1430 Sunday 4 November 1990
GOPHER Aerial Refueling Anchor Point
Over the Al Jawf Region of Saudi Arabia
Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.
—WILL ROGERS, AMERICAN COWBOY, ACTOR, AND HUMORIST
Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.
—SAM WALTON, AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN AND ENTREPRENEUR
If anything can go wrong, it will.
—MURPHY’S LAWS OF COMBAT
Local checkout for combat missions is a threefold educational process. New pilots and navigators fly with a seasoned crew the first time, watching them from the jump seats as observers. New boom operators get contacts with an instructor watching over them. The new crew flies in the seats on a second sortie a day or two later with an experienced crew watching over us. The experienced crew debriefs mistakes and things to watch out for. These sorties are called “over-the-shoulder” rides. The last step to becoming SAC-trained killers in theater is certification on the air campaign plan. Certifications are like difficult oral exams, as wing leadership asks crews questions on tactics, techniques, and procedures in a board of review. Once you pass, wing leadership signs a letter stating you are now mission ready and adds it to your personnel record. Most over-the-shoulder flights happen without incident. If nothing goes wrong, you and the plane come home in one piece. My first flight did not go so well. We came home early from our over-the-shoulder sortie and first in-country mission with a very broken jet, and a Saudi pilot went back with a KC-135 souvenir.
This diagram illustrates a typical seventy-miles-long by thirty-mile-wide anchor refueling area like GOPHER in Desert Storm and RUSH, O’REILLY, and HANNITY over Afghanistan’s Shahikot Valley in Operation Anaconda. Anchors are controlled by a ground radar station or a controller in the E-3B AWACS like CHOCTAW, MAGIC, or BRIGHAM.
GOPHER anchor refueling area sat near the Iraqi border, close to Arar Air Base in the An Nafud desert. Since GOPHER was close to Iraq, F-4G Wild Weasels and RF-4C photo-reconnaissance Phantoms used it a lot. On our first mission as observers, SHELL 46 was scheduled to refuel two RF-4Cs from the 12th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron from Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas, call signs PHOTO 65 and 66. Once the Photo-Phantoms had their gas, four RSAF F-15Cs, call signs STALLION 61 through 64, would hook up for fifteen thousand pounds each. Being only an observer on the flight, I moved all over the tanker watching the experienced crew from Plattsburg Air Force Base. After arriving at GOPHER, CHOCTAW vectored PHOTO 65 and 66 to us. I checked off the interphone and headed for the boom pod with my camera, wanting pictures of my first combat mission.
Mikey D, my temporary boom, was one of the most experienced instructor boom operators in the 909th. On this flight, he would observe during PHOTO 65’s and 66’s refueling, and then crawl into the boom couch as the boom operator for the next receivers. When I got back to the boom pod, Mikey D was lying next to the Plattsburg instructor boom as PHOTO 65 approached precontact position, fifty feet from the nozzle. PHOTO 65 was rock solid, taking on four thousand pounds and moving to the right wing. PHOTO 66 was also rock solid in the refueling envelope, taking on the same amount. Both Phantoms dropped below us and left to the east. CHOCTAW told us the STALLION F-15s of the Royal Saudi Air Force would arrive staggered over the next twenty minutes. CHOCTAW called back to say STALLION 61 was on his way. We could hear CHOCTAW send STALLION 61 over to the air refueling frequency. Mikey D slid over and settled into the boom couch. He moved the boom from side to side and then up and down to see how it handled. Once he was happy with the boom’s maneuverability, he extended the pipe and we waited for STALLION 61.
STALLION 61 approached from about two miles back and a thousand feet below us, coming fast. The F-15 carried four AIM-7M Sparrow air-to-air missiles on the fuselage and four AIM-9M Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles under its wings. Three external tanks hold four thousand pounds of fuel each. Photographers rarely see a fighter loaded with live weapons. By the time I checked the camera’s battery power and how many frames were left, STALLION 61 was a hundred feet away.
“SHELL 46, STALLION 61 requests contact,” the pilot said in a thick Arab accent.
“STALLION 61, boom radio check.”
“SHELL 46, STALLION 61 has you loud and clear. How about me?”
“SHELL has you loud and clear also. You are cleared to the contact position, sir.”
Mikey flashed STALLION 61 the PDI lights, and he moved toward us. Once stabilized in the contact position, Mikey put the pole right in the hole. The copilot flipped on two fuel pump switches, and the offload totalizer showed gas coming off our airplane. Four heads peered down from the boom sighting window as STALLION 61’s pilot looked up at us. He reached the outer limit, and the system fired through a disconnect, releasing him from the nozzle. STALLION moved back about fifty feet to the refueling precontact position, then moved back toward us. Mikey stuck the nozzle in his receptacle again. STALLION 61 remained pretty stable this time—until he looked up and saw all of us watching and my camera pointed down at him. He waved to us, and STALLION 61 moved forward . . . and down . . .
