Not really about Meridian, but talks about bombing practice...
EDITED: looks like they changed the link on me. So here's the text of the news story:
Navy fighter pilots train hard for war
By FRANK FISHER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
MERIDIAN NAVAL AIR STATION, Miss. -- The Navy SEAL had a big problem, and Lt. Cmdr. Mike Kraus had the solution hanging on the wings of his F/A-18 Hornet.
Deep behind enemy lines in northern Iraq, the commando was on the run from Saddam Hussein's troops. He needed a bomb dropped fast.
Kraus, streaking across the sky, got the call. It was going to be a tricky mission: The SEAL could only give Kraus a few bits of information, and the weather was awful.
The fighter pilot gave the SEAL a 30-second warning, then sent a bomb loaded with several hundred pounds of explosive shrieking toward the desert mountains.
Kraus, a 37-year-old Monticello, Minn., native whose Navy call sign is "Sour," will never forget the next few minutes. He tried to radio the SEAL to make sure he was OK. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing.
"Pretty much, the conversation was, 'Hey, we could've just ended up killing our own guy,'" Kraus recalls telling another pilot on that mission about a year ago. "But, we've got to put it behind us, let's go to the tanker and get our gas."
After what seemed like an eternity, Kraus got his answer: The SEAL was safe.
"That was a big sigh of relief," said Kraus, now an instructor at Meridian Naval Air Station.
Although the U.S. military spends millions of dollars training fighter pilots and puts them in aircraft jam-packed with computers, war in the 21st century is still fraught with uncertainty. Sometimes, it comes down to a plane, a bomb and a soldier on the ground.
The 165-170 aviators who train annually at Meridian drop 25-pound practice bombs on a bull's-eye in a remote corner of eastern Mississippi. Some of these students could find themselves on an aircraft carrier heading into harm's way less than a year after graduation.
Lt. Cmdr. Bradley Burgess, chief staff officer at Meridian's Training Air Wing One, said Navy pilots normally go through realistic combat exercises in the Nevada desert and spend hours training with their squadrons before being sent into action.
"You can train, you can train, you can train, but until you're going in country and it's time for, as they say, 'the show,' you really don't know what you're getting into until you get into it," said the Joplin, Mo., native who flew in the first strikes on Kabul, Afghanistan.
"It's different, and you won't know until it's 'green time,'" added Desert Storm veteran, Cmdr. Paul Shankland of Greensboro, N.C., head of Strike Training Squadron Nine at Meridian.
Navy pilots have plenty to worry about. Besides avoiding shooting their own troops on the ground, there's the danger of being shot down or running out of gas before they can get back to the carrier.
Burgess, who piloted an EA-6B Prowler during the war in Afghanistan, said that conflict was especially hazardous because fliers had to operate so far away from their carrier.
"My main concern was, especially on that first night, our brief was if we either got shot down or had to eject over country, that they didn't think they'd ever come get us because we were so far into country," he said.
Burgess' worst fear almost came true. During the mission, his aerial refueling tanker couldn't give him gas. He had no choice but to start flying south to his carrier, wondering how far he'd get before bailing out.
After some tense moments, Burgess finally found a British tanker to fill him up.
Reacting quickly to unexpected challenges is the payoff of superior training, these veteran pilots say. And they say that training ensures that when deadly force is required, it is applied on target.
"Every aviator knows that a weapon doesn't go down range or a bomb doesn't come off his airplane unless he has his target identified," Burgess said.
Strapped in the seat of a cockpit flight simulator, Marine 1st Lt. Tom Cunningham practiced bombing dive runs as an instructor watched. Blue skies, rolling green hills, roads and rivers whizzed by on a huge, hemispheric screen around him.
The target would come into view up ahead in a field, a tan-colored circle with a white line through it. Cunningham rolled his plane around in this computer-generated world and came in at a 30-degree angle to drop his bomb.
The 24-year-old from Pensacola, Fla., said the significance of what he's doing hits him sometimes when he's back home relaxing.
"This isn't just about me and my grades," said Cunningham, who hopes to graduate in July. "This is, down the road, protecting Lance Cpl. So-and-So from Iowa. I don't want to kill him, but I want to make sure this bomb goes right where it's supposed to go."
Kraus, a former enlisted man, said the deadly seriousness of his job was hammered home by his 3 1/2-year-old son, Carter, and a wife who always tells her pilot-husband to be careful out there.
"I knew that anytime I dropped a bomb, it was somebody that wasn't going home to their wife and kids," he said.
