Surely the real issue here is the guy at Cranwell must be walting right....? Designating targets in the FIs and now working as groundcrew...? C'mon, I don't buy it.

In the middle of a war you're going to hover at 5000' in clear view of the enemy? You don't need specialist knowledge to predict the likely consequences. If I were a member of your crew and you proposed such a plan I'd have clubbed you like a baby seal.

Tis ashame you didn’t read the post, I said “outside the defended area” ie outside the Roland missile engagement zone…. They only go so far;- approx 5miles horizontally.

Looking the film and maps they were successfully designating targets (artillery)at 10 -12 miles from an elevation of about 1000ft.

You’d have to have supreme confidence in the intelligence on enemy ground weapon deployment in an era and area without satellite coverage or photo recce and analysis….

Presumably if they put a PaveSpike pod on the wing pylon it could self designate. From memory they also tried fittiing LGBs to the Vulcan, but were hampered by the fact that you could only fit three in the bomb bay

I would presume nothing. No information was made available at station level regarding how LGBs might be employed. Had I to guess, the aircraft role might have been similar to the part it usually played in a Vectac.

I don’t know what the outcome of the measuring up exercise was. We knew beforehand that they would fit, but how many and if a safe release was achievable was not a unit matter. In any event, there were many other things going on that fully occupied my time.

YS

The GBU-10s & 12s we used back in the day had a 4-digit code that was set on both the weapon and the designator. Did the kits used in the Falklands not have this, or if they did, how was it expected that the Harrier laser would work with them?