Mikey saw what was happening and started telling STALLION 61 “Up five, back five . . . Up ten, back ten . . .” but STALLION wasn’t listening. The boom was pointing almost straight down, the nozzle cocked backward at about sixty degrees. Finally, Mikey radioed the words all tanker crews never want to hear: “STALLION 61! BREAKAWAY! BREAKAWAY! BREAKAWAY!”
No movement.
Mikey said louder, “STALLION 61! BREAKAWAY! BREAK—”
STALLION 61’s pilot looked down in his cockpit and pushed both throttles and stick forward. His Eagle moved instantly. All of us in the boom pod heard a loud BANG, and the boom extension started wobbling up and down. You could feel it through the whole airplane. SHELL 46 had just experienced a brute-force disconnect. STALLION 61 continued down and to our right. With gas still pouring out of the pipe, STALLION 61 moved back toward the boom and into precontact position. Why was he doing that?
Fuel stopped trailing when the copilot closed the air refueling line valve and cut off the boom’s supply of gas. Mikey began a systems check, and the boom flew just fine—except one vital piece was missing: the nozzle. SHELL 46’s nozzle had broken off in STALLION 61’s receptacle. All of us could see the nozzle poking out of the F-15’s refueling slipway. After looking STALLION 61 over to see what damage he had, the pilot asked, “SHELL 46, STALLION 61 requests precontact.”
I was still taking pictures as Mikey looked over at me with a quizzical look on his face. “What did he just say?!”
“Mikey, he wants his gas,” I said, laughing.
“SHELL 46, STALLION 61 requests precontact.”
“STALLION 61, negative precontact . . . hold your position,” Mikey said as he flew the boom around.
“SHELL, I need more fuel.”
Exasperated, Mikey said, “STALLION 61, you just took the only means of putting gas in your airplane!”
STALLION 61’s pilot turned his head left, looked over his shoulder, and saw the problem: the nozzle in his jet. The nozzle’s metal flange had torn during the breakaway. But STALLION 61’s pilot still had one last thing to say.
“SHELL 46, we make AIR MESS, no?”
Mikey, trying to keep his composure, replied, “Yes, sir! We make AIR MESS! SHELL 46 is done for the day and on our way home.”
“Okay . . . I go home now too.”
With that, STALLION 61 flipped into a ninety-degree right bank, pulled about 7 g’s, and disappeared behind us.
CHOCTAW was not happy that the nozzle was gone. Three Eagles could not get gas and had to return home. I’m sure the Saudis covered their three-hour defense requirement or vulnerability period somehow. As we closed in on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, the nav passed to FIREHOUSE ops our maintenance code: code three, not mission capable. No one likes to hear code three. FIREHOUSE wanted to know why we were code three. The nav told them we had experienced an uncontrolled brute-force disconnect. We heard people laughing in the background as FIREHOUSE said ours was the third brute-force in two weeks. I had never seen a brute-force disconnect, so after we landed I went to the back of the jet. Nozzles connect to the boom extension with eight bolts. Six bolts had stayed with the boom. The top portion of the flange and the other two bolts had ripped off completely.
Four days later, my crew was flying again. King Khalid Provisional Air Wing’s vice wing commander Colonel Ken Mills told us to visit maintenance debrief right around the corner from mission planning, a big smile on his face. In maintenance debrief, there was a table with several parts sitting on it. The most prominent piece was a tall, round metal shape: a boom nozzle. STALLION 61’s hydraulic maintenance folks pulled the nozzle out, boxed it up for transportation, and put it on a C-130 for a ride back to FIREHOUSE. None of us ever forgot the sound of that nozzle ripping off, the snapping and the vibration through the airplane. I’m sure the Saudi pilot lost face with his squadron mates when they pulled the nozzle out of his receptacle. He was not the only one to write “brute-force disconnect” in his maintenance forms.
I went on my first operational combat mission in Saudi Arabia, and I came home with a broken jet! STALLION 61—the four-ship formation flight leader, no less—broke the nozzle right off our boom, but he had a good sense of humor about it, asking, “We make air mess, no?” For as long as I live, I’ll never forget the loud bang of the nozzle snapping off. During the aircrew debrief we discussed how aircrews make mistakes, sometimes big ones, but we find the humor in these events and don’t take ourselves too seriously. Don’t dwell on the mistakes; life is too short to not find the humor in the “air messes” of our lives. Be happy you come away with the experience, but don’t dwell on the brute-force disconnects. Learn to be happy and move past them. Reader’s Digest includes a “Humor in Uniform” section in every publication. The military is often involved in some pretty funny things. As you continue to read these stories, you’ll see that I’ve included a lot of entertaining events. There were times when we laughed hysterically in the cockpit because of a missed radio call or a mistake that most of us learned to move past. Finding the humor in the dire situations you experience helps you get through the hard times and brings greater joy to your life. Smile—you lived through it, and it wasn’t that bad.