Word: aircrafting
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...push of a button. But this time it would kill them. Before lifting off from southern Turkey, bound for northern Iraq on April 14 of last year, the pilots of two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters activated the "friend-or-foe" system designed to identify them to other U.S. aircraft. They set it to frequency 42. That was the setting prescribed in the top-secret "air-tasking order" they received from the Air Force each day they ventured into the part of Iraq policed by U.S. aircraft...
Escorting the Stallions were two Marine AH-1W SuperCobra helicopter gunships, bristling with missiles, cannon and machine guns, and a pair of single-pilot Marine AV-8B Harrier jump jets. These six aircraft were backed up by identical sets of replacement helicopters and jump jets-none was needed-as well as two Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes, two Marine F/A-18D Hornets to provide air cover, and a pair of tank-killing Air Force A-10 Warthogs. The entire aerial armada of roughly 40 planes was choreographed from above by a nato awacs radar plane. "We had the whole...
...Italian bases. "That was probably good," Berndt later said. "It took the edge off us, and it got everybody focused and thinking perhaps a little bit straighter." Then came the "push"-authorization from the awacs to enter Balkan airspace-and the mission was under way. Within minutes the aircraft had reached Bosnian Serb territory. At one point, Admiral William A. Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Lake and said, "Our feet are dry," meaning they were flying over land. The sun was winking through the rugged, fog-draped Balkan terrain as the CH-53s spent...
...three seconds when O'Grady tumbled across its threshold. He relinquished his 9-mm Beretta pistol to the crew and pulled on Berndt's Gore-Tex parka and a crash helmet. "I'll never forget the look on his face as he was running toward our aircraft," said Berndt. "He had this pistol in his right hand -- looking like he had been in the field trying to survive for six days, and knowing we were there to pull him out." Nobody, Berndt added somewhat incredulously, "even got off our helicopter...
Your article on U.S. air force safety and charges of cover-ups in crash probes, "Way,Way Off in the Wild Blue Yonder" [THE MILITARY, May 29], was right on. In 1986, when I was stationed at Washington State's Fairchild Air Force Base, a KC-135A aircraft crashed. As in the case of the June 1994 crash you described, this plane was practicing for an air show. The casualties might have been far greater than the six who were killed: the plane crashed into a field surrounded on three sides by maintenance buildings, near liquid oxygen-service areas...