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- piston79
- Građanin
- Pridružio: 13 Feb 2015
- Poruke: 110
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Napisano: 19 Dec 2022 21:22
piston79 ::Kubovac ::@ Toni
Evo da slikovito prikažem moje dileme:
Na osnovu podataka @piston da se u mestu Breznik, nalazio radar P-37 Bugarske vojske, sasvim je moguće da se dogodilo ovo:
Не, радар П-37 е бил в Божурище до София (синий треугольник)
Ракета упала где желтая указка.
Мне сказали, что оператор радара подумал ето подбит самолет НАТО Шел на аварийную посадку на Софийския аеропорт, но потом заметил скорост пере движения целю и вьиключил передатчик....
Вот ето схема полета НАТО самолета и ракету
Вот новая информация....
Надеюсь @Kubovac сделает перевод на српском (прошу кирилску норму!) 
Citat: As I mentioned before, I was always “that guy” who was involved in whatever was happening. On this particular night a lot happened, and I found myself smack in the middle of an international incident that could have fundamentally changed the course of the war in Kosovo. On that particular night I was leading a two-ship, callsign Sword 11, conducting a presence mission over Kosovo. The weather was scheduled to be really shitty, so the NATO CAOC had cancelled all of the missions for the night across the whole of Yugoslavia except for ours. Our job was to roam around providing the Yugoslavians another reminder that we owned the airspace over their country, even in bad weather. Providing presence in bad weather was not as easy as it sounds. My wingman, Sword 12, and I would have to be very careful and stay out of the clouds so that we could see if someone was shooting at us. If needed, we could fly really high to stay above them, but if we couldn’t keep ourselves in the clear we would abort the mission and come home. It was raining pretty hard when we went out to the jets. I always felt really bad for my crew chiefs on nights like this. Yes, I got wet, but things weren’t too bad once I climbed in the cockpit and shut the canopy. The F-16 has a great environmental control system, and I felt guilty sitting there all toasty and drying off, while they were moving around my jet in the chilly, dreary European night and getting soaked to the bone. It might have been worth it if we had a real mission of any value that night, but we didn’t. The crew chiefs are really an amazing bunch of young men and women to work in the heat, and the cold, and the rain, to give us safe jets to fly. The weather was really nasty too. Sword 12 stayed in trail about a mile behind me all the way to the tanker. Rejoining on the tanker was pretty tough, with the in-flight visibility so bad that I couldn’t actually see the tanker until I was well inside of 100 feet from him. You might not believe me but flying up on another airplane that close without being able to see him always made me sweat more than getting shot at. Between the pitch-black night, the rain, the thick clouds, and the light to moderate turbulence, getting gas was quite a chore. When we were gassed up and clear of the tanker, I breathed a sigh of relief. I told Sword 12 to stay 3-5 miles behind me, and that we would stay that way while we explored the weather over Kosovo. Much to my surprise and delight, as we crossed the mountains from Albania and into Kosovo, the weather cleared up. And I’m not talking just a little…there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the air was so clear that the visibility was phenomenal. So much for the weather forecast! I decided that we would still stay in our trail formation, and I climbed us up to a little over 30,000 feet. It was a really beautiful night. We could see the wall of clouds away to the west and south over the Adriatic Sea and Albania, occasionally glowing internally with a flash of lightning. To the north you could actually see the glow of Belgrade’s city lights cresting the horizon. East, across Kosovo and into Bulgaria, there was a soft, thin layer of fog blanketing the low places in the ground. It was absolutely amazing to behold.Leveling off at 30,000 feet or so, I called the AWACS and passed along an update of the weather. I told them that we would fly north along the western edge of Yugoslavia for about half the length of the country, then cut across to the eastern edge and fly back south along the border with Bulgaria. A little math told me that this route would take almost the whole 45 minutes we were scheduled to be on station. After flying that big loop, we would go back to the tanker, get gas, and fly back to Aviano. It looked like it was going to be an easy night. As we cruised along the radios were silent, except for the occasional “picture clear” call from the AWACS. There was nothing showing on my radar scope either, and my different sensors were not detecting any radar signals. It really