国家地理:Wings Over The Gulf 波湾战机 - 4

Hundreds of coalition 1 airplanes were in the sky at any one time. Airborne warning and control system airplanes better known as AWACS kept air traffic straight. Largely thanks to AWACS there were no air-to-air friendly fire incidents during the Gulf 2 War. <... are coming in, with no symbology>. When AWACS spotted 3 enemy planes they sent F-15s in for the kill. All 120 US and 82 Saudi F-15s were responsible for 36 of the 41 confirmed air combat victories by coalition forces.

The closest thing I saw to an enemy aircraft was the first day, and that was in our package that F-15s got 2 Mig-29 kills. And I can remember vividly 4 too because we had one of the female AWACS controllers, her voice was very, not soothing 5 but, her voice was easy to pick out when you heard a lot radio chat going on, the female voice to our guys it's just something you hear. So we're, I was listening I can remember watching her talk what the Mig-29s were doing on my radar 6. I decided 7, looking out there in distance. And when those guys turned and committed out on these eagles, we were waitin' on them and just jumped on them and shot them both down.

Iraq's air force consisted of 750 fighters and bombers 8 and 200 support planes. They flew the best non-US planes money could buy including Mirage 9 F1s and Soviet 10 Migs from the 29 on down. But despite having weathered 10 years of combat during the war with Iran, Iraq's air force was defeated in days. Planes that weren't shot out of the sky were blasted on the ground by F-111s and other fighter bombers. The Iraqis moved their planes into heavily reinforced aircraft hangars and bombproof revetments. The allies countered by dropping hardened laser-guided bombs. Eventually they destroyed 375 of Iraq's 594 impregnable shelters. By the ninth day of the war, Iraq's airfields 11 were in ruins. Iraqi air force apparently 12 decided the only way to survive was to run. Flights of Iraqi fighters and bombers began streaking 13 towards Iran. Some of the planes were shot down by F-15s, some ran out of fuel. And about 150 made it to safety.

You know Iraq really had a good air force, er, was well equipped, Mig-29s, Mirages 14, was well trained. I have met Iraqi pilots. And they are good. These guys are not slouches. They pulled off some fantastic missions in the Iran-Iraq war, the strike against the Iranian nuclear power plants, the strike against Kharg Islands they carried out and but their problem, their weakness was they were very centrally controlled. And they were tied to their ground control. So when the Iraqis took off, many times they were blind because we took out the communications we took out the radar sites and then once we got them in the air, they were more easily engaged and shot down. But the other thing is because we made it look easy don't think it was easy. And those air-to-air engagements were a struggle and our guys risked it all but they pulled it off.

Perhaps the greatest mistake made by coalition planners before the Gulf War began was...