On Oct 6, 1973 the armies of Egypt
and Syria opened an offensive against Israel on two fronts,
launching a coordinated series of air, armored and artillery
attacks across the Suez Canal into the Sinai and on the
Golan Heights. The preemptive strike came as a result of
the failure to resolve territorial disputes arising from
the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967.
These disputes involved the return
of the Sinai to Egypt and return of the Golan Heights to
Syria. UN Resolution 242 and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s
peace initiative failed to resolve the issue peacefully. Sadat
wanted to sign an agreement with Israel, provided the Israelis
returned all the occupied territories, but Israel refused
to withdraw to the pre-1967 armistice lines. Since
no diplomatic progress was being made toward peace, Sadat
was convinced that to change things and gain legitimacy
at home, he must initiate a war with limited objectives.
Along the Suez canal, eighty thousand well equipped
and trained members of the Egyptian army crossed the
Suez canal into the Sinai on rapidly constructed pontoon
bridges, and attacked fewer than five hundred Israeli
defenders. Simultaneously, in the Golan Heights, approximately
180 Israeli tanks faced an onslaught of nearly 1400
Syrian tanks. With a surprise attack on two fronts,
Israeli military losses were significant and assistance
was requested from the United States.
At the time, National
reconnaissance satellites did not have the capability
that was needed to sufficiently assess the situation.
The 9th Strategic Reconnaissance wing at Beale AFB
Ca, under the command of Col Pat Halloran was alerted
to prepare to fly SR-71 missions from Beale AFB over
the area of conflict and to recover at a contingency
base, RAF Mildenhall in England, prepared to fly follow
on missions. The proposed mission was within
the design capability of the aircraft, although such
a long, multiple refueling and logistically difficult
mission of this type had never before been accomplished
in an operational environment.
Within the first few days of the conflict, the supporting
Arab nations initiated an oil embargo, making oil a
weapon of war and contributing to a decision by the
British government to deny approval to use Mildenhall
as a recovery base. Plan B was rapidly drawn up to
fly the SR-71 out of Griffiss AFB New York, through
the area of conflict, and recover back at Griffiss.
These never before accomplished twelve thousand- mile
missions would require five air-to-air refuelings,
the deployment of sixteen KC-135Q supporting tankers
with special JP-7 fuel to Spain, and a specialized
maintenance, intelligence and operational support planning
staff to Griffiss. The 9SRW was well prepared, and
in utmost secrecy, the necessary forces were mobilized
and deployed. The first mission was successfully flown
on October 13th
I was a Capt and fairly
young pilot in the squadron at the time, with only
one overseas operational tour and about 120 hours of
SR-71 time under my belt. On Oct 20th I was assigned
to fly a backup SR-71 from Beale to Griffiss and to
stay at Griffiss in an alert posture, prepared to fly
follow-on missions. We flew successful missions on
October 25th and November 2nd, where I served as backup
pilot. My turn as primary came up on Nov 11th. The
excitement level was high, as I certainly wanted to
be part of the Air Force and the wing’s success
in completing the mission as tasked.
Takeoff was at 2am on a brisk
and clear autumn night with about 15 inches of snow
already on the ground. It was peacefully calm – until
I lit both of the two thirty-four thousand pound thrust
afterburners. The first 450 miles had to be flown subsonic
at .9 Mach, since we had to clear the commercial aircraft
flight tracks, both inbound and outbound, between Boston,
New York and various European cities, before we could
safely conduct air refueling operations. Once
clear, radio-silent electronic rendezvous with three
tankers flying in stacked echelon formation, 250 miles
out over the North Atlantic, was accomplished successfully,
as was the planned seventy- thousand pound (10,600
gallon) fuel offload.
You don’t know the true meaning of dark until
you’ve refueled on a moonless night at 3 am hundreds
of miles out over a black ocean. We likened it to refueling
in an inkwell. After completing a few post-refueling
checks, I lit the afterburners and started my acceleration
to a leisurely Mach 3 cruise across the Atlantic. The
airplane performed flawlessly, thanks to the extra-special
effort put forth by the maintenance guys. About
two thousand miles across the Atlantic, on an easterly
heading, I watched with excitement as the sun
peeked over the horizon and came up right in
my face, in about a minute and a half---a nice
vantage point for viewing this daily event.
The second
refueling was conducted in daylight, a couple hundred
miles north of the Azores. This was another seventy-thousand-pound
offload, thirty five thousand pounds from each of two
tankers, while the airborne spare tanker was not needed.
I started my second acceleration and headed for the
Strait of Gibraltar. Cruising through the center
of the narrow straight at eighty thousand feet with
clear weather on both sides provided quite a spectacular
view.
As we proceeded
down the Mediterranean toward the Middle East, the
weather grew gradually worse as forecast. The third
refueling south of Crete, although in poor weather,
went as planned. After packing in a full load of eighty-thousand
pounds of JP-7 fuel, I lit the afterburners and started
the acceleration toward the target area in the Sinai.
