Amnectrus
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Joined: 10/22/2015
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Toss bombing was also a fairly normal delivery method for both dumb bombs and LGBs by the F-15E. On the Basra raid on the second night of Desert Storm, F-15Es hit a POL plant using toss bombing with Mk 82s, as described in Strike Eagle by William Smallwood, page 96:
quote:
Scott [pilot]: "Time has slowed down now and I just want the airplane to give me the pull-up cue for the loft. It seemed like it was forever; it wasn't passing fast enough. Finally I get the pull cue, I start the pull and the hammer [pickle button] is down and Larry goes, 'Scotty, when you get a chance break left'--which isn't the normal call you make. Normally a break call means you are about to die, you had better move the airplane."
Bowers [backseater]: "While he is in the loft, I'm looking outside at my right one-thirtyish and I,ve got a steady stream of bullets coming toward us. It was obvious they could see us and that it was aimed fire. This is a steady stream that is catching up with us but I know Scotty is paying attention to his job, just sitting there waiting."
Scott: "I am glued to the release key."
Bowers: "To get accurate weapons he has to track right up the line: I know that is what he is doing. And I'm like, oh, my God, they are coming on us."
Scott: "I've got the airplane in a climb at 3 Gs and at about 35 or 40 degrees and the weapons finally come off. I pull hard and am in over-G, Bitching Betty is yelling at me, and Larry is saying 'Watch the jet!' and I'm saying, 'Watch the guns, watch the guns!' and I'm pulling down and jinking--kind of S-turning our way down and then I get too far south and have to come back around. The jet was 6,000 pounds [12 Mk 82s] lighter now and it was easier to maneuver it."
This was starting from extremely low altitude. The bombing was done blind, using the SAR radar mode to generate a target map, designating the target on the map, and then flying the cues given in the HUD. If anyone played the old Strike Eagle III or Jane's Strike Eagle games, that bombing mode is fully implemented. Several other references to toss bombing are made in the book, before everyone was moved to medium altitude to keep them out of the guns. And incidentally, this is one of the best books on military flying I've ever read, highly recommended.
And in Sierra Hotel: Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam by C. R. Anderegg (PDF), starting on page 63 he describes the "dive-toss" tactic that was developed starting around 1970. With the F-4, it started as an alternative to their regular dive-bombing runs, where they would lock the radar onto the ground to get the slant range, and then recover from their dive early while holding the pickle button and the computer would drop at the correct range and angle. (That is, the plane was still diving when the bombs came off, but they came off at an earlier point and with a higher trajectory than they would normally be dropped in a manual dive-bombing run.) It had mixed reliability, but was in common use in Vietnam. Then in 1974, one of the student pilots at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School discovered that the automatic system could deliver from much longer ranges than anyone thought:
quote:
[Capt. John] Jumper, an electrical engineering graduate of Virginia Military Institute, planned to fly at low altitude to the target, pop up to a few thousand feet, and then point at the target from five miles away. Once the WSO locked onto the ground return, Jumper would hold down the pickle button, pull his nose up through an extended line toward the target, and literally toss the bombs at the target from three or four miles away, letting the WRCS computer decide the proper release moment.
He compensated for the decreased accuracy by using the new "556-mod" F-4s with a bomb salvo mode (instead of ripple, the only mode available on older jets). A test is described where he and 3 other pilots released from 3000 ft at almost 5 miles range and destroyed their target. The long range tactic never saw combat use, according to the book, but it seems that at least by the time the F-15E came around, it was fully integrated in the avionics and in regular use.
Also starting on page 131, he describes the early days of toss bombing using LGBs and the Pave Spike pod (the day-only predecessor to the infrared Pave Tack pod). The author describes some tests done at Nellis that culminated in a successful demonstration before some Air Force bigwigs in 1978. With that tactic, the planes would come in very low, flying directly at the target. The WSO would be looking at the Pave Spike display and started lasing the target as soon as he saw it. At about 2 miles, the pilot would pull up only slightly (10 degrees) and loft the bomb, then dive back down and turn sharply away while the WSO kept lasing until the bomb hit. This allowed reliable LGB delivery from under the low cloud ceilings that are very common in Europe.
I have several thoughts about how all this applies to the current game engine and weapons modeling, which I should probably post in the feature-suggestions thread...
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