Right on Target : If Bosnian Duty Calls, Fighter Pilot Greg Feest and Fellow Stealth Fliers Will Be Ready for Action

Nine minutes before all hell broke loose over Baghdad five years ago, Greg Feest was cruising quietly over southern Iraq in a Stealth fighter, zeroing in on a command bunker.

He hit it with the first bomb of the Persian Gulf War.

During the U.S. action in Panama in 1989, Feest also dropped the first bomb.

Feest, 39, of Racine, Wis., the lieutenant colonel who commands the Flying Knights of the 9th Fighter Squadron here, has never missed a target--in combat or in practice.

“I was good at video games, I guess,” says Feest, the only pilot to log 1,000 hours in an F-117 Stealth fighter. “This is more like playing a video game, only it doesn’t cost a quarter.”

The black, dart-like F-117 destroyed Iraqi radar and command bunkers in the opening minutes of the Gulf War. Now Feest and his fellow Stealth pilots are getting ready for duty in Bosnia, if needed, practicing over U.S. cities with cameras in lieu of bombs.

Feest says his 300 men and women can mobilize again at a moment’s notice if called.

“Immediately. Wherever they want us to go we can go,” he says.

In fact, he says, Stealth pilots, but not their planes, were deployed once already in connection with the Balkan conflict this fall.

“It was when the bombing campaign was happening . . . back in September, October,” Feest says. “Some of us deployed. However, as you’ve read in the newspapers, the Italians wouldn’t let the 117s in the country.”

Meanwhile, Holloman’s 53 Stealth planes, 130 pilots and hundreds of ground crew members are staying sharp by training over the Southwestern cities.

In an office decorated with several Top Gun fighter awards, Feest lays a small map book on his desk showing this night’s objectives.

“Here’s El Paso, OK? This is a training mission. So it’s a big city; here you’ve got an overview of the city, OK? There’s the target.”

He points to a triangle drawn around one house on a curving street, third house up from the corner.

“It’s this building right here.”

Re-emphasizing these are only camera simulations, he asks: “How many other aircraft could go fly in here--let’s say this is Baghdad--and hit this building out of all these?

“We could hit the middle of that building. We could hit the garage. We could hit the shed in the back yard.”

And do it without damaging buildings nearby.

The plane, which flies subsonic, can hit its target from as high as any plane flies and can also come in at treetop level untracked by radar, he says.

“Our advantage is that we can go in and hit their radar sites, their SAM [surface-to-air missile] sites,” Feest says. “We could take out SAM sites because we are stealthy. We are not invisible. We can be seen on radar, but we cannot be tracked on radar, or if they do track us, it’s very difficult, and we can move our aircraft around so that they won’t be able to track us.”

Once enemy radar is neutralized, he says, non-Stealth planes can come in and attack other targets.

During the Gulf War, all Stealths emerged unscathed.

“We have not even been scratched in combat, knock on wood,” says Maj. Gary Woltering, operations officer of the 7th Fighter Squadron.

And Feest says air defenses in Bosnia are less formidable than in Iraq.

“They don’t have the sophisticated equipment that the Iraqis had,” Feest says. “The Iraqis had some of the best equipment they could buy. They had the money to do that.”

Feest says Stealth pilots have trained for Bosnia and are familiar with the terrain.

“If we think there’s a hot spot, we practice and train for that area so that if we are required to go, we’ll be ready to go,” he says.

Stealth pilots in general miss less than 10 percent of the time, he says, and misses include those occasions when pilots can’t find the target and don’t drop bombs.

“If you couldn’t find the target, it’s logged as a miss.”

The target is displayed on a computer screen in the center of the instrument panel. The pilot places his computer cursors, representing his laser guidance system, on the target. The computer decides where the bomb should come off to hit the target.

The pilot must give final consent, however, before the plane releases the bomb.

The pilot also must continue to track the bomb until it detonates.

Feest, flying F-15s at Langley Air Force Base, Va., entered the Stealth program unwittingly in 1988, when it was still top secret.

“My squadron commander came in and asked me if I wanted to go fly as part of the 4450th Test Group out of Nellis (Air Force Base) in Nevada. He told me I was going to fly the A-7 and fly at night, so I said it sounds good and volunteered.”

At Nellis, “they put me in a room, locked the door and showed me a movie of the Stealth fighter. It was the first time I’d ever seen it. They said this is what you’re going to be flying.”

He flew Stealths there 3 1/2 years, then went to the Pentagon for a stint as liaison officer for the Senate, returning to Stealths in June 1994. The jets had moved here from Nevada in 1992.

Feest was named commander of the 9th Squadron in May. The 9th and 8th are the two operational Stealth squadrons, while the 7th is the Stealth training squadron.

Because there’s no room for an instructor in the single-seat plane, the first time a pilot goes up in an F-117, he solos.

Stealth students must already have logged 750 hours flying at least one other combat plane.

So far, five Stealth fighters have crashed, killing three pilots--none of them students.

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The training squadron recently was honored for flying more than 18,000 hours mishap-free, said Lt. Col. Greg Nicholl, commander of the 7th.

“It’s a record that goes back years and years and years,” Nicholl says.

The first three Stealth crashes occurred in the 1980s when the F-117 was top secret. It left the secret world in 1988.

The 9th Squadron’s Capt. Kenneth Levens of Stamford, Texas, was killed in a Stealth crash May 10 on the Zuni Indian reservation of western New Mexico.

The Air Force report on Levens’ crash concluded he probably was spatially disoriented and did not realize he was about to crash.

The report also found that the plane’s autopilot failed, and a voice alarm common on most other Stealths had not been added yet to Levens’ plane. It would have alerted him when the plane dipped below 11,400 feet.

Feest says spatial disorientation can happen to any pilot in any jet.

“I don’t necessarily think that this aircraft is any more difficult, that you get [spatial disorientation] in this aircraft any more than you do in others.”