Word: 2c
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pilots made three more efforts to shake their pursuers. Each . time, observers in a Navy E-2C radar plane flying nearby heard the Libyan ground controller order the MiG pilots to jink into potential collision courses with the Tomcats. The MiGs normally carry radar-guided Apex as well as heat-seeking Aphid missiles. While the Aphid homes in on a jet's fiery exhaust, the Apex is effective when launched at a target's nose...
...Customs Service. A dazzling new aircraft? No. It was a used Lockheed P-3 Orion, designed in the 1950s. The $31 million turboprop has just one major innovation: a 360 degrees radar dome capable of spotting smugglers' low-flying planes as effectively as the $48 million Grumman E-2C Hawkeye, which Customs had been using. The Lockheed can stay aloft twelve hours -- three times as long as the Hawkeye, which must refuel after four hours...
...enforcement has been more effective lately, it is little thanks to the two E-2C Hawkeye radar planes that the Navy turned over to the Coast Guard last year. According to the House Government Operations Committee, the Coast Guard uses the Hawkeyes just 100 hours a month. Moreover, the planes are based in Norfolk, Va., 1,500 nautical miles from their surveillance area of southern Florida and the Caribbean...
...more, providing ample time for the Navy to reach, stop and inspect it. But some border-hopping Cessnas can fly to their unloading airstrips and slip out of the U.S. again in half an hour. Even if Air Force radar planes such as the AWACS or E-2C surveillance craft spot the intruders, there is not much time to alert lawmen on the ground, get them to the strip and make arrests before the drug traffickers flee. The cost of keeping an AWACS in the air, moreover, is about $7,500 an hour...
...Sentries. The jet, which the U.S. deploys on the NATO front and in other key strategic areas, is a top- of-the-line technical marvel whose exact capabilities are classified. But Washington says it has no Sentries to spare, and has offered instead the much less sophisticated Grumman E-2C Hawkeye. Capable of tracking more than 600 targets at a range of 300 miles, the propeller-driven Hawkeye is slower and more vulnerable to attack than the Sentry...