Word: mcpeak
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...darkness. At about $20,000 a pop, it's far cheaper than the $1 million cruise missile that has been the precision-guided weapon of choice for the past decade. "Once you get the air defenses suppressed, you can just fly over and puke out JDAMS," says Merrill McPeak, the retired general who ran the Air Force during the Gulf War. "You can't beat the economics...
Even military experts disagree on how dangerous these missions will be. "Plinking his tanks will be a piece of cake," predicts Merrill ("Tony") McPeak, the retired general who ran the Air Force during the Gulf War. "Plinking," perfected during the Gulf War, used the contrast between sun-warmed tanks and cooler desert sand to help pilots target the tanks with infrared equipment. How well that will work in the forested Balkans remains to be seen. But retired Navy Admiral Leighton Smith--who ordered NATO's first-ever bombing raid, against Bosnian Serb targets in 1994--thinks the tactic...
...safety problems with the T-3. Our son, Captain Dan Fischer, mentioned in the report, was the first instructor to die in a T-3 crash. It is clear to us that the T-3 is a flawed "dream" plane, promoted by an arrogant Air Force general, Merrill McPeak. He expected inexperienced students to be able to do spins and rolls without parachutes. These young people were the victims of a program hurriedly begun before the T-3 was adequately adapted for the thin Colorado air, before instructors were sufficiently trained, before safety and mechanical problems were solved. Losing...
...teach cadets the building blocks of military flying, including a dizzying array of loops, rolls and spins. With the T-3, the Air Force could offer what it called an "enhanced flight-screening program," which could pinpoint "those cadets who have the basic aptitude to become Air Force pilots." McPeak encouraged his service to buy a trainer that could spin, the wing tips tracing a circle after the plane has lost, at least temporarily, its ability to remain aloft. It is a maneuver so dangerous that Air Force fighter pilots are under orders to eject if one occurs. But McPeak...
Defenders of the plane argue that's exactly what T-3 training is meant to accomplish. "We don't want to kill people at the Air Force Academy, obviously," McPeak says. "But we drove [Commerce Secretary] Ron Brown and a planeload of VIPs into the hills of Yugoslavia because of pilot error." "We don't want to kill a planeload of people because we haven't properly identified the people who can do this job." Other Air Force officers point out that the plane has flown without an accident at an Air Force base at Hondo, Texas, where the instructors...