Allied Planes Stacked Up for Runs on Iraqi Targets : Air war: Pilots must wait their turn to deliver bombs. There are 5,800 takeoffs and landings in one day.

So many allied planes are stacked up over Kuwait and southern Iran that pilots often must wait 10 minutes or more for their turn to bomb, and air traffic controllers are worried about the possibility of midair collisions, U.S. commanders said Monday.

“It’s mind-boggling how well orchestrated it (the air campaign) is,” Marine Brig. Gen. Richard I. Neal said. “It’s a busy place up there. It makes LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), Dallas and Atlanta combined look like kids on the block.”

Allied planes from nine nations are averaging more than 600 combat missions a day over the Rhode-Island-sized chunk of desert where Iraq has concentrated its troops. That figure is likely to increase as the U.S.-led coalition intensifies its attacks in preparation for an expected ground offensive.

On Monday, U.S. planes flew 750 combat sorties against the Iraqi positions, including 200 against the Republican Guard, U.S. officials said. Altogether, good weather enabled the allied air forces to fly 2,900 sorties on Monday, making it one of the busiest days of the almost four-week-old war.

Those 2,900 missions mean about 5,800 takeoffs and landings, or about triple the 1,800 to 2,000 takeoffs and landings at Los Angeles International on a typical day.

Like the skies over Los Angeles, those around target areas in the Gulf War are stacked up with planes waiting their turn. In order to maintain a flow to the air campaign, pilots are allowed only 10 minutes over the “kill zone” and, if they haven’t dropped all their ordnance by then, they are often ordered out of the airspace to clear the way for other circling warplanes.

During the recent battle for the Saudi Arabian border town of Khafji, one A-10 Thunderbolt pilot had to wait 20 minutes before finding airspace to make his run on a target.

“The skies already are so crowded, it’s like a freeway, a traffic jam,” said Air Force Col. Charles Pettijohn, commander of the 4409th Operational Support Wing (Provisional).

Combat pilots are assigned altitudes, times over target and other parameters to keep the flow of attack on schedule. When they are ordered out after 10 minutes, Pettijohn said: “The guys say, ‘Wait, I’ve got ordnance and there’s targets down there. You can’t do this to me.’ But we have to be kind of hard-nosed about it. We say, ‘Get out of the way and let the next guy have his turn.’ ”

Deep inside two British ships, the Gloucester and Cardiff, 45 air controllers direct the flights of aircraft from five allied nations. Closer to the battlefield, modified U.S. C-130 transports loaded with command-and-control capsules move the planes through the target zones on a strict schedule. High overhead are AWACS reconnaissance planes. Their crews can detect developing air-control problems but are usually preoccupied with operational concerns.

Air Force Lt. Gary Cooper, an F-16 pilot from Huntington Beach, Calif., said on returning from a mission Monday that a forward air controller, known as a pointer, gave him target coordinates after he took off and directed him into the killing zone.

“We held while another flight was there,” Cooper said. “He dropped some bombs to mark the target area, which was just the standard revetment with tanks and vehicles and some . . . artillery pieces. He marks it for us and we try to pick up the areas with the biggest concentration of vehicles and drop on them.”

With a fast-moving ground campaign expected to follow the intensified bombing, commanders said coordination and air traffic control will be an essential element of avoiding friendly casualties and midair collisions during the support of ground troops.

“It’s very congested up there,” said Air Force Col. Gary Voellger. “There are a lot of airplanes that are getting compressed into a small area. . . . One of my concerns is the midair collision. The AWACS watch for problems, but they’re not air traffic controllers. The number of sorties up there is overwhelming.”

Although good weather enabled U.S. pilots to fly 2,900 sorties Monday, they said they were still seeing hundreds of military targets. Most agreed there is a lot of work left to be done before a ground war starts.

“I know everybody wants to get it over with and get home,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Billy Diehl, commander of an F-16 squadron, “but the longer they give us, the better it’s going to be for our guys when they roll into Kuwait, you know. The more time we have, the better it will be for our allied armies.

“We don’t want to be here a day longer than we we have to, but we don’t want them to roll in there with all the defenses and all the artillery and the tanks they still have alive.”

This article was written in part from correspondent pool reports cleared by U.S. military censors.