国家地理:Wings Over The Gulf 波湾战机 - 3

(There's also a piece of safety wire that, em, showed up on the X-ray. So we have to...)
In fact just the opposite proved true, the number of air planes ready to fly at any given time actually increased during the war. F-15s went from an 85 percent peacetime mission capable rate to a wartime average of 94 percent. A hard work of fly crews made it possible for pilots to fly constant defensive 1 counter-air patrols along the boarder of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the goal was to test Iraq's air defenses and readiness of Iraqi pilots.

Defensive counter-air is basically flying combat air patrols, orbits, south of the border so that on one leg, the hot leg, you're looking into Iraq to see if they've got anybody taking off to come south to do an invasion and we flew those missions for the 5-month waiting about four and half to six hours at a pop because anytime they fly we'd, we'd lock them up, they knew we were up there and they were getting that radar 2 spike 3 that told them that F-15s were looking at them and if they wanted to try anything they were welcome to come south.

Jan 17th, 1991, in the early hours of the morning, 668 aircraft and their pilots geared up for the first air attack on Iraq and occupied Kuwait.
The first night was probably the most impressive because even though they had practiced drills in the Baghdad area where they would turn all the lights out, if they would, if they did get attacked, they didn't when they got attacked, and it was like flying in the Philadelphia or some place totally lit up, and you could see the Tigris and Euphrates as they went on to approach Baghdad.

No doubt the first night was fairly impressive, and what was really unique about that for me was as we let down into a lowland one, we flew first 250 miles or so in the Iraq at a low altitude and so absolutely nothing. It was just like a training mission at Luke or Seymour Johnson or anywhere else until our first bomb hit the ground and there was no doubt at that point that they didn't know where we were, but they knew we were coming, and you cant 4' prepare somebody for being shot at. I thought I'd been prepared for that, but it was truly an eye-opening experience.

The key element of our overall strategy was to knock down his interceptors before they could interfere 6 with our operations, the F-15Cs performed beautifully in their role and while the magnitude in the first three days of the war when they controlled the area was really contested by both sides. The Iraqis would take off, they put their gear up and they blew up, that’s because the F-15 with this look-down and shoot-down capability 7 was able to target them immediately after takeoff. I think that was fundamental to our success in the whole campaign.

The F-15's mission is to intercept 5 enemy aircraft and protect friendly aircraft in the Gulf 8 war that meant guarding packages of planes including F-16s which flew bombing raids, F-4G Wild Weasels which knocked out anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. F-111 long-range fighter bombers 9 which flew over 4000 sorties in the Gulf, British-built Tornado 10 fighter bombers and B-52s, a long-serving heavy bombers that shelled Iraq's Republican Guard around the clock every day of the war.