Many U.S. pilots who
patrolled the skies of Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War would
later put that experience to use during Operation Iraqi Freedom, an
F-16 pilot who flew combat missions over Iraq early in the war said
Monday.
"We all knew the situation in Iraq. We knew the types of
anti-aircraft systems that they had, understood where they were,
and incorporated that into our daily training," said Maj. Michael
Norton, a South Carolina Air National Guard F-16 pilot who flew
Northern and Southern Watch missions.
"That was an advantage when Iraqi Freedom rolled around. ... We
were prepared," Norton said. He flew with the coalition strike
force that launched OIF on March 19, 2003. The veteran pilot spoke
with American Forces Press Service and the Pentagon Channel April
10, the day after Iraqi Freedom Day commemorated the fall of
Baghdad on April 9, 2003.
Northern and southern no-fly zones were established over Iraq by
the United States, Great Britain and France to keep Saddam
Hussein's air force in check after a U.N. military coalition
ejected his forces from Kuwait in 1991. France withdrew its pilots
from no-fly zone operations in 1996.
The United States cited U.N. Security Council Resolution 688 as
rationale for establishing the no-fly zones, which protected the
Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south from Saddam's
persecution.
However, Saddam's
ground-to-air radar and anti-aircraft weapons sites tracked, and
sometimes shot at, coalition aircraft that enforced the no-fly
zones. Coalition pilots often reciprocated with attacks on Iraqi
radar and anti-aircraft sites.
But "we didn't lose anybody throughout a decade of flying over
northern and southern Iraq, mostly because everybody, I think,
understood this was a low level of acceptable risk," Norton
said.
"We were there to accomplish a mission - to prevent the Iraqi
air force from flying," Norton said. "But it wasn't going to help
anything if one of us were shot down and captured. So a lot of
thought and preparation, I think, went into how to accomplish the
mission, while minimizing any chance of losing allied
aircraft."
Even so, there were scary moments for Southern and Northern
Watch pilots, Norton recalled.
"We were shot at," the 36-year-old Tallahassee, Fla., native
recalled. Iraqi air defense sites fired 100 mm anti-aircraft
rounds, he said, that coalition pilots found difficult to see
during the mostly daytime missions.
"There were close calls. People would see large artillery rounds
going right by their cockpits. So somebody was looking out for us,"
Norton said.
Some U.S. military aviators, including Norton, also had
experience flying combat missions over the Balkans in the late
1990s.
By the time OIF began in March 2003, many U.S. Air Force, Navy
and Marine Corps fliers "had previous experience flying over Iraq
already," Norton said, "and had spent a lot of their careers
thinking about this."
Air strikes conducted
over the years by Northern and Southern Watch pilots had helped to
render Iraqi air defenses less effective as OIF neared, Norton
said. His squadron was deployed in the OIF theater of operations in
February 2003.
"We didn't have whole a lot of time to get things set up and
prepare, but luckily just about everybody in the squadron had flown
over (Iraq) before," Norton said. There were even "quite a few"
Gulf War veterans flying in his squadron, he said.
As March 19 approached, Norton said, he and another F-16 pilot
flew an escort mission for a B-1 bomber strike on a target in the
Baghdad area.
"We were targeted by radars in Baghdad, but didn't see any
missile launches," Norton recalled.
OIF was launched a few days later. Due to the war's short
duration, degraded Iraqi air defense capability and the absence of
a viable enemy air force, the Iraqi "air threat wasn't quite as
severe as you'd expected it to be," Norton said. [ANN Thanks Gerry
J. Gilmore, American Forces Press Service]