Quirky said:
With munitions being ever more precise from high altitudes, what’s the need to train for such missions - high speed, extremely low level bombings? Was there ever such a mission profile in our last campaigns in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and recently Iraq/Syria?
That was standard during the Cold War, when the air defence threat was way, way higher than at any of those places that you mentioned.
There were times when I was FACking in Petawawa, nestled into a hollow in the tree-tops on a hill, watching the CF5s fly the low ground
below me on their runs in. It was hard to track them - which made my job a lot harder - until they popped (offset thirty degrees in a climb, roll back sixty degrees while inverted at the top, which was the only time that the pilot could see the target and we could verbally direct him in, roll level in the dive, and drop/fire). They were more than a little below their min 500 foot altitude, and the hill that I was on was also well below that. I was surprised that no tree parts were taken back to North Bay.
One almost thumped in in front of us on my FAC course in Gagetown in 1984. It got a little low during its gun run, pulled up abruptly to compensate, and mushed. I lost sight of the exhausts and horizontal stabilizer, briefly, behind a low hill before it finally began climbing.
A T33 on a low-level nav clipped trees on a low hill well north of Baden one day, losing a tip tank and other critical and non-critical bits in the process, then struck the next, and slightly lower, hill top and exploded. We took the Flight Safety team to the site in three Kiowas. The bodies were still in location - ejected by the force of the explosion - when we arrived, and not in very good condition. The Flight Surgeon was supposed to take blood and tissue samples at the site, but could not. They were her messmates. Centrifugal-flow engines, almost spherical, will roll a long way, especially down hill.
One of our guys, back in Canada for a couple of weeks to do some mountain flying with 408 Squadron, and his co-pilot, were killed when they flew their Kiowa into a large, calm, mirror-like lake. They were lower than they should have been anyway, and did not realize that they were descending due to the lack of visual references.
Our min cross-country altitude in Germany was 250 feet. The min altitude for fighters was 500 feet. Or, at least, their min
legal altitude was. In reality, not so much. I learned to never stray above that after four Italian F104s went below me a couple of weeks after I got there.
I was tracking inbound from the beacon on an NDB approach to a German airfield one afternoon - and we were literally "under the bag" when flying IFR (the Kiowa was not IFR certified; we flew IF training missions on VFR days to maintain an emergency capability, with a chunk of fabric and visor obscuring our view of anything other than the instrument panel). I thought, at one point, that I heard a faint "whoosh", and then noticed my safety pilot sit a little more upright. A minute later or two later, he relaxed again and said "That's the closest that I've ever been to a Tornado". "How close?" said I. "I'm not really sure. I only saw the vertical fin going underneath us".
Low-level attacks were the norm, given the Soviet air defence threat. The desire to train for that reality was high (and it was, yes, fun), and a bit more of a Roger Ramjet-ish "Devil-May-Care Flying Fool" attitude existed than one will ever see today.
Are attacks at 1000 feet AGL against a Russian or Chinese threat today more survivable than they would have been back then (ie, virtually not at all), even with PGMs? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.
We certainly had a lot more guys killed (eighteen in 1982), and nearly killed, and aircraft smashed up or written off, in training accidents back then, especially those involved in low-level operations (mainly CF104s, but also Kiowas (wirestrikes were the big threat), and two Hercs doing LAPES drops both out west (one in each of Suffield and Wainwright, if I remember correctly - one struck a not-quite-low-enough-but-too-low-to-be-visible berm on its ten-foot AGL run-in and the other had the load hang up at the rear of the cargo area causing a pitch-up and stall).
I was the last one to fly CH136258 - from Petawawa to Downsview and back in June 1985 - and live. I found out that I was on the night schedule upon return, but had another commitment and about double the minimum night time for the quarter, so begged off. My flight commander and an Observer took that machine, which suffered a never-happened-before critical component failure preceded by misleading symptoms that night, instead of me. The outer race of the free-wheeling unit, which essentially connects the engine to the transmission, was subsequently found to be three ten-thousandths of an inch out-of-round. The allowable tolerance was two ten-thousandths of an inch. The component was traced back, through the Canadian and US Army supply chains (sitting in various warehouses for a few years), to the manufacturer, who had destroyed several others in that batch, presumably for quality control issues, shortly after they were made. This one had been on 258 for several hundred trouble-free (until that night) hours.