Former Buccaneer squadron commander Graham Pitchfork describes the RAF’s extraordinary success during the early Red Flag exercises
During the mid-1970s the United States armed forces conducted a study to address the lessons learned from the Vietnam War. It demonstrated that ‘unseasoned’ combat aircrews suffered unacceptably high loss rates while showing low operational effectiveness. Indeed, the first ten missions were the key to a crew’s survival in war. This should not have come as a surprise since Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland had written in his World War Two memoirs:
“A steadily increasing percentage of the young inexperienced pilots were shot down before they reached their tenth operational flight. As training courses in the Luftwaffe were cut it soon became more than fifty percent.”
The USAF decided to provide an operational training facility, which could reproduce those early war sorties and, in 1975, Exercise Red Flag was born at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas in the Nevada desert….
The tactical weapons and electronic warfare ranges to the north occupied an area that would cover the southern half of England and Wales, and they included 50 different types of life-size targets against which aircraft were allowed t…
