Just a quick Strike mission being dug out of the depths of the ATO. We managed to find one that had us hitting a weapons factory complex deep in North Korea. Each member of the flight was free to choose their own payload and most opted for LGBs. Discussion after the flight concentrated on the differences between the various bomb types and the differences within a certain bomb designation. We quickly agreed that BMS had more toys than we knew what to do with.
After a quick discussion and mission briefing, we quickly assigned targets and set out for the jets.
A nice slow left turn to Steer 2 while waiting for the flight to get up in the air.
#2 (Coolts) did a quick rejoin....
and soon enough the entire flight was in formation with #3 (CTR) and #4 (CrashEd) in position.
Ingress was uneventful although hauling the F-16 up to Angels 25 was a slow process. With a good distance to the target, I did not want us to burn too much fuel and as the route took us through 4 SA-2 battalions, I did not want to risk getting too low even with a SEAD flight clearing the way for us. Stable at Angels 25, we fenced in at 20nm from target and each of us started our attack runs. My target was the processor plant and I made sure it was gone with the help of two GBU-10s released in pair.
On my attack run, I noticed flak coming up at me at Angels 25 and these were the guys that made sure we didn't tarry over the target area for too long.
On my way out, it's nice to see the results of a good bomb run.
Our #3 and #4, CTR and CrashEd, had problems with their bombs and had to re-attack. For some reason, CrashEd decided he wanted a bit more fun and here he is dancing through the flak at Angels 15. I was expecting him to be blown to smithereens any moment but he came out of it unscathed!
On the way home, we were jumped with MiG-21s just as my BMS crashed for no apparent reason. By the time I got back in, CTR managed to kill one and scare away any more MiGs and the airspace was clear despite a flight of F-15s coming in to assist. As a result of all his turning-and-burning, CrashEd had a little more than 1,000lbs of fuel on Ops Check and CRUS-HOME estimated 300lbs of fuel by the time he got to base. Luckily he had a good 23,000 feet of "energy" to play with so I cleared him in for an emergency landing while I took the flight a bit south. Soon enough, we were 15nm from home plate and CrashEd declared an emergency. He had enough altitude to throttle back to idle and land. On this shot, the airbase is just off CrashEd's left wing.
All in all, a very good mission. No surprises on ingress, we managed to hit and destroy all our targets, killed a MiG and scared off the rest, deal with a small emergency, and come in and bring everyone back home. We decided to park on the grass (or dirt!) as we couldn't be bothered to taxi back to parking and besides, as Coolts said, "that's what all the cool kids do." I mustn't have been cool enough...
I noticed that restarting BMS, my jet was more-or-less where I expected it to be on the route, although when I jumped in, I had full fuel and my ordnance was also still there. Aside from that, my screenshot after the restart shows that the other F-16s also still had their bombs with them, as seen by the shot of CrashEd's plane showing him with his GBUs still on as well as that last pic of us on the ground. Another weird BMS bug, I guess.