was turning out to be a quiet night, and as we reached the eastern side of Yugoslavia, I turned us south along the Bulgarian border. Bulgaria was a formal member of the Warsaw Pact, and they were staying neutral in this fight. There was a rumor in the press that Bulgaria was even trying to get admitted to NATO. It occurred to me that I really didn’t know much about Bulgaria. I was really enjoying the flight. The border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria was pretty unpopulated. The countryside was mostly dark, but there was one well-lit and sizable Yugoslavian city near the border: Nis. The city of Nis had not played much of a role in the air campaign to date. It was located on the far side the country from Kosovo, and well away from Pristina and the areas where the ethnic cleansing was most prominent. It was also well away from Belgrade and any of the other major target areas we serviced. So, as a result, to my knowledge, we hadn’t really flown many missions near it. Looking east from the city, you could see the line of lights where the border crossing into Bulgaria was located. The whole city was covered in the thin fog, which made everything seem to glow. It reminded me of one of those snow-covered city models you see under Christmas trees sometimes, with the buildings nestled in cotton to simulate snow. I really didn’t pay it all too much attention. Everything was so quiet, and at 30,000 feet the stars were very bright, so I decided to watch them instead. I had the autopilot set, my arms resting up on the edges of the canopy, and I tilted my head back to look for shooting stars. I realized that I would have to be careful and not fall asleep stargazing in my warm and cozy cockpit. Relaxing there, staring into the night sky, I physically jumped against my straps as a missile flew across the top of my jet from behind and detonated right above me! A bucket-full of gourmet adrenaline surged through my body as I grabbed the flight controls. I didn’t have time to disengage the autopilot, and that set off warning lights and sounds as the flight control system protested my actions. I rolled my F-16 fast to the left and broke into a high-G turn, slamming the throttle into afterburner at the same time. I twisted around to check my six and see who had shot at me, just in time to see another missile fly by, also detonating as it passed my jet. “Sword 11 flight, break left!” I shouted over the radio. I couldn’t see my wingman in the dark with his lights out, and it occurred to me that we would have to depend on the “big sky” theory to avoid hitting him. The “big sky” theory says that the sky is a big place, so the odds are small of hitting another airplane. While not the best plan, it would have to do for now. Rolling out of my break turn, I dove for a few thousand feet to get my airspeed back up, then cancelled the afterburner so that I would disappear again into the darkness. Searching the sky and ground I couldn’t see any more missiles. My mind was racing as I weaved my jet around looking for anyone else shooting at me. I had no indications on my RWR that a radar was locked onto me. I was too high for any heat-seeking MANPADS to have taken those shots. And there was no AAA anywhere. But those missiles came close to hitting me…so close that I could vividly remember seeing small sparks trailing out the back of both missile’s rocket motors before they were detonated by their proximity fuses. They had only missed me by a few yards! My mind jumped to a MiG…had a MiG snuck up on us with his radar off and taken a shot with an air-to-air heat seeking missile? Holy shit! “Sword 11 is naked” I called over the radio, indicating that nobody had an air-to-air radar locked onto me. Sword 12 replied that he was naked as well. To make sure he understood what I was thinking, I also threw out a “Watch for MiGs” call. Next, I called the AWACS, “Magic, Sword 11, picture at our location!” Almost like he was waking up from a nap, the AWACS controller replied in a non-specific European accent, “Sword 11, picture clear.” That meant he didn’t see anybody. While certainly helpful, I honestly didn’t trust the sleepy NATO AWACS guy with my life right at that moment. I needed to get Sword 12 back into some sort of tactical formation so that we could better protect one other, and to also avoid accidentally shooting each other if there was a MiG mixed in with us. “Sword 11 flight, flow north and take it down (to a lower altitude). Sword 12 say your position.” Sword 12 acknowledged, and the position he gave me was only a couple of miles from my own. With a little back and forth over the radio we got organized, and he quickly called “saddled,” meaning that he was back in formation. After confirming again that we were both naked, I turned my attention to looking for MiGs and SAMs. I set us up into an orbit