Storm Over Basra

The clouds south were a factor. Unlike the rest of Iraq, the southern edge by Basra and Kuwait was socked in with huge thunderstorms, and I wasn’t looking forward to punching through those to get home tonight. At the southern end of Iraq by the Arabian gulf, the airspace squeezed into a small corridor between Iran and Kuwait, through which all traffic going into and out of Iraq passed every day. Too often, near misses occurred here as civil traffic, tankers, and fighters met each other head on in the mid-twentys as they passed each other to and from duty stations over Iraq.

The air controllers here had limited ability to see us and we relied primarily on procedural control, which meant we flew at assigned and expected altitudes and routings for deconfliction, and in this tight airspace, the bottleneck always made life interesting. On our radar, we’d track C-130s down low, Russian IL-76s freighters and friendly KC-10 and KC-135 tankers with us at similar altitudes, with civil traffic usually higher. Inevitably, the Russians would be at our altitude in the big lumbering IL-76 transports, beak-to-beak with us as we met them, causing us to offset our routing to avoid the inevitable collision. In clear air, it was usually a place to stay especially alert; today, the weather would complicate things.

Climbing up in clear air from our last leg of our mission, a road-recce run from Baghdad down the four-laned route Tampa to Nasariah, what was left of the Arabian sun was a faint red glow in the west along the horizon line. In front of us, as we pushed the power up to mil and set the nose 10 degrees up, I could see the huge storms boiling and flashing in the dark ahead of us. “Wonder if we can get over these?” I thought. 2 was in tactical formation, 1 mile abeam us on the right side, making a small sillouette on the horizon against a darkening sky with his red beacons now slowly flashing at the wing root and on the tail.

In the middle east, unlike home where thunderstorms can extend up to 40 thousand feet, fierce storms seem to reach only to the high 20s, making them low enough for us to get over. But occasionally, the meanest ones would be higher, and these massive thunderheads, stretched in a line from the Iraq/Kuwait border westward along the Iranian coast looked today like they might be bigger than normal.

Passing 20 thousand, I called for a battle damage check, to take advantage of the remaining light, keeping an eye on the storm ahead as 2 closed in to take a look at our jet - we swapped positions in the climb swapping the lead in close formation, and I lobster-eyed his jet, inspecting it too while making the call whether we’d need to send him to radar trail.


As 2 passed me the lead, I began to see that although the storms were dark, electric, and ugly - they weren’t too high. I gave KEGI* the radar to check the weather - In air to ground mode, we could map out where the thickest portions of the clouds were and hopefully steer around them, provided we could stay out of Iranian airspace (and hopefully Kuwait’s too) in the process. Only problem was, there were no ‘holes’ to get through - solid thunderstorms for 40 miles left and right all the way to Saudi. But as KEGI* rolled the coverage up high enough we saw that the tops looked to be just under 30 thousand. We’d be able to sky over them! What a relief.

“Wedge.” Two rolled right and smoothly slid out and slightly back into a comfortable traveling formation - close enough to see each other easily for mutual support, but far enough out and back to minimize the wingman’s workload in a low-threat environment. The boiling clouds growing bigger and darker as we neared Basra with the coastline of the Arabian Gulf just in front of us.

“Dirty 65 contact Kuwait Center good day” said Talil, signaling that their handoff was complete. “Here we go” I thought, always enjoying the strange, yet predictable greeting with Kuwait Center. After giving a couple of attempts at contact, with no luck, I decided to wait until over the Gulf to try again. The storms, flashing constantly now just off the nose, were well defined. There were no breaks to fly through left or right, but it looked like we’d have no problem getting over the top with a little afterburner, maybe one or two stages of burner, and we had enough gas to do so. Only question was who we’d meet on the way out. Sure enough, on an 80 scope, we could see three contacts in the low 30s coming towards us through the bottleneck.

 Passing 27k, with 2s burners glowing blue against the evening sky and the first dark clouds passing under their nose, we could see a sheer drop of weather beneath us like a massive dark mountain, with a wall of rain pounding the delta beneath us. Like giant angry fluffy purple balls of electricity, the cloud tops were now passing on either side of us as I led the two-ship through a meandering trail between clouds in the climb, eyeballing a 747, an IL-76, and a KC-10 as they screamed past us and slightly above us on their way in.

And then came the static. The StrikeEagle had this way of creating static over the radios just when you needed them most - in stormy weather. Starting with a few annoying scratches, the static rapidly increased as the weather worsened until on both radios, a constant din of scratchy white noise made any transmission sound like a click - you knew something was being said, but had no idea what it was. Most pilots and WSOs, after trying wide and narrow band, just turned the radios down during this static to decrease the annoying and ceaseless aggavation.

A huge flash of lightning erupted from the cloud just under our left wing, as we drifted in and out of the high cirrus floating just over the top of the storms - wispy sky in front occasionally obstructed by thick dark puffs. Phenomenal rhythmic electricity pulsated around us in all directions, with each cloud appearing as its own ball of live activity seething and bubbling with energy.

Hearing 2’s faint staticky call finally in the turbulent milky air, we looked right to see what was an amazing and startling sight. An electric glow around 2’s jet, with an unbelievable display of Saint Elmo’s fire like we had never seen before.

From the nose of the jet to its tail, above and below were two electric blue/purple jagged lines of visible electricity, snaking and writhing rhythmically in dynamic lines starting at the nose cone and flowing up over the canopy and down under the bombs, back to the top of the tail and the rear of the stabs.

Like an electric touch ball in a science museum, the sight was beautiful as it was alarming - but after a short period we realized that it was fairly harmless. In our own jet, we could see the same phenomenon in a much more limited way, noting the bluish sparks and wispy charges flow up and over the windscreen and canopy. Not as dramatic for us, but as two pushed forward towards a position more abeam and close, we all realized what an amazing thing was happening over this angry storm.

And then, suddenly, the wispy, electric milk bowl disappeared in a flash behind us as we blasted free from the purple high cirrus into the clear air, the storm line now behind us as we each looked back down the wingline on either side at a pure face of dark cloud, the wall of a sheer electric mountain face extending from 30 thousand feet all the way down to the surface of the water.

In front of us stretched the vast Kuwaiti and Saudi desert to our right, now a beautiful shade of shadowy dark pink bright oil refineries and oil rigs punctuating the flat desert, and the glassy, dark, and deceivingly peaceful Arabian gulf to our left, with its distant Iranian lights and lighted oil derricks. Nothing but clear, purple, and peaceful sky ahead and airliners on the radar.

“ahhhh…. durteee six-five?” questioned the barely audible Kuwaiti controller, in a familiar quiet Arabian accent. He always sounded like he was about to tell us a secret, in his low, sneaky voice.

“Dirty 65 now with you at flight level 310 request lower when able, Salaam Alaikum” I answered, beginning our hour’s journey back home.

 “A Lakem Sala’am!” the gentleman replied, happy to have finally made contact with us.

In the back radio I sent our wingman back to a more comfortable night formation, directing night vision goggles. “Two NVGs/systems trail,” I said, pulling a Diet Coke and a piddle pack out of my helment bag. KEGI* plugged in his Ipod with a new Coldplay song to his patch cord, s I watched two’s jet bank up in the mirror for the drag.

Happy with him responding, “Two!” “Going cold mic” I told KEGI* and dropped my mask and sipped the fizzy Coke for a little caffeine to help stay alert for the night landing back home, now only an hour or so away.

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