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Met an Air Force Colonel yesterday. Vietnam B-52
MBK
Member Posts: 2,919 ✭✭✭
I just learned something. This man is 73 like me, and he was SAC. Also flew gunships. We got to talking about Vietnam aircraft losses. Apparently the number was about 10,000 total including accidents.
But I was quite astounded when he explained that we lost many B-52's. It was because while they had radar jammers pointing down from the belly of the aircraft, once bombs were released, the procedure was to make a sharp turn, thus the directional antenna was no longer pointing toward the jammed SAM sites. And up they came.
Total 31 lost and 17 in combat.
This wiki enumerates types of losses. There were certainly some planes what were pretty vulnerable. Like the F4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War
But I was quite astounded when he explained that we lost many B-52's. It was because while they had radar jammers pointing down from the belly of the aircraft, once bombs were released, the procedure was to make a sharp turn, thus the directional antenna was no longer pointing toward the jammed SAM sites. And up they came.
Total 31 lost and 17 in combat.
This wiki enumerates types of losses. There were certainly some planes what were pretty vulnerable. Like the F4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War
Comments
I had no idea we'd lost that many F-4's!
Interesting article. It looks like the B-57 fared even worse than the B-52's. 56 total and 38 in combat.
I had no idea we'd lost that many F-4's!
I had always thought we lost more F105s than anything else.
I guess one has to remember that by the last half of the war, the F4 was being used by both the USAF and USN for attack and fighter sorties, and many more were available and in use.
Brad Steele
According to WIKI, we lost one of every five O-2s in that war. We lost one of every 10 FAC pilots, which is far more important than the planes. The aircraft loss rate isn't that surprising for FACs. We got shot at - a lot.
And ya'll weren't all that fast, either, were ya?
I guess if you can get low enough you can limit your exposure. Still, though, pretty hairy stuff.
Thanks, Rocky.
But I was quite astounded when he explained that we lost many B-52's. It was because while they had radar jammers pointing down from the belly of the aircraft, once bombs were released, the procedure was to make a sharp turn, thus the directional antenna was no longer pointing toward the jammed SAM sites. And up they came.From the sounds of it the gentleman you spoke with was a veteran of Operation Linebacker II, which was a highly significant campaign.
The vast majority of that war our B52's were only used to hit targets over undefended jungle areas of the south in support of tactical operations. In December of 1972 Nixon took the gloves off and authorized strategic air strikes in the Hanoi/Haiphong area, which was deemed the most heavily defended air space in history- and it was.
Over the course of that war we suffered 17 B52 combat losses, with (IIRC) 15 of these being lost during Operation Linebacker II ('Christmas Bombings') conducted 18Dec-29Dec '72. During this period our Buffs completed 729 sorties over the Hanoi/Haiphong area and put over 15,000 tons of bombs on target.
Two different models of B52 were used in this campaign, B52D's primarily flown out of Thailand and B52G's flown out of Guam.
During the first 72 hours of this campaign we lost 11 Buffs to SAM's, with the D-models and their more sophisticated/powerful ECM gear faring much better than the G-models. For this reason, during the latter half of the campaign the G's were scratched from missions and the remainder were conducted by only the D-models - which had also been modified to deliver ~70,000lbs. of bombs each.
By the final days of this operation NV had exhausted their entire on-hand supply of SAM's, their Migs were kept on the ground by our fighter aircraft and all military targets in the area had been destroyed. In other words, they were basically defenseless for the final days of this pounding.
Fallout from this campaign showed it should have been done from the start. The Paris peace talks had been going since '68, with very little progress made until we finally took the war to their doorstep. Within a month of Linebacker II concluding NV had signed the peace accords and our POW's were returned.
BTW, I served in a B52D Wing. [^]