The Fastest Thing on Earth Page 4

By SimHQ on April 24, 2006 in _air6, hide

At Natanz, the planning group had taken the strategic reconnaissance rulebook and tossed it out the window. “One cardinal rule in combat flying is: one pass only. No matter what, you do not go back over the target a second time. It’s been proven true, time and again. The first F-117 combat loss was due to the planners using the same track to the same target. It just makes it too easy for the defenders. And if anything, the prohibition applies doubly to unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. But we did it anyway, because the NSA guys wanted to see the Natanz facility from more than one angle. So instead of crossing the target and racking it into a hard right turn to go to Esfahan, I rolled into a 260-or-so degree turn to the left. This served another purpose: if they’d gotten enough of a look at me while I had the ASARS pod out to develop a tracking solution, drastic and unexpected maneuvering was the best way to render it useless.”

Well into the turn at Natanz, just before the upset.

“However, at Mach 4, the other side of the turn would be somewhere east of India. To make the circle smaller, I slowed the vehicle down to about 2.5 Mach as I crossed Natanz. We’d done the math enough times to know that at Mach 2.5 and 45 degrees of bank, we still had a decent margin above the stall. But something happened that we failed to account for.”

Even today there is no definitive explanation for what happened as the vehicle’s nose came around through West. Analyses of contemporary accounts rule out Iranian defensive action. Although it was not generally known at the time, Iran had no missiles or aircraft which could have effectively intercepted the vehicle. And 91,000 feet is well above the often turbulent jet stream altitudes. The real cause may never be known.

Killmore felt a hard bump, the indicated Mach dropped to 1.7, and the vehicle was suddenly descending at 6000 feet per minute in a deep stall. “There were no immediate indications of a mechanical problem. After wresting with the autopilot for about 10 seconds, I said to myself, well, maybe now would be a good time to re-evaluate that ‘no-hand-flying’ rule. I switched it off and to my surprise found it a fairly straightforward process to bring the vehicle back under control. I think I got the descent bottomed out at around 65,000 feet. Once I was out of the stall and climbing, I horsed it back over to 45 degrees of turn, lined up, and made my second Natanz pass.”

“At the lighter weight, it was an easy matter to get back up to 91,000 feet. The Esfahan and Bushehr passes went just as scripted. I even took the opportunity to hand-fly some of the turns, and marveled at the handling qualities that the F-136 would much later be famous for. At the time I wasn’t aware that the Iranians couldn’t have caused the upset. With that possible exception, I had no indication the opposition was even aware I’d been there.”

Looking down on Bushehr and the nuclear generating plant there.

But they were. The two minutes-long exposure of the ASARS/TRAC antenna had indeed been seen and tracked by air defense operators. And there was widespread consternation that such a target could appear, as if by magic, directly over the heart of Iran, and just as mysteriously disappear. The furor extended up through the chain of command to the senior commanders of the Iranian military, and to the highest levels of the government. But that is a history story for another time.

“It was all downhill from there — no pun intended. Across the Persian Gulf, over the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, and on down the width of the Indian Ocean to Diego Garcia.