Viper Pilot: a Memoir of Air Combat
“I MUTTERED INTO THE SLIPPERY OXYGEN mask as sweat ran down my forehead, through my eyebrow, and into my left eye. Then I saw it.
In front of a rolling cloud of dirty white smoke, the surface-to-air missile came up off the ground. The SAM was twenty feet long, weighed a thousand pounds, and was accelerating to 2,300 miles per hour. Its speed exceeded a half-mile per second, and it was locked onto me.
There wasn’t much time.
“BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .” The radar-warning receiver, called RW...R, screamed into my helmet, telling me enemy radars had locked onto my jet. “BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .”
I hesitated a long moment to make sure the thing was actually tracking me. I shoved the nose of the F-16 down, my butt came off the seat, and I blinked rapidly as cockpit dust floated into my face. The long white plume behind the missile flattened out as it leveled off a thousand feet above the Baghdad rooftops.
Not me, I briefly thought. It’s onto something else.MoreLess
In front of a rolling cloud of dirty white smoke, the surface-to-air missile came up off the ground. The SAM was twenty feet long, weighed a thousand pounds, and was accelerating to 2,300 miles per hour. Its speed exceeded a half-mile per second, and it was locked onto me.
There wasn’t much time.
“BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .” The radar-warning receiver, called RW...R, screamed into my helmet, telling me enemy radars had locked onto my jet. “BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .”
I hesitated a long moment to make sure the thing was actually tracking me. I shoved the nose of the F-16 down, my butt came off the seat, and I blinked rapidly as cockpit dust floated into my face. The long white plume behind the missile flattened out as it leveled off a thousand feet above the Baghdad rooftops.
Not me, I briefly thought. It’s onto something else.MoreLess
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