mistake.”
At the base, everything was quiet. He wondered where everyone had gone, but then he noticed lights in the mission planning room. When he got there, the room was crowded. Everybody was there, from General Turki, the base commander, on down; and everybody was talking, trying to brief Turki on the details of the mission they’d been tasked to fly.
Sultan walked across the room to the general, saluted, and asked, “What is going on?”
His squadron commander answered, “We are going to war.”
Sultan then asked, “Is it real?”
The general slowly and sadly answered, “Yes, this is real.”
The aircrews were now assembled, and now it was time for the mission commanders — like Sultan — to lead them. The young lieutenant colonel was one of the oldest fliers in this young squadron in this young Air Force, and now it was time for him to take charge.
Sultan walked to the mission planning table, where the crews were poring over maps and intelligence plots of Iraqi air defense guns and surface-to-air missile sites. At that point, Lieutenant Mohammed Raja, Sultan’s weapons system officer, gave him some disturbing yet exciting news: “Colonel Sultan, sir, I think it’s our time!”
Sultan looked at him. “Are you sure?” he asked, and Mohammed nodded yes.
As they turned to leave, General Turki stopped them. All the pilots at Dhahran’s King Abdullah Aziz Air Base respected Turki. Not only was he a superb aviator, he listened when they needed to get anything off their chests, he chewed them out when they made a mistake, and he praised them when they shined. Because the aircrews loved their commander, they wanted to please him; and because he was one of them, he loved them in return.
Now they had to go on the RSAF mission of war.
Colonel Assura, the chief of logistics, who was standing beside Turki, took Sultan’s hand. “I wish you good luck,” he said.
Then Turki put an arm around him. “Just go for it,” he said. “Good luck. I wish I was with you.”
Moments later, Sultan had assembled the crews in the personal equipment shop. There they donned their survival vests and G suits. Once they were suited up and gathered close around him, he could sense their eagerness and fear. “I know you are used to having a briefing before we fly,” he told them. “Tonight this is war. We will fly off the plan. Don’t change anything. We have been planning this strike for six months. Just follow the plan and you’ll be all right.”
Though he was the oldest man there and was doing all he could to calm them, in his heart Sultan himself was deeply troubled. Most were his students. They hung on his words. But this night would see the birth of a combat air force. After tonight, they would be the old heads, the veterans — but first they had to make it through the night. This was a first time for everything — first time into combat, first time to carry and drop the huge JP-233 runway-busting munitions, and the first time someone would make a concentrated effort to kill them.
The bus ride to the aircraft shelters was deathly quiet. Each man was locked in his own thoughts. For his part, Sultan wondered why they were fighting this war. He thought about the Iraqis, brother Arabs, united in Islam, who had savagely violated Kuwait, also brothers. He thought about an old adage: If someone points a gun at you, and you think he’ll shoot, then you must kill him. Well, the Iraqis were pointing their gun at Saudi Arabia, so he and his WSO Mohammed had killing work to do.
At the aircraft, number 760, the crew chief was busy pulling off the dust covers. Sultan did not do a preflight, since the crew chief had already done that, and he appreciated Sultan’s trust and confidence. As he swung his right leg into the cockpit, a warrant officer on the ground crew asked if they could write a message on the bomb load slung under the fighter’s belly. With a grin, Sultan told them to write whatever they wanted to, then went through the time-honored procedures of strapping the jet to his body. He never learned what message he carried to Iraq, because he was too engrossed with engine start and system check to find out.
Because Sultan had skipped the preflight, he and Mohammed reached the runway first. Though they rolled into their takeoff position eight minutes behind schedule, they knew they could make up the time because slack had been built into the inflight refueling delay. The engine run-up was good, and the afterburners lit off, blasting the night’s silence and darkness with a roar and yellow-blue flames. As they rolled down the runway, however, Sultan realized he had never flown so heavily loaded and had not computed the takeoff data, check speed, nosewheel liftoff speed, takeoff speed, and distance.
“What’s the takeoff speed?” he asked Mohammed on the intercom.
“I don’t know,” Mohammed replied. In true WSO fashion, the backseater had no intention of doing the pilot’s job for him, even if it meant he might wind up in a ball of blazing twisted metal off the end of the runway.
“Okay,” Sultan told Mohammed, “I’ll take her to the end of the runway, and then if we can’t get off, I’ll eject and take you with me, okay?”
Mohammed did not answer, as the fighter was now going over 150 miles per hour.
Aware that the heavy bomb dispenser fastened under the aircraft required added speed for a safe takeoff, Sultan watched until the “3,000 Feet Remaining” sign flashed by, then tenderly pressed the front part of the control stick, and the nose of the Tornado started to fly off the runway. As the last of the runway flashed by, the jet was waddling into the darkness.
Sultan had never flown in worse weather — thunderstorms, rain, and lightning buffeted the jet as they searched the night sky for their RSAF KC-130 tanker aircraft; yet when they reached the air refueling contact point over northern Saudi Arabia, they were now only four minutes behind schedule… only, there was no tanker. They had to refuel or they could not get to the target and make it back home.
Breaking radio silence, he called the “Camel” aircraft, asking for his position (“Camel” was the call sign used by Saudi pilots for their refuelers).
His tanker answered that he was a hundred miles to the south, too far for Sultan to make a rendezvous, refuel, and make it to the target on time. In other words, Sultan and Mohammed were out of the show their very first try at combat.
Just then, another Camel aircraft called, its pilot a longtime flying buddy of Sultan’s. “Sultan, is that you? Do you need gas? I’m at the refueling track at the next block altitude, sixteen thousand feet.”
In their excitement, Sultan and his KC-130 pilot friend were talking in Arabic instead of the more correct English, until someone else came up on frequency to tell them to keep quiet (they were supposed to be comm out). Sultan then climbed up 4,000 feet and put his Tornado behind this new tanker. Now he had to get hooked up to the basket trailing a hundred feet behind the KC-130. During daylight and in good weather, this was a demanding task. At night and in thunderstorms with a heavily loaded jet, it proved close to impossible.
Sultan called his tanker friend: “If you really want to help me, climb another four thousand feet so we can get on top of this weather.”
“I can’t,” Camel replied. “There are aircraft above us.” (He had read the Air Tasking Order, good man.)
Always the fighter pilot, Sultan simply hooked up and said, “Then keep your eyes open and give me high flow.” (That meant pump the gas at maximum pressure, so the receiver aircraft would fill its tanks in the minimum time.)
As they bounced through the night sky, riding the tops of angry clouds, desperately hanging on to the hose of a pirated tanker, risking collision with other aircraft scheduled to use that same piece of sky, Sultan asked Mohammed to let him know exactly when they had enough fuel to get to the target and back. Though they were now eight minutes late and still short on gas, Mohammed advised Sultan that they could do that.
Sultan thanked the tanker and backed off, then rolled the fighter onto its back and split “S”s down into the inky blackness. Because of their high-speed descent, and because the tanker had dropped them off at the north end of the refueling track, they were able to save six minutes. Now they needed only to fly faster and make their appointed time over target.
Leveling off at 3,000 feet, Sultan checked out the terrain-following radar and its connections with the jet’s autopilot. Since everything was working, he selected 1,500 feet, soon followed by 1,000 feet; and then, swallowing hard, he flipped the switch that caused the fighter to drop to 200 feet above the ground.
This was another first — the first time this crew had operated this close to the ground using the terrain- following system.
