight at F190 ( lower than normal for us ) in the cloud tops which was quite tricky as there was a lot of turbulence ,the refuelling box was pretty small - which meant a lot of turning and every 10 mins we had to break off to allow higher priority fast jets to top up.
Also the tankers being at war had all their lights switched off! The boom operators tactic of keeping the boom low until the last second also was quite hairy.
Luckily my Dutch hero had no problem at all and didn’t even break sweat!
On our int brief the pessimistic American blond had told us that they had no idea where the large numbers of Iraqi fighters - MIG 29s,MIG 25s etc had disappeared to and thought that they might be operating from the motorways which were only about 50 miles south of us! We would not see them approaching as they would be in the blank area beneath our radar.
The other worry was that an airway was operating about 50 miles North of our orbit and a cunning tactic that concerned us was a that clever MIG pilot would formate under an airliner and then undetected attack a big juicy target (us) from short range when it would be too late to evade!
Sure enough about 3 hours later the back end reported a ‘double’ radar contact on the airway!
After about a minutes discussion on what to do the captain made his decision - wing over/ gear down/ airbrakes out rapid descent!
The Boeing 707 has a reputation of being able to descend very rapidly (as proved by a crew who had unintentionally stalled in the orbit a short time before) and we hit safety altitude at about F100 over the Turkish mountains in what seemed seconds later!
Lessons learned:
Air power is VERY flexible.
The Allied Air Power demo was MASSIVE
The B707 is/was a great aircraft.
Always take some spare kit with you on deployment !
Last edited by Senior Pilot; 21st Dec 2020 at 11:16.
Reason: Remove triplicate dits