history

Hoehn and Toomey learned that their intended location was maybe where Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, was staying

We remember the U.S. Air Force F-117 airstrikes over Baghdad on March 19, 2003, which signaled the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom with the article Bombs over Baghdad, written by Airman 1st Class Emily A. Kenney, 49th Wing Public Affairs.

The morning of Wednesday was gloomy. The black clouds that covered the sky shook with thunder, and rain poured down. Maj. Mark Hoehn, who was stationed with the 49th Fighter Wing at Holloman, observed the sunrise through the clouds, the grays and blues transforming into reds and oranges. Hoehn thought, “Wow, this would be a beautiful sight if I wasn’t about to blow something up.”

He didn’t know who or what his intended target was. Only six hours ago, from Al Udeid Air Base, then Maj. Clint Hinote gave the order “Do whatever it takes to get two aircraft ready for combat tonight.”

Operation Iraqi Freedom started at 5:30 a.m. on March 19, 2003, when the first airstrikes were fired in Baghdad.

“F-117s were used to make the opening attacks on Baghdad on Jan. 17, 1991, the opening salvos on Desert Storm,” said James Burrett, 49th Wing historian. “Just 12 years later, in 2003, F-117s were used again in the first airstrikes over the same city in Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Hoehn claimed to have foreseen this day. He had only shaken hands with President George W. Bush four months earlier when he asked, “You ready?”

Maintainers started preparing two Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters for the mission not long after the order was granted. Hoehn claimed that the crew chiefs and maintainers meticulously checked each plane, making sure it was prepared, using modern GPS weapon technology.

As the deadline approached, then Lt. Col. David Toomey looked at Hoehn and asked, “Fuji (Hoehn’s call sign), are you ready to go?”

“You bet,” Hoehn said.

At approximately 3 a.m. the aircraft were prepared to fight. After a quick prayer, Hoehn and Toomey stepped and boarded their jets.

“We were briefed that we would taxi and take off ‘comms out’, not talking to anybody,” Hoehn explained. “We had folks in the tower that flashed a light gun at us, signaling when we were able to taxi and take off. We went completely stealth, with our antennas in, and anything that would omit a signal turned off.”

They continued up the Persian Gulf, stumbling into a thunderstorm while trying to maintain visual flying.

“I remember looking at the fuel gauge as we were approaching the Iraq and Saudi Arabia border, where the tankers were supposed to meet us, and I was really getting nervous,” Hoehn said. “At that point, I had just enough gas to get back to Al Jaber (Air Base in Kuwait). If I was going to make it to Iraq, I needed fuel and I needed it soon.”

It didn’t take him very long to wait. A KC-135 Stratotanker arrived shortly after to deliver the critical fuel. Toomey first refueled his aircraft before directing it directly north toward Iraq. Hoehn then connected to the tanker and started refueling.

“Sir, it sounds like you’ve got an interesting mission,” said the in-flight refueling specialist. “Can you tell us anything about it?”

“Unfortunately I don’t know much more than you,” Hoehn said. “All I know is to put bombs on coordinates at a certain time.”

Hoehn ordered the refueling tanker pilot to drag him north into Iraq to save time while he was being refueled as the time-over-target (TOT) drew near. He dispersed from the tanker and moved in the direction of his destination once his tank was full.

Hoehn immediately went back into mission mode. He claimed to have observed the Tigris river weaving through Baghdad through the cloud cover.

“I wasn’t able to see my target because of the overcast, but I was able to see landmarks enough to know that my cursor was, if not directly on, within a few meters of the spot I was targeting.”

Even though the target was still hidden, Hoehn released his weapons and used the GPS weapons system to hit the target at precisely 5:30 in the morning. Hoehn and Toomey swiftly turned their aircraft and left Baghdad as soon as the bombs dropped.

“I reached over and pushed the throttle even further forward to get as much speed as possible, and get out of there,” Hoehn said. “I didn’t really start feeling comfortable until at least 30-40 minutes outside of Baghdad. Then I thought, what’s next? I hadn’t really thought it through this far in the mission, and once again, I was running low on fuel.”

Hoehn turned on his antennas and radioed the Airborne Warning and Control System at that point (AWACS). He informed AWACS of his general location and received instructions on where to locate a tanker for refueling.

He flew to the tanker track area in the south after spotting a tanker waiting. When he hooked up, he recognized the tanker as the one that had previously refueled him.

The same in-flight refueling specialist asked, “So how did everything go?”

“Well, I’m about 4,000 pounds lighter,” Hoehn said. “I can’t wait to go back and find out exactly what we hit, but you guys were a big part of it.”

In order to readily communicate with the Air Traffic Controllers at Al Udeid, Hoehn flew the same path on his return trip.

“When I landed and pulled back into the hangar, there were probably 100 people there,” Hoehn said. “Nobody slept at all. All the maintainers and the rest of the squadron were there. As the doors opened, everyone tried to look and see if the bombs were gone, and when they saw that they were, everyone cheered.”

