It had to be. Especially when turnarounds on returning aircraft were the key to operations.
A few minutes later the crew-chief slapped on the pilot helmets and closed the cockpit glass behind them. Others on the ground visually inspected the new load-out and showed a thumbs-up to the two pilots who nodded. Seconds later the two aircraft began rolling towards the runway…
Two minutes later two Mig-21s were climbing steadily over the foothills of the Great Himalayan peaks as they headed northeast, away from the raging dogfight between Indian and Chinese Sukhois to the west. The pilots checked fuel usage: they were using up the external fuel tanks first…
By this time the skies to the east were a shade of dark blue. The silhouettes of the mountains were still visible with their western slopes lit by the fading reddish light.
Like the Sukhoi pilots, these pilots also lowered his helmet mounted NVGs and changed the visceral colors in front of them into a greenish-black hell-scape. The stars suddenly became visible almost as if they were lights that had been switched on. The Himalayan mountains were blanketed in light green coloration now…
The two Mig-21s were burning the external fuel fast as they built up speed and altitude. The HUD showed all the required statistics.
The external fuel tankage indicators were on their way down. A minute later the two Mig-21s reached twenty-five thousand feet altitude and the pilots brought their aircrafts down to zero climb-angle. But the afterburners were still on and the acceleration was high.
Several minutes later the external fuel tanks were dry and the aircraft were cruising at very high subsonic velocities. That was when the pilots flipped over a switch to separate the source of unnecessary drag and four empty drop-tanks punched off their pylons and separated into the slipstream behind.
A few moments later the two Bisons went supersonic…
While the battle over Se-La was being fought, the single Tu-154 electronic-warfare aircraft from the PLAAF 26TH Air Division loitered over the beautiful vegetated valleys of what had been eastern Tibet at some time in history. On board the aircraft the crew of EW officers was manning their consoles as they attempted to support the 33RD Fighter Division assets over Arunachal Pradesh.
Flying to their north was a single KJ-2000 AWACS aircraft on patrol coordinating the air defense of southern Tibet. The Tu-154 was under the protection of this aircraft and its supporting squadron of J-8IIs on air-defense tasking from the 33RD Fighter Division.
Approaching this force were the two Indian Mig-21s armed with one R-77 each and one Israeli made electronic-warfare pod each. They were being guided to their targets by the CABS AEW aircraft over Assam that had detected the Tu-154 through its jamming efforts a short while ago.
The only other weapons the two Indian pilots had was the element of surprise. The Chinese would not expect them to be back in the sky so soon after taking heavy losses against the J-7s. If anything, they would have been expected to go in support of their Su-30s to the west.
The sheer audacity of the operation was the key to its success.
Hitting the enemy exactly where they didn’t expect to be hit was crucial in affecting his psychology. And daring was a key element to achieving this.
But executing the operation was not so simple. The two Bisons were going up against a dedicated electronic-warfare aircraft. And that meant they could not activate their own radars until the very last moment, lest they give away their presence or worse, allow the crew on board the Chinese aircraft to interfere with their guidance radars.
That made them passive. And dependent on the radar picture from their AEW support over Assam. It also made them very vulnerable to what lay far to the north. They could not activate their EW pods pre-emptively either or else they would give their game away indirectly. Only when they had been engaged by hostile forces were they to go active on both their radars and self-defense jammers.
The two pilots could not help but feel naked deep into Chinese airspace. Their only warning system was the passive on-board RWRs. This had already detected the emissions from the KJ-2000 radