Document Page: First | Prev | Next | All | Image | This Release | Search

Those are the kinds of things that we worked with and
overcame.

S: The final product of your airfield with the lighting, with
the understanding of the weather conditions, with better
communication with the AWACS and with Riyadh established,
how would you characterize the operations, once you got your
airfield up to the standards that you wanted?
	.
M: Once we installed the airfield lighting,that we needed; once
we installed the correct weather system; once we understood
and applied the communications with higher command and
command and control elements, we were capable of producing
300-plus fighter sorties per day, not including military
airlift, which was producing between 40 and 60 sorties per
day.  You can see that with these numbers on a single
runway, a 12,000-foot runway with one parallel taxiway, we
basically occupied the parallel taxiway, and we had our way
here. We were able to institute a flow that worked. We
were able to park jets when they needed to be parked and
launch them on TOTs [Time-Over-Target] or launch them on
alert status and get aircraft going.

Probably the biggest impediment to that flow was the
weather. Weather would often stop us. Weather would hold
aircraft on the ground. Either here at KKMC or in the
target area or back at the main operating base, weather
would hold aircraft here. The ramp would become saturated.
These are all things that we were able to deal with. Often
the ramp would become so saturated that we would have to
turn aircraft away. We would have no reluctance in doing
that, and all that it required was some coordination with
air traffic control and the TACC [Tactical Air Control
center]. Once we understood all the elements involved--and
this took about a week, the first week of the air war





                                                                                5

Document Page: First | Prev | Next | All | Image | This Release | Search