Hoehn and Toomey learned their destination was where Saddam Hussein would be living during the mission debrief. Even though they missed Hussein that evening, Hoehn thinks that the attack made Hussein frightened and act sporadically, making him vulnerable to capture later.

Photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron D. Allmon II, Airman 1st Class Emily A. Kenney, and Senior Airman Brian Ferguson / U.S. Air Force

“I came out of the AOR, contacted the appropriate agency, and said, ‘Copy. You’re going to support ‘Ram 01′.’ That’s all I got. Who’s ‘Ram 01!?’,” Capt Paul Carlton 55th FS F-16 pilot

For more than ten years, the F-16, also known as Viper by her pilots, has been the most productive fighter in American and Coalition operations in the Middle East. It has been the workhorse of U.N.-sanctioned operations in the area since the 1991 Gulf War, performing in “Wild Weasel,” “ground attack,” and “air superiority” roles.

Over a decade-long period, Operations Southern Watch and Northern Watch necessitated daily and ongoing combat patrols over Iraqi territory; this work was made easier by the abundance of F-16s available in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) service, as well as the jet’s historical capacity for a variety of functions and applications.

The following narrative, which is from the book F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom by Steve Davies and Doug Dildy, tells what happened when the U.S. in an effort to locate, identify and destroy Iraq’s extensive air defense system, President George W. Bush sent his forces into Iraq in March 2003. The F-16CJ was the second aircraft to enter enemy airspace during this operation.

“On 19/20 March we were flying on-call SEAD and had HARMs on board the airplane. I was a night guy, flying only at night, and it was early in the morning. I had one more vul to cover before I went home. We were covering six-hour vul times (vulnerability periods), where we’d come away to get gas when we needed it and then go back in again. I came out of the AOR (Area of Responsibility), contacted the appropriate agency, and said, ‘Copy. You’re going to support ‘Ram 01′.’ That’s all I got. Who’s ‘Ram 01!?’ “

A skilled F-16 pilot with more than 1500 hours of Block 30/50 flight time under his belt, Capt. Paul Carlton. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been transferred from Shaw Air Force Base’s 55th Fighter Squadron (FS) to the 77th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron (EFS) to add Night Vision Goggles (NVG) experience. At the time he received this cryptic message, he was commanding a two-ship of F-16CJs on the last position of their assigned vulnerability time.

“I had no idea what was going on. I asked, ‘Can you tell me who ‘Ram 01′ is, what their time-over-target (TOT) is, and where they’re going?’ I got nothing back. Silence. The RoE was that we couldn’t shoot or drop anything unless we were given permission to do so. That morning we were briefed that we were not to shoot any weapons unless were we told we could. So, I sent ‘Two’ (Carlton’s wingman) off to get permission to fire our weapons if needed, and at the same time, I started looking for ‘Ram 01’ on the radio. I had no idea what he was or what was going on.”

Carlton was completely unaware of the upcoming assignment to support this mysterious mission, but he assumed that ‘Ram 01’ was presumably a conventional asset, such as a Block 40 Viper or similar. He had no idea that the aircraft posing as “Ram 01” was actually an F-117 on a time-sensitive mission to strike a bunker where Saddam Hussein was allegedly hiding.

“‘Ram 01’ came up on the radio and told me roughly where he was and the coordinates of where he was going. He also gave me the coordinates of his IP (Initial Point) and his target, which I plugged into my jet to figure out where he was going and what his target was. His target plot fell into the little map of Baghdad. That clued me into what he was about to do, and I knew that things were about to get much more exciting.

“Having learned the TOT and seen where he was going, I knew all I needed to know. I knew what threats he was up against and now I was thinking about how best I could support him. I had just four HARMs to work with (two per F-16), which is not a whole lot to cover the entirety of Baghdad. Having devised a basic strategy, I flew back into the AOR but chose not to go up near his target, even though we were now allowed to cross the No-Fly Zone. The F-16 is a radar-significant target, and I didn’t want to simulate the air defenses before they needed to be. I never heard anything else from ‘Ram 01’, which thinking about it now makes sense to me as the pilot always ‘cleans up’ when they go to war (the F-117 retracts its communication antennas when entering hostile territory).”

Carlton kept his composure but was still unsure of who he was rooting for. For around an hour, he observed the SuperMEZ (super missile engagement zone), “then I hit Bingo fuel. I had not seen anything happen to ‘Ram 01’, so I told the controlling agency, ‘I’m bingo and have to go home’. I got handed off to different agencies and headed back to the tanker down south to get gas for the trip home.

“We were on the tanker when ‘Ram 01’ came over the radio and said, ”Ram 01”, ‘tanker 51′, behind you and checking in for gas’. As I came off the tanker with my wingman, I looked behind me and there was this ‘Stinkbug’ taxiing up. That was the first clue that I had that we’d just helped started the war.”

Although “Ram 01” was successful in hitting the bunker, Saddam Hussein would later show up on television still alive. The mission was supported by a large number of Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) strikes, which caused Coalition pilots to watch in silence from their cockpits as the cruise missiles moved along the TLAM corridors to their targets while their heat signatures were visible on NVGs.