and went around the racetrack a couple of times until I was sure there were no MiGs near us. Confident that we were alone in the sky, I focused on figuring out where the missiles could have come from. The missiles had come from roughly just outside the western edge of Nis. Focusing my sensors on that area I didn’t find any SAM radars, but I did find a Soviet-made early warning radar. Because of their long range and how the enemy used them in their integrated air defense system, we rarely found one radiating so close to us. The ROE allowed me to engage it if I wanted to, and after getting shot at I was certainly in the mood for some payback. The tactical problem I faced was the type of radar I was looking at, as well as its location. Yugoslavia and Bulgaria both were equipped with the same radars made in the former Soviet Union. The location of the radar I had found was awfully close to the border on the Yugoslavian side of the fence, close enough that from the angle I was looking at it, I couldn’t be 100% sure which country it was in. To avoid shooting a Bulgarian radar I needed a way to make sure. After thinking about it for a few seconds, I decided that since I could clearly see where the border was by the lights on the ground, I would simply swing into Bulgarian airspace and fly back toward the radar. When I flew across the clearly visible border between the two countries, if the radar was still in front of me that would mean it was in Yugoslavia for sure, and I would shoot it. As I swung our flight eastward, I was pretty sure that at 0100 in the morning nobody in Bulgaria would notice, nor care if they did. And if they did care, they couldn’t do anything to stop me…super-power coming through! Once I had the border comfortably behind me, I turned us back toward Yugoslavia and concentrated on the radar I wanted to destroy. In short order the line of lights on the ground marking the border slid under my jet. The early warning radar was indeed in front of me! I glanced over to make sure that my weapons were armed and that I had a HARM selected. The radar was not very far in front of me, so I pushed the stick forward, the negative Gs floating me up against my straps, and causing all kinds of dirt to fly up from the cockpit and against the canopy. The targeting box around the radar settled into my HUD and I relaxed the stick back to positive Gs…I was now in a steep dive toward the radar and the city that surrounded it. My thumb stroked the pickle button on the stick, and the HARM leapt off my jet like a hound after a fox! I watched as the missile flew straight to its target, looking like a meteorite as it flew, and its rocket engine was still burning when it hit. The warhead on a HARM isn’t huge by any means, but it is pretty powerful none the less. The flash of light as it detonated seemed amplified by the thin, soft layer of fog around the target. It was very satisfying to see! After recovering from my dive, I set us up in an orbit nearby to see what the Yugoslavian’s response would be, but there wasn’t one. All remained quiet. They didn’t even shoot a single round of AAA into the sky. Our gas was soon low, so we went to the tanker. The weather was still shitty while we were getting gas, and we were in the soup the whole way home too. It was a stark change from the clear skies over Yugoslavia. We split up close to the base and flew instrument approaches to landing. If anything, it was raining harder now than when we took off a few hours ago. After we landed and taxied clear of the runway, the first thing we did was stop and some crew chiefs came out to de-arm the airplane. This involved them putting safety pins into all of our weapons so that we didn’t accidentally drop them or shoot them off on the ground. De-arming is almost always done by hand-signals alone, especially on rainy nights when the ground crews were in a hurry to get back inside their shelter. Since it was rare to have them take the time to hook up a headset to the jet’s intercom system, you can imagine my surprise when the lead de-arm guy checked in with me! “Hey Sir!” he yelled over the engine noise. “It looks like you guys both saw some action tonight!” My thoughts immediately jumped to the near-misses I had with those missiles, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I had some damage to my jet that I didn’t know about! Trying to play it cool (fighter pilots have a reputation to maintain, after all), I asked him what made him think that? He squinted up at me through the driving rain and said, “Because you both shot a HARM.” I thought about that for a second. I knew I had shot a HARM, but when did my wingman shoot one? I turned around and looked at his jet. I could barely make it out through the glare of the stadium lights reflecting in the heavy rain, but sure enough, he was missing one of his two HARMS!