At .98 Mach and 31,000 feet, just prior to going supersonic,
maximum fuel flow in full afterburner, a red engine oil-quantity-low
light illuminated steady on my emergency warning annunciator
panel. I stared at it in almost disbelief, while scanning
engine instruments. oil pressure, rpm, exhaust gas temperature
and nozzle position for other indications of trouble. Although
there were no immediately available confirming indications
of problems, I couldn’t just ignore the situation
and continue on into the target area with the possibility
of an engine failure at supersonic speed over the Sinai.
We had no viable emergency airfields, and I certainly did
not want to be a no-notice, no-flight plan, single engine
emergency arrival at David Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv,
especially since the Israeli government had not been informed
in advance of the mission, and they were in a battle for
their own survival. I took the engines out of afterburner
to further access the situation and think about the best
course of action.
To my pleasant surprise,
a few seconds after coming out of afterburner, the red
emergency warning light went out. I was by now fairly well
convinced that it was a false momentary indication, but
analyzing the situation had cost me 2500 lbs of critically
needed fuel. My tankers, having completed their mission,
were now eighty miles behind me and heading further away. Although
I knew they had extra fuel, getting rejoined to top off
would present a whole new set of problems. I decided
to re-light the afterburners and press on with the acceleration
to supersonic flight. Except for a five-second steady flash
at about Mach 1.4 during the climb, I never saw the warning
light illuminated again.
My preplanned flight
track over the target area went down the Suez canal
past Cairo before making a left turn at Mach 3.15 to the
north across the battle lines in the Sinai. I continued
on a northerly course across the Dead Sea and over the
Golan Heights with the panoramic and pointing cameras providing
imagery of hundreds of targets on both sides of the aircraft.
. Approaching the border of Lebanon, I made a big
sweeping right turn out over Syria and then back toward
the Sinai on a parallel flight path for maximum coverage.
The airplane was running well, and I pushed it up a bit
to Mach 3.2 before exciting the area near Port Said.
Once
out over the Mediterranean, I started a descent to twenty-five
thousand feet for my fourth refueling. As fate would
have it, not only was I low on fuel because of my previous
emergency oil low warning problem, but also a thunderstorm
had moved in over the scheduled air refueling contact point. My
reconnaissance system officer (RSO), using electronic azimuth
and distance measuring equipment, directed me within less
than a mile behind my tanker, but because the visibility
was so poor in solid weather I couldn’t see the tanker. We
continued about 20 miles down track in lousy weather with
only one-half mile distance and one thousand feet vertical
separation before a small break in the clouds permitted
a visual hookup with the tanker. When we made contact and
started transferring fuel, I had less than fifteen minutes
of fuel remaining and was seventy five miles from the closest
straight-in emergency landing runway on the island of Crete.
Needless to say, I was very thankful to my tanker buddies,
RSO and good equipment for that rendezvous. It gives special
meaning to finding a “gas station” when you
really need
one. Once full of fuel, we accelerated back to Mach
3, headed west toward the straits,
completed a fifth seventy-thousand pound air refueling
near the Azores and finally enjoyed a relaxing straight
line Mach 3 course across the Atlantic to a planned and
uneventful landing at Seymour Johnson AFB North Carolina.
We were met by 9SRW download crews who had the intelligence
collection equipment downloaded within twenty minutes and
on a dedicated AF courier flight to Washington D.C. for
delivery to the National Photographic Interpretation Center.
The flight covered 12,181 miles in 10 hours 49 minutes,
and included six hours, forty-one minutes of supersonic
flight. After landing, while taxing in, I remember
wondering what Charles Lindbergh, who was still living
at the time, would have thought about the advancement of
aviation technology in the 46 years since his flight from
New York to Paris.
The 9SRW was tasked
to fly nine missions from the United States to the Mid
East and back in the Yom Kippur War of 1973-1974
and completed all of them successfully. The missions were
flown by nine different Air Force crews and I was lucky
enough to be one of them. The airplane I flew, SR-71 tail
number 17964, is now a center piece display at the Strategic
Air and Space museum in Ashland, Nebraska, about half way
between Omaha and Lincoln.
SR-71
Mission:
Crew:
Construction:
Length:
Wingspan:
Height:
Landing Weight:
Maximum Gross Take-off Weight:
Maximum Speed:
Maximum Altitude:
Maximum Unrefueled Range:
Armament:
Powerplant:
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High
Speed, High Altitude Reconnaissance
2 (Pilot and Reconnaissance System Officer)
Titanium monocoque / carbon
107 feet, 5 inches
55 feet, 7 inches
16 feet, 6 inches
68,000 pounds
140,000 pounds
3.2+ Mach
Over 85,000 feet
3,200 nautical miles
None
2 Pratt & Whitney J-58 / 34,000 #
thrust
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By 1990 the
Total SR-71 Flight Hours were 53,490
Total Mach 3+ was Time 11,675
Total Sorties were 17,300
Operational Sorties were 3,551
Operational Hours were 11,008
Total Air Refuelings were 25,862
Total Crew Members were 284
( high time pilot by then had 1,392.7 hours) |
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| More
information on the role of Griffiss Air Force Base
supporting these long flights and honoring the dedication
of the many personnel involved is available at http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/griffiss.html |
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