The last-minute SEAD escort for “Ram 01” was around 48 hours before the war’s scheduled start date, according to the original briefing. Although “Shock and Awe” may have been a little less frightening and not nearly as awe-inspiring as many had expected it would be, Capt Carlton was more than satisfied with his performance on March 19, 2003. The subsequent “Armageddon” that the public had been taught to expect never quite materialized. He had just executed a textbook demonstration of the skill for which he had spent nine years receiving training in the Air Force.

“Most of our peacetime training centers on us learning rules-of-thumb and doing the calculations in flight so that when this kind of tasking comes during wartime, we don’t need to do detailed planning there in the jet in order to get the mission done.”

Then, Operation Iraqi Freedom was in progress.

Photo by Senior Airman Kevin Tanenbaum and Tech. Sgt. Gregory Brook / U.S. Air Force

“There was AAA everywhere, and I could see these big white puffs and red ropes getting closer and closer. They were gaining on me every second, and were now only 25-30 ft off my wing…” Capt James R Mastny, former F-117 Pilot

The USAF’s Have Blue program, which began in the middle of the 1970s, produced the F-1 17, which was created by Lockheed’s illustrious Advanced Development Company. The first of 59 production aircraft, equipped with Stealth technology that rendered the jet almost invisible to radar, was handed over to the USAF in August 1982.

Midway through 1990, the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing (TFW) made a major deployment to Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield in reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. This was the last Nighthawk to be delivered to the USAF. Later, in January 1991, F-117s took control of Operation Desert Storm’s initial strikes.

By the conclusion of the first day of Desert Storm, it was clear that the F-117s were invisible to Iraqi radar. However, the locations that had survived the initial assault that signaled the beginning of the aerial campaign were making every effort to assist in the downing of a Nighthawk. Since no other returns were obtained, radar operators suspected that USAF tankers in orbit over the Saudi border were refueling the F-117s.

The Iraqis believed the “invisible” bombers had entered their airspace when the tankers turned away. According to Capt. James R. Mastny (Bandit No 268) in Warren Thompson’s book F-117 Stealth Fighter Units of Operation Desert Storm, calculated the time between that occurrence and the first bombs landing on Baghdad to determine when they should begin firing in the hopes of striking something.

`During the first couple of days of the war, when we were sending wave after wave of Nighthawks over downtown Baghdad, the Iraqis still had enough early warning radars in operation to see the tankers because we were refueling only 45 miles south of the border. Once we had topped off our tanks, we had a strict time over target, which usually meant we would go straight there from the tanker. They could detect us while we were on the tanker, but when we broke and completely stealthed up, we were invisible.’

`During the first 48 hours of the war the Iraqi radar controllers must have figured out our target times, for all of a sudden, while we were lining our aim points up on the third night, all hell broke loose. They began firing everything they had straight up in the air. On earlier missions the firing didn’t start until the first bombs exploded, so we knew they couldn’t detect us.’

The first time this occurred, the pilots alerted their intelligence personnel, and a new strategy—targeting Iraqi assets outside of Baghdad—was developed. The sky lit up exactly when the Iraqis thought the F-117s were flying over the city, although there were no Nighthawks nearby. The pilots of the 37th TFW(P) never again flew to Baghdad in a straight line after demonstrating that the Iraqis were exploiting flight timings to target the stealth fighters. This resulted in a large difference in their arrival times at their targets, which appropriately perplexed the Iraqi defenders. While some waves focused on places outside the capital, others attacked targets inside the city.

The Nighthawks needed to maintain an unpredictable behavior in order to escape the nightly AAA firestorm above Baghdad. The sheer number of tracers being fired blindly into the night sky caused the stealth pilots to have multiple close calls even after altering their tactics. Capt. Mastny was one of those who believed that during an early mission over Baghdad, his number had come up.

`There was no way to describe the intensity of the fire coming up from the ground. They had an endless supply of ammunition. One night I was more scared than any of the others. I thought this was when I was going to be hit and have to bail out. Moments earlier, I had put my bombs on the targets, and I was now leaving the city with my throttle wide open.’

`By leaning forward in the seat, you could get a pretty good view to the rear. As I was looking back over the sweep of my left wing, I saw the sky light up soon after my bombs had hit the target. There was AAA everywhere, and I could see these big white puffs and red ropes getting closer and closer. They were gaining on me every second and were now only 25-30 ft off my wing. I believe the gunners were tracking me by the sound of my engines — they were doing a very good job of it, but I doubt that they had radar-guided guns. They either caught a glimpse of my aircraft or were shooting at the sound. Just about the time figured I was going to take one, I evidently went out of range, and it aII drifted behind me. If they’d had bigger guns, I think they’d have ailed me.’

‘My biggest fear was not dying but being captured. The enemy would have given anything to get their hands on an F-117 pilot. The flak I saw on that mission was just about every color you could imagine — red, yellow, green, and white.’

F-117 Stealth Fighter Units of Operation Desert Storm is published by Osprey Publishing and is available to order here.

Photo by U.S. Air Force