I chatted with the crew chief while they finished de-arming me, and then wished him a good night. Taxing back to parking I was kind of pissed at my wingman, because he should have let me know he shot a HARM. Maybe he shot it in the heat of things and forgot to say anything on the radio…kind of like “buck fever” in the moment. Regardless, I would speak to him about it. He needed to do better next time. Once he climbed into the crew van the first thing he said was, “I need to talk to the Commander.” I looked at him. He was visibly shaken. “What about?” I asked. “I just need to talk to the boss” was his reply. “Okay,” I replied, “in the meantime let’s talk about the HARM you shot. When did that happen? I didn’t hear you call it on the radio.” He didn’t look at me. Instead, he just repeated again, “I need to talk to the Commander.” This was really odd, and we rode back to the squadron in silence. As soon as the van stopped, he was out the door and off like a shot. As I watched him go in search of the boss, I wondered what could have happened that spooked him so badly? And how did shooting a HARM play into it? For a second, I thought maybe he had shot a HARM at me somehow, but that didn’t make sense since he only fired one HARM and I had two missiles blow up next to me. I decided not to worry about it for the time being, and I was quite sure that if something bad had happened I would hear about it eventually. After dropping off my flight gear and debriefing with our Intelligence people, I looked at my watch. It was a little after 4am. I was hungry and the chow hall wasn’t going to open until 0500, so I decided to take advantage of the late hour and find a computer to send a few emails home. Normally it was hard to find an unused computer, but at this time of the morning it was no problem. I logged in and checked my work emails, and then spent an hour or so sending personal emails to family and friends. In 1999 having email at a deployed location was a real treat. Back when I deployed to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm back in 1990 through 1991, we had to send letters the old-fashioned way. It took about a month for a letter to get back to the States, a reply to be written, and then sent back. Some letters took longer than others too, so it wasn’t uncommon to receive letters out of sequence. That was sometimes very confusing! After taking care of emails, I still had a little time to kill, so I decided to check the news online. As the website loaded, my eyes were drawn to an article titled, “Errant NATO Missile Strikes Apartment Building in Bulgarian Capital.” I leaned forward and made sure I read that right. As I waited for the story to open, I wondered if this was connected to Sword 12’s wanting to find the Commander so badly? I had a gut feeling it was. As it turned out, the errant NATO missile was indeed the HARM my wingman had shot without telling me. It was all over the news the next day. I believe Stars and Stripes even carried a picture on the front page of their daily edition showing the President of Bulgaria standing in the rubble of an apartment with the wall and roof missing, looking at the shredded furniture with his hands on his hips. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the apartment building was in bad shape. And, of course, it was a huge international incident. Fortunately, the Bulgarians didn’t go too crazy over it. A few years later, I found out why. In the meantime, there was an investigation. And I have to commend the Air Force for how well they conducted it. A full Colonel from the Pentagon was sent to look into it. The guy was a former Electronic Warfare Officer who had spent most of his career flying F-4G Wild Weasels and had flown combat missions in Desert Storm. That was perfect, because his technical background meant that he genuinely understood everything he was looking at, and his combat experiences allowed him to put it in context. Here is what he figured out. When the two missiles flew by my jet, Sword 12 initiated his own break-turn before I even called for it on the radio. In the middle of that high-G break turn he looked down at his sensors and saw a radar, so he quickly shot a HARM at it. The problem was it was a radar deep inside Bulgaria. The missile tried its best to get there, but eventually ran out of speed and fell to the ground, right into an apartment building in downtown Sophia. The missile’s warhead did not detonate as it would have done on a target. Instead, the impact of hitting the building set off a low-order detonation. That was a stroke of luck and probably was the reason nobody got hurt. Sword 12 was under attack at the time he took the shot, and while he should have determined where the radar was before shooting, it was reasonable that he returned fire in that moment. NATO followed the Colonel’s assessment that this was an accident caused by the fog of war, and not because of negligence or ill intent. We were all pleased when the word came down that Sword 12 wasn’t in any trouble. We were even more pleased that the U.S. or NATO didn’t put some stupid restriction