OCA Strike: A Falcon 4 Air to Ground Mission Report Page 5

By SimHQ on December 22, 2003 in _air, hide

As I reach the IP I roll into a hard left turn and start searching the horizon for the airfield.

	I slew the radar cursor so that it is resting squarely on the main runway, hit the designate button on my HOTAS and then order my wingmen to “ATTACK MY TARGET”. The acknowledge my instruction and now it’s every man for himself.
	The skies around me start buzzing with tracers. They whiz past the cockpit in yellow blurs and the occasional louder flak burst rumbles through my helmet. One of my wingmen calls out a SAM launch and I start dumping chaff and flares and mildly rock my wings, not wanting to be a steady target, but also not wanting to screw up my run-in on the target from the IP.Here a tracer just slides by the front of my aircraft.
	Since I’ve already designated and handed off the target to my wingmen I switch out of CCRP mode and into CCIP by jabbing a button on my HOTAS twice. The pipper comes up in my HUD and a few seconds later I catch sight of the runway just as I’m about to overshoot it and I make a hard left turn to realign myself.
	Snapping wings level I wait for the threshold to pass below my HUD then I press and hold the pickle button sending my bombs off at the pre-set interval. As each weapon leaves the rack it falls for a fraction of a second before the small stabilizing chute deploys angling it down toward the runway before a rocket drives it down into the concrete.
	As I fly down the length of the runway my finger stays mashed on the pickle button and it feels like it takes hours for the last weapon to drop free. All the while I can see and hear AAA exploding around me. Just as the last Durandal drops from the rack I snap into a steep right bank and pull a hard 90 degree escape turn (the wrong way!)
	In my excitement I forgot that the egress waypoint was straight ahead then a LEFT turn! I’m sure my wingmen will get a chuckle out of that later in the debrief. I continue around to the right as the element (wingmen #3 & #4) cross the field and drop all of their bombs on the point I had earlier designated.