Spooky Luck
They say that combat is hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Sunday’s mission, we took the unfinished C-130J, outfitted as an AC-130. Never mind that it takes 11 trained people to operate an AC-130 in combat, and we are one guy with the wrong kind of stick; when I say “unfinished” I mean that the mod is still in development and several features are not yet implemented. Among these are the targeting and aiming systems for the AC-130 weapons.
In order to employ the AC-130’s impressive array of cannons and guns, one must fly the airplane while looking sideways out of the aircraft and aim by altering course, pitch, and roll to “walk” the rounds onto target. It is a purely visual affair, requiring a good line of sight to whatever you’re trying to hit and all the places that your shots will be off target.
Sunday’s weather over the converted Russian airbase at Novorossiysk was soup. Overcast clouds with a ceiling of 1500 feet meant that we would be well within small arms fire range, to say nothing of a radar aimed ZSU-23-4 “Shilka” Self-Propelled AAA (Anti Aircraft Artillery) and a SAM (Surface to Air Missile) battery which was sure to put large, unrepairable holes in us before we even got close enough to think about descending through the clouds.
The C-130 is really only equipped with one reliable defensive system – durability. A cargo aircraft might survive a hit from a single SAM, if our hold wasn’t full of high explosives and gunpowder. No, for the SAM we must rely on either copious dispensing of chaff and flares or maintaining our distance from the site.
As with all coordinated multiplayer strike missions, we have the support of people whose job it is to make it possible for us to do ours.
We take off from Kutasi, two hundred miles away from our target airbase. This gives a flight of much faster F-16s an hour to perform their SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) mission. Slow moving at an altitude of 25,000 feet, I set the autopilot and use the sim’s various external cameras to watch the show.
They say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
The SEAD mission fails to neutralize the two threats that will end our mission of peppering the airbase. There are three (total) radars that we need killed before we get in range of the airplane killers they control: a search radar, a track radar, and whatever that dish on top of a Shilka is. A second run does obliterate the search radar, this would neutralize most modern SAM systems, since they’d be unable to detect approaching aircraft. Without a search function, the track radar would have to blindly stumble on a target in order to guide missiles to it. Whether they were getting reports from a local TV doppler weather or the track radar operator was the Zen master remote viewer produced by the Soviet psychic warfare program, the SAM site was still able to aim well enough to shoot down incoming missiles. Missiles are slender and screaming by at twice the speed of sound. A Hercules is the size of a dozen large elephants roaring by at the speed of several smaller, more elderly elephants. We will pose no problem for their fully functioning targeting system.
12
But, we have fuel for days. We take up a parking orbit, flying racetracks between far away from danger to slightly less far away from danger, while another SEAD sortie is mounted to take out the two main threats. Another hour of selecting the waypoint on the other end of our orbit and turning on the autopilot. The F-16s move in for another set of strikes. Zen Psychic-ovich knocks down another 4 missiles.
We start getting a time pressure – we have a birthday party to attend. Time to break orbit and make a run. It’s a sim, the worst that can happen is we hear a loud sound and get treated to a video of our airplane on fire before we do any damage and have to log out and eat cake. The best case is we do a tremendous amount of damage before we disconnect and eat cake. What happened was something in the middle.
Novorossiysk lies across a Black Sea harbor next to the north western foothills of the Caucasus mountains. Our orbits have kept us east of these hills. Large mounds of rock and dirt are really good at blocking direct line of sight – like the kind of waves used in tracking radars. They’re also really good at stopping missiles. We turn off the autopilot and jump off our 25,000 foot perch. We were due east of the target airbase, so nudging the yoke gets us on a direct heading 270.
The clouds are dense; we have no visibility. Relying on our own radar altimeter to tell us how far away the ground is works fine in broad flat plains, but it’s a quick path to abrupt terrain-arrested flight when flying NOE through mountains. Fortunately, we get below the densest part of the clouds without incident, and we start seeing dark blurs that are below light blurs. We pick our way through the dark blurs, getting ever closer to them and the airbase.
We break out of the mountains, and find ourselves over the water. This is a lot more unsettling than one would think. Even through we are low, there is limited forward visibility, and the water gives us no indication of how close it is. And then there’s a SAM site and a AAA battery that have, thus far, evaded our strike force’s best efforts to remove their mission capability and want to punch holes in us. We cross the shoreline over an industrial dock and our radar warning horn wakes up the dead ghosts of the ancestors of people who might have seen a C-130 once. There’s a direct line between us and the SAM site.
I bank left and dip over the city, using office buildings as cover. It seems to work as we don’t get a launch warning. We cut back to the right, and a laser light show with crappier “drumstep” music opens up before us. Red small-arms tracers, green for crew serve guns, and a yellow lightning hail from the Shilka let us know we found the base.
Flying into the swarm of angry anger, I see a row of hardened aircraft shelters. Our target is the airbase, and nothing says airbase target like parked aircraft. We already know we’re only going to get one pass, and we have four pylons with six 500lb unguided bombs each. “Pickle, pickle, pickle, pick…” – you get the idea. Six tons of high explosive fall away in a line – my best guess of “this will probably hit something” before the ZSU-23 cuts our wings off and we go eat cake.
We’re low enough that we hear the impacts behind and below us. Only there aren’t 24 booms; there are 25. It’s called a “secondary,” and it means that we hit something full of fuel or ammo or something else that reacts “in kind” to being hit with high explosives. The battle damage assessment window pops up and informs us, “ZSU-23-4 Shilka Destoryed.”
It’s the only thing we hit.
The SAM site did fire on us on our way out, and our debriefing app shows we actually spoofed it with a cloud of countermeasures. All in all, we earned that piece of cake.
Sim: DCS World
Region: Caucasus
Aircraft: Anubis Hercules
Base: Kutasi