into effect on how we could operate, in a misguided effort to prevent it from happening again. I mentioned earlier that a few years down the road I found out why the Bulgarians didn’t get more upset. Fast forward to 2002, and I was reporting to Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) at Maxwell AFB. ACSC is a 10-month long Air Force school for Majors to learn about how to plan air wars, and how to be effective squadron commanders if they ever got the chance. The class size each year is pretty big, with about 800 students attending. The class was made up of not only Air Force Majors, but officers and civilians of equivalent rank from the other branches of the U.S. armed forces, and something like 30 or 40 foreign countries. The student body was divided into clusters of 12 or so students, called Seminars. Each Seminar contained a cross section of folks from the USAF, the Army and Navy, and a couple of foreign officers. As I sat down with my Seminar on the first morning, I discovered that the foreign exchange officer sitting next to me was from Bulgaria! It never occurred to me that there might be a connection between that HARM hitting the apartment building and the guy sitting next to me. He was a pretty interesting guy, and he contributed a lot to our different classes. But one day, our homework included readings on the NATO air war over Kosovo. The instructor led our Seminar though a lesson on the challenges and complexities complexities of operating in a multi-national coalition like NATO. Many of the folks, myself included, had been there and a lively discussion ensued. At one point, the Bulgarian guy spoke up. And here is the story he told. Late one night he was sitting on duty in the Bulgarian Air Defense Headquarters operations center. It was a quiet night, and they were watching two American F-16s flying around near the city of Nis on their border. All of a sudden, one of the F-16s shot a missile into Bulgaria, and soon thereafter the two F-16s invaded Bulgarian airspace. Their General who was in charge that night was certain that this was the opening move of a NATO attack on his country, and he ordered the Bulgarian air defenses to high alert. While he was getting the President of Bulgaria on the phone, he ordered one of their long-range SAM systems, an SA-10, to prepare to engage us. As he was explaining to the Bulgarian President what was going on, reports began to roll in of the missile hitting an apartment building in the capital city. The General then noticed that the two F-16s were retreating back toward Yugoslavian airspace and requested permission to shoot them down before they escaped. To the General’s amazement, the Bulgarian President told him not to shoot. The President then explained that Bulgaria was seeking admission into NATO, and that acting with restraint would give Bulgaria tremendous political leverage during the coming entrance talks. The General hung up the phone, and with obvious disappointment ordered everyone to stand-down. Needless to say, my jaw dropped. What a coincidence to be sitting next to this guy and hearing another side of that story. It was especially eye-opening to learn that an SA-10 had targeted me and my wingman! At that time the SA-10 was probably the most lethal Russian-made SAM in existence. If they had decided to attack us with it, we would have probably been blasted out of the sky without ever seeing it coming. That story also explained why Bulgaria didn’t go off the deep end over the incident. And I guess their President’s restraint paid off, because in 2002 Bulgaria officially became a member of NATO.
Littleton, Thomas. All Aces, No Jokers: The Wartime Memoirs of an American Fighter Pilot (pp. 231-232). Thomas Littleton. Kindle Edition.
Кажется етот разказ не совпадает очень с то, что нарисовано на VOJIN планшета (он официално непотверждаеть, что ето ситуация 28/04/1999, но на его видно, что некоторая цель летит право к Софии.... Тоже на етот планшет не видно SWORD 11.... Вообще очень много вопросов и мало ответов...
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Dopuna: 22 Dec 2022 20:57
Анализ многоуважаемого подруга из Венгрии..
Citat:Read it, and here are my observations...
- So obviously Sword-12 was who launched against Sofia (and against the SA-10)
- Sword-11 had a faulty RWR during the whole mission (should have alerted for Serbian SA-6, and Bulgarian SA-10 lockon) or...
- ... Serbian KUB was aimed with a thermal camera.
- Sword-11 seen KUB (SA-6) missile pair (rocket motor was still burning at 30kft)
- NIS was protected by the Serbian 230th KUB missile regiment. By the 28th April, they lost 1st and 4th battery, so 2nd and 3rd battery was active. 2nd battery was at Gornja Strazava SWW of Nis, while the 3rd battery SE of Nis. So probably it was the 2nd battery firing at Sword-11.
- I'm not aware of any Serbian radar at the Serbian-Bulgarian border, Sword-11 attacked.
- The Bulgarian flightpath drawing is good, displaying Sword-12
- The writing is inline with my knowledge. (except the radar Sword-11 attacked)
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