“In terms of the workload, the threats, and the number of aircraft involved, Red Flag is huge,’ says Tom Raeburn, a 6 Squadron pilot, who was part of the deployment from RAF Lossiemouth. “50-plus aircraft take part in every single mission — with 20 to 30 on the hostile or red side — and the missions take place day and night.”
The skies are full. As well as the combat aircraft including F-35s from the United States and Australia, multiple tankers support the jets for air-to-air refuelling, and ISR (Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance) aircraft involved, like UK and US Rivet Joints, unmanned Predator drones and space assets. It’s one of the ultimate tests of interoperability in world aviation.
Says Tom: “We’re consistently operating at almost double what we might see at the climax of even the biggest exercise at home. At Red Flag, it’s a different scale.”
Typhoon is the backbone of the RAF’s frontline fleet, but at Red Flag it’s part of a much larger mix of aircraft. For Tom and his colleagues, the exercise was a great opportunity to see how it shaped up. He was not disappointed.
“Typhoon was able to carry out a wide range of missions. Very few other aircraft were able to say they’d done all the roles we managed. We've done Defensive Counter Air and Offensive Counterair (escorting strikers). We performed long-range strikes using Storm Shadow. We've also carried out airborne interdiction, using the Litening III targeting pod to find an enemy convoy of trucks and then strike it. We did pre-planned strikes on multiple targets using Paveway IV. That’s a vast range of mission sets and I don't think there were many other aircraft in the Red Flag exercise that covered the full spectrum.”
Another positive was its staying power. “Through the two weeks of Red Flag, we flew every sortie assigned to us. That was 10 sorties a day — six daytime ones, four night-time ones. We didn't lose a single sortie due to technical or engineering fault, which is good, even compared to all the US squadrons that are flying out of their home country.”
Another plus for Typhoon was its ability to carry a significant amount and array of weapons. “Often, we were employed to carry out air-to-surface strikes, either with Storm Shadow or with Paveway IV GPS-guided bombs. We would go in, conduct our strike and then we still had four long-range air-to-air missiles to use afterwards. Then we would move on to a counter-air role. That flexibility was a real strong point for Typhoon.
“It was also good for us to be able to operate with fighters like F-35 because in a high-end, air-to-air war we will be working closely together. We're going to bring the missiles to the fight and use their sensors to find targets.”
This interoperability with another advanced aircraft like F-35 — one that brings different, complementary qualities to the fight — is what an exercise like Red Flag is particularly useful for. It allows pilots and commanders to gain useful experience, hone their skills and gain a detailed understanding of each other’s capabilities.
“Working together correctly we can bring a lot,” says Tom. “Typhoon brings six long-range air-to-air missiles, including Meteor, and can use their capabilities to find targets for us. Over the two weeks of Red Flag, we could see an improvement in how we set up the formation to work most effectively together. F-35 does not carry as many missiles, but it has great sensors. We needed to be in the right position to be able to pick up those targets and help the formation ingress into enemy airspace.”
Tom explained that there's a lot of excitement among the RAF pilots for the ECRS Mark II electronically-scanning radar being developed by BAE Systems and Leonardo to add even more capability to Typhoon. He said: “It was clear that working in this high-threat environment with lots of electronic attacks, the new radar is going to be a game-changing capability for Typhoon.”
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