"Ed Rasimus" wrote
Don't know where you were in the food chain of aircrew training, but
if it was installed in the planes every single day, you can bet we
knew how to use it. If it were mission essential or mission critical
we got trained in it, refreshed in it, tested in it, and briefed on
every single mission with regard to employment of it.
Well... OK...
One thing that fighter/bomber crews never seemed to understand was
Mode-4 IFF, and wide-band secure voice. In Iceland the mission was
to intercept and escort any unidentified aircraft through the defense zone.
What that meant in real life was that if the IFF gave you problems, you
shut it off. If you couldn't talk to AWACS, or the Shack on secure, then
you switched to clear. Billions in hardware in the off position.
Finally in 1986 the Air Force started getting serious, and they made the
bean count on those two items as painful as possible.
What we found, was that the crews just didn't understand the poorly
designed fault indicators, and since there was no incentive to operate the
equipment, they just shut it off. 1) The Soviets know we're there, 2) The
Soviets understand how NATO intercepts are conducted, and 3) By
doing the intercepts in the clear, the Soviets weren't surprised when
fighters and tankers, and P-3's, etc, all pounced on them for escort.
All of which HQ decided was too damned non-mil to continue.
The Army finally came along in the early 90's after the highly trained
USAF pilots and AWACS controllers splashed their non-participants
in Iraq.
Today, I think the radio is a completely different tool than it was before
1986. The use of wide and narrow secure when it's even necessary, is
the favored position (especially satcom). I listened to some of the
Air/Air recordings from a strike near Hanoi by a flight of 105's when I
went to a technical seminar, and it pretty much defined the word Clint
Eastwood had about Clusters...
I can see where crews might have training/operational problems with
gadgets even more complex than the IFF and Wide-Band panels.
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