On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:20:54 GMT, ktbr wrote:

Mike Weller wrote:
I was stationed at Statesboro when I was in the Air Force. We had a
direct telephone line to JAX center and Savannah. We coordinated with
them because we had bombers on a low level route (OB-17) that would
use our fire control radars for training and evaluation.

Interesting, I'd love to hear more about all of of that.
What's an OB-17? Statesboro was an Army Airfield during WWII,
then a SAC base later on (maybe when you were here). I have done
Google searches and generally find little info about this
airfield under military use. I'd like to have a few interesting
tidbits to put up on the walls here if I could find it.

OK

When I was stationed there, I was in SAC. The airport was Statesboro
Municipal and we just leased the spot from them.

OB-17 was called an Oil Burner (Oh maybe that was an Olive Branch)
route. Number 17 obviously.

They would do qualification and training with our stolen SA-2 radars,
and would also do what we called a "Pop Up" and get scored on their
bombing accuracy. Considering that they had simulated nuclear
weapons, they and I wondered what good it would do to "Pop Up" from
200 feet to 500 feet.

In Kansas, I saw a B-52 pull up slightly to go over the only tree for
miles around there. There's just not many trees in those wheat fields
that go on forever.

B-52s were allowed to fly at incredibly low altitudes on the OB routes
and they had what was called terrain avoidance. It wasn't as good as
the FB-111 that had terrain following. I guess that was why SAC never
lost a B-52 while they were doing that stuff.

Now Linebacker II was a whole different matter. The dumb ****ers at
USAG, or where ever, sent them day after day on the same route, at the
same altitude, and with the same jamming equipment. A monkey could
have figured out how to shoot them down. And did.

The only FB-111s that SAC lost were when they were joining up after a
low level mission, and "got too close together". They had these
really cool ejection pods for each of them, neither of which worked.

Mike Weller