EDITED: looks like they changed the link on me. So here's the text of the news story:
Navy fighter pilots train hard for war
By FRANK FISHER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
MERIDIAN NAVAL AIR STATION, Miss. -- The Navy SEAL had a big problem, and Lt. Cmdr. Mike Kraus had the solution hanging on the wings of his F/A-18 Hornet.
Deep behind enemy lines in northern Iraq, the commando was on the run from Saddam Hussein's troops. He needed a bomb dropped fast.
Kraus, streaking across the sky, got the call. It was going to be a tricky mission: The SEAL could only give Kraus a few bits of information, and the weather was awful.
The fighter pilot gave the SEAL a 30-second warning, then sent a bomb loaded with several hundred pounds of explosive shrieking toward the desert mountains.
Kraus, a 37-year-old Monticello, Minn., native whose Navy call sign is "Sour," will never forget the next few minutes. He tried to radio the SEAL to make sure he was OK. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing.
"Pretty much, the conversation was, 'Hey, we could've just ended up killing our own guy,'" Kraus recalls telling another pilot on that mission about a year ago. "But, we've got to put it behind us, let's go to the tanker and get our gas."
After what seemed like an eternity, Kraus got his answer: The SEAL was safe.
"That was a big sigh of relief," said Kraus, now an instructor at Meridian Naval Air Station.
Although the U.S. military spends millions of dollars training fighter pilots and puts them in aircraft jam-packed with computers, war in the 21st century is still fraught with uncertainty. Sometimes, it comes down to a plane, a bomb and a soldier on the ground.
The 165-170 aviators who train annually at Meridian drop 25-pound practice bombs on a bull's-eye in a remote corner of eastern Mississippi. Some of these students could find themselves on an aircraft carrier heading into harm's way less than a year after graduation.
Lt. Cmdr. Bradley Burgess, chief staff officer at Meridian's Training Air Wing One, said Navy pilots normally go through realistic combat exercises in the Nevada desert and spend hours training with their squadrons before being sent into action.
"You can train, you can train, you can train, but until you're going in country and it's time for, as they say, 'the show,' you really don't know what you're getting into until you get into it," said the Joplin, Mo., native who flew in the first strikes on Kabul, Afghanistan.
"It's different, and you won't know until it's 'green time,'" added Desert Storm veteran, Cmdr. Paul Shankland of Greensboro, N.C., head of Strike Training Squadron Nine at Meridian.
Navy pilots have plenty to worry about. Besides avoiding shooting their own troops on the ground, there's the danger of being shot down or running out of gas before they can get back to the carrier.
Burgess, who piloted an EA-6B Prowler during the war in Afghanistan, said that conflict was especially hazardous because fliers had to operate so far away from their carrier.
"My main concern was, especially on that first night, our brief was if we either got shot down or had to eject over country, that they didn't think they'd ever come get us because we were so far into country," he said.
Burgess' worst fear almost came true. During the mission, his aerial refueling tanker couldn't give him gas. He had no choice but to start flying south to his carrier, wondering how far he'd get before bailing out.
After some tense moments, Burgess finally found a British tanker to fill him up.
Reacting quickly to unexpected challenges is the payoff of superior training, these veteran pilots say. And they say that training ensures that when deadly force is required, it is applied on target.
"Every aviator knows that a weapon doesn't go down range or a bomb doesn't come off his airplane unless he has his target identified," Burgess said.
Strapped in the seat of a cockpit flight simulator, Marine 1st Lt. Tom Cunningham practiced bombing dive runs as an instructor watched. Blue skies, rolling green hills, roads and rivers whizzed by on a huge, hemispheric screen around him.
The target would come into view up ahead in a field, a tan-colored circle with a white line through it. Cunningham rolled his plane around in this computer-generated world and came in at a 30-degree angle to drop his bomb.
The 24-year-old from Pensacola, Fla., said the significance of what he's doing hits him sometimes when he's back home relaxing.
"This isn't just about me and my grades," said Cunningham, who hopes to graduate in July. "This is, down the road, protecting Lance Cpl. So-and-So from Iowa. I don't want to kill him, but I want to make sure this bomb goes right where it's supposed to go."
Kraus, a former enlisted man, said the deadly seriousness of his job was hammered home by his 3 1/2-year-old son, Carter, and a wife who always tells her pilot-husband to be careful out there.
"I knew that anytime I dropped a bomb, it was somebody that wasn't going home to their wife and kids," he said.