To the other side of the world in 'The Mighty B-ONE'

  • Published
  • By Maj. Jonathan Creer
  • 28th Bomb Wing Director of Staff
ELLSWORTH AIR FORCE BASE, S.D. --  Editors note: This is article is part one of a series.

The alarm clock buzzes at 6:45 a.m. I let my wife hit the snooze button and roll over, hoping to get another 15 minutes, only to be startled by a little face staring at me, eye level, from the side of the bed. Not long after that, my youngest son is bouncing around on the bed trying to get us up for breakfast. I suddenly realize what day it is, swap out sortie today! The day suddenly gets more urgent.

I spent the last two days packing my single A-3 bag with an extra flight suit and desert boots, one pair of DCUs, plenty of undergarments, and two sets of Air Force PT gear. My toiletry kit is the last thing to go in the A-3 bag before I zip it up. Wait a minute; I might need a towel (pretty important stuff!). Yesterday, after running and trying to get a new gas mask at the "no orders, no mask" deployment building, I made a quick run to the store to pick up beef jerky, snack bars, diet coke, water and assorted licorice, candy and the mint gum so I don't have to brush my teeth in the aircraft. All are the essentials for a 20-hour flight.

For the next 24 hours, I will constantly be meeting timing checkpoints and I already missed the first one! It's now 7:45 a.m. and I'm going to be late for my show time at the squadron. I still can't leave until the important stuff is done. After hugs for everyone, family prayer and a big kiss from my wife, I run out the door and race off to another day at work. By the time I get to the squadron, the lobby is a flurry of activity with Tigers, T-Birds and Gryphons in flight suits or, in flyer-speak, "green bags." Others are in tan bags, and some in BDU's. To the un-initiated it would look like pure chaos. To me, it looks like six of my seven crew members have shown up, and I make number eight. The four spare crewmembers are also already here. There are several other aviators who will hand us our mission paperwork and give the mission briefing. They spent weeks planning the mission, including coordinating diplomatic clearances for the countries we will fly over, and arranging air refueling aircraft to meet us at specific places in time and space to do the three air refuelings.

I am mission lead for this sortie so in accordance with Murphy's Law, 'Something will go wrong with the plan!' I don't see the aircraft commander yet, (at least I wasn't the last one to show up). His call sign is "Ace." Everybody calls him that; no one knows his real first name. This is also going to be one of his last sorties in the B-1 after 15 years of flying. The sortie home will be his last before he moves off to a commander assignment with the army. Finally, he shows up with survival vest, 9 mm pistol and flying gear ready to go.

8:20 a.m. I'm still late because my life support gear is over a block away in the other operations building's life support shop. Now that I think about it, I was indeed briefed the day prior, during the mission briefing, that we would get gear as we arrived at 8 a.m. Too late now because the step-brief and final weather brief is about to begin. Each crew finds a separate row to sit at in the auditorium. Weather spends five minutes covering a 17-hour 3,000 mile flight. Not to worry, I'm not afraid of a little thunderstorm! It's not until midway through the mission when we are fighting our way through some serious thunderstorms, somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea, that I realize my weatherman was absolutely 100 percent correct. 'There were "possible scattered thunderstorms" along our route of flight.'

9 a.m. After finding out which aircraft we will actually be flying to the area of responsibility and getting our intelligence briefing of all the possible threat radars that will be looking at us from various countries along our route of flight, we get our final words and the risk management brief, from the squadron commander. Weather - check; Airfield status - check; notice to airmen - check. Flight orders are signed by the aircraft commander and our flight plans for international flight are checked one last time then sent to base operations for entry into the air traffic control database. We have to make one last check of our flight and ground currencies to make sure we are qualified in all events for the flight. I've already checked them a 100 times in the last two weeks in preparation for the flight, but one last check by the aviation resource management systems folks makes it all legal for flight. We're finally ready! Out to the flightline we go -- after I go back to get my survival gear of course.

9:30 a.m. We're back on time. The jets are already running with pre-flight crews checking systems, loading our mission data into the flight computers and dragging our big A-3 bags onto the already overloaded crew compartment. Like the lobby, the flightline is also a flurry of activity with a lot of blue Air Force vehicles scurrying around instead of people in flight suits. As I jump out of the bread truck (square blue Air Force van) I have my helmet in one hand and my flight checklist bag with another helmet bag full of food in the other. With the survival vest and ejection harness on, the 9 mm in my side holster and the sound of the mighty B-ONE up on engines, I get that old familiar feeling from when I'd flown the B-1 in places like Korea, the South Pacific and Oman. The familiar smell and sounds of the flight line remind me that I am an Airman and a warrior. My chest bows up and I smile as I walk toward the loud screaming sound of the four GE-101 engines -- I love this job!

9:45 a.m. We're all strapped into our ejection seats, the ladder is up, and the hatch is closed and sealed. The crew from the other jet already radioed in with their status - GREEN. (The significance of that simple word is big. It means that hundreds of people worked many hours to get these jets ready for this flight, on time). We are ready for taxi and both jets are in the green. Wow! The co-pilot radios ground control for taxi clearance and flight plan routing. The controller gives us our final destination and level-off altitude.

10 a.m. End of runway, cleared for takeoff by tower, the co-pilot runs the last item on the before takeoff checklist, we each respond with our crew position saying that our ejection seats are armed and safety pins are pulled - pilot, co-pilot, offensive systems officer, defensive systems officer. Throttles to afterburner, brakes released and the 400,000-lbs of aircraft lurches forward - it's going to be a long day at work!
The aircraft slowly gains momentum until at 150 knots the nose rises and the jet slowly starts a climb to 19,000 feet. We make our turn to the east during climb out and start settling in to checking systems and adjusting cruise airspeed to meet our navigation timing requirements. This will ensure we meet our next checkpoint on time - air refueling with New Jersey Air National Guard KC-135s over the U.S. Eastern coastline.

2 p.m. We are on time to waypoint 15, which is a point designated as the start of an air refueling track near Bangor, ME. This will be one of the rare occasions that the co-pilot gets to re-fuel and take on a full 85,000 pounds of fuel. Ace says, "This is your chance to shine CO - don't mess it up." The co-pilot steadily takes on all of the fuel, and within 20-minutes, we're flying toward the end-of-track way point saying good-bye to the tanker crew over the radio. We jump on the high-frequency radio to call command post back home. We have to call Andrews Air Force Base on the HF radio, which connects us to the Ellsworth phone system. "Raymond 33, Slam 1 is green, AR-1 complete." This sortie happens to be a single-ship swap out, so our wingman in the second aircraft turns around at this point and flys back to Ellsworth. If our aircraft had any equipment or re-fueling malfunctions, we would turn around and the wingman would have gone forward. Once again, two green calls in one day - I need to thank every maintainer I know when I get home five days from now. We all settle down for a long seven-hour flight across the Atlantic.