NATO Pilots Describe All-Too-Easy Routine

For 96 hours last week, the busiest hub of NATO’s air raids against Yugoslavia settled into a fortunate routine. Dozens of warplanes would roar into the night sky, and all their pilots would return unscathed for a day of debriefings, sleep and planning sessions for the next round.

That was until the Yugoslavs apparently downed a U.S. Air Force F-117A Stealth fighter that had taken off Saturday from Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy.

In interviews two hours before the reported loss, American pilots told journalists at the base that the routine had become too easy. They said they were expecting stiffer resistance from President Slobodan Milosevic’s air defenses.

“We have not seen near the anti-aircraft weaponry deployed that we thought we’d see,” said a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot. “But we’re not sure that’s not just a tactic that he’s using to husband his weaponry and use it at a point when he thinks he can surprise us.”

Pilots of six of the 14 North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations taking part in Operation Allied Force are based at Aviano, at the foot of the Italian Alps. The assault aims to neutralize Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, a rebellious province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia.

A cautiously upbeat mood had grown at the sprawling base and its newly added tent city as the Stealth fighters, F-16s, F-15s, F-18s, EA-6B Prowlers and other aircraft went about their destructive work without a setback.

“This is what we train hard for every day, a chance to prove ourselves,” said Staff Sgt. Darien Nunn, 30, a maintenance crew chief who arrived here a month ago with a squadron of Stealth fighters from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. “This is the real thing.”

But they came prepared for the worst.

The pilots, most of them untested in combat, sweat through their sorties in insulated flight suits and winter boots, issued in case they’re shot down in Yugoslavia’s mountains.

Before each mission, “they give us the thumbs up and we give them the sign of the cross,” said Maj. Lorenzo Meekins, a Presbyterian minister who walks with pilots to their planes.

The pilots said Milosevic appeared to be deliberately holding back both his air force and his ground-based air defense systems last week.

“They have a pretty good surface threat,” said the F-16 pilot, a 36-year-old Air Force commander who identified himself only by his call sign, McJack. “The prediction was that we would face some fairly heavy surface-to-air engagements.

“Maybe they’re waiting for the day they’ll let it all go at once,” he added. So far, Milosevic “doesn’t seem as crazy as [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein, when he shoots things even though he knows he’s going to get plastered.”

The pilots said Yugoslavia’s air defense radar was being switched on only sporadically, apparently to minimize detection by NATO pilots out to destroy it with radiation-sensitive missiles. They said they had to be careful not to let down their guard.

“In all our briefings, we make sure that everybody going out on these missions realizes that despite the fact that last night they may not have seen a lot of defenses put up, that doesn’t mean they won’t see any danger tonight,” said a U.S. Navy major who identified himself as Bigfoot.