A new flight path for the 'invisible' bomber
During the Iraq war, B-2 bombers were based for the first time at a forward location, easing pilot's jobs.
By
Seth Stern
| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
How do you upgrade a $2 billion stealth bomber? Install e-mail.
Pilots flying the bat-winged B-2 bombers over Iraq received targets from mission planners on the ground via e-mail. It's not exactly America Online. Each encrypted message bounced off military satellites before popping up in their onboard laptops' Microsoft Outlook in-box.
The e-mails were vital, say pilots who have now returned from the Persian Gulf, as the fast pace of the campaign often made preassigned targets obsolete.
The pilots are now beginning to tell a side of the Iraq war that was important but unseen. There were no embedded media aboard these planes, or even at the bases they flew from. The Pentagon still won't confirm where they were based.
But stealth bombers - whose paper-thin profile and top-secret "skin"make them nearly invisible to radar - played a vital role in a campaign that involved unprecedented use of rapid ground-to-air communication. They delivered some of the air war's decisive blows from an altitude far removed from the dangers or ruin of battle.
Many of the B-2s flew from their home base in Knob Noster, Mo., where special climate-controlled hangars protect their sensitive outer skins. But four of the 21 stealth bombers operated from somewhere closer to the action for the first time, accounting for 40 percent of B-2 missions flown. That "forward location" is believed to be the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
Two B-2 pilots from the 509th Bomber Wing spoke to the Monitor about their five-week forward deployment and four combat missions on the condition they would not identify where they were based during the conflict.
The forward location cut the "commute" to Iraq in half - to a mere 18 hours round trip and reduced the number of aerial refuelings from five to two.
"It makes a big difference," says Lt. Col. Gavin Ketchen, who commanded the squadron from the forward location. For one thing, they didn't need any naps on the cot nestled behind their ejection seats: They could sleep on the ground while their Missouri-bound counterparts still had another sunrise and sunset to endure.
The First Night
On the afternoon of March 20, Col. Ketchen took off from his forward location as leader of a pack of three B-2s. Within minutes, he was joined in the air by a dozen B-52 bombers, as well as nearly every tanker aircraft at their base. Fighter escorts and electronic warfare planes joined this massive "package" of aircraft as it got closer to Iraq. So did three more B-2s flying from Missouri.
Their mission? Hit airfields around Baghdad where the Iraqis had dispersed aircraft capable of dropping chemical weapons. They also were assigned "high value" radio relay stations that helped Iraqi commanders communicate with units in the field and command and control bunkers where top generals hid. "We were trying to chop the head off the snake," Col. Ketchen says.
The targets weren't a surprise. For weeks, Ketchen's squadron had studied pre-selected targets and planned possible missions. However, they expected to lead off the war. Instead, the night before, F-117 stealth fighters and cruise missiles launched a last-minute strike against a Baghdad location where Iraqi leaders, including Saddam Hussein, were believed to be meeting.
Col. Ketchen is no stranger to combat over Iraq. A 19-year Air Force veteran who entered the Air Force after completing ROTC in college, he started his career as an engineer working on air-to-air missiles. He wound up fulfilling a childhood dream by applying to flight school. He'd regularly visited the flight museum at Wright Patterson air force base while growing up in Dayton, Ohio. He ended up a bomber pilot, flying an F-111 bomber out of Turkey on a combat mission over Iraq during Desert Storm. But this was his first combat mission at the controls of a B-2. After studying the Iraqi theater so carefully, Ketchen says he wasn't nervous at all as he flew towards Iraq sitting alongside his co-pilot. Unlike the B-52 - which has a crew of five - and the B-1 that requires four crew members, there are only two people aboard the B-2.
On the way, they refueled once - a task pilots find as physically taxing as combat. They must guide the bomber to within feet of the aerial fuel tanker's belly while flying 300 mph. In this high-speed aerial ballet, the pilot must align the plane's nozzle with the tanker's extended boom. Other than that midair dance, the flight to Iraq was rather uneventful, Ketchen says. Unlike the flight from the US, where pilots see the Statue of Liberty on the way over the Atlantic Ocean, Ketchen says they saw little outside the aircraft. (He declined to describe his actual route.) The only sight to see: a thicket of American fighter aircraft flying below at lower altitudes.
They sat at the controls in the eight-foot wide cockpit - about the size of a large desk. It houses two pilots' ejection seats and a cot for napping during long flights. The plane's itself is huge. The 172-foot wingspan stretches over half a football field, but the cockpit is small to keep a low radar profile . It's just high enough that Ketchen could stand up and stretch mid-flight. He munched on a series of snacks: celery, carrots, trail mix, and even fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and energy bars.
But neither pilot needed to take a nap on this short flight.
"It's almost like a normal work day," says Ketchen. The longer flight from Missouri complicates missions. Pilots must synchronize their schedules well before takeoff to ensure that one of them is always awake. Both are awake during the most sensitive parts of the mission: takeoff, landing, refueling, and weapons release.
It was night when they finally approached their target eight hours into the mission. Even at their high altitude, they could see the lights in Baghdad below. Anti-aircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles fired by Iraqis were visible in the distance, but were not aimed at Ketchen's aircraft.
His payload of satellite-guided JDAM "smart bombs" dropped automatically at four sets of targets. Pilots have the option of releasing them manually, but Ketchen and all other B-2 pilots during the war used a on-board computer that constantly re-calculated the correct launch time. Though the B-2 bomber weighs 360,000 pounds, it jerked slightly each time a 2,000-pound bomb was released. Bomb damage assessments later determined the B-2s hit all 48 targets.
Unlike ground attack pilots who fire right into enemy tanks from low altitude, Ketchen says B-2 pilots are detached from the impact of their bombs. "The sense of what you truly did does not hit you until a couple days later," he says.
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Shortening the B-2's 'commute'
SOURCES: US Air Force; AP/Adam Weiskind
During the war, B-2 bomber pilots flew combat missions from a forward location for the first time, cutting their trip in half. The Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia was presumed to be their home though the Pentagon has still not officially confirmed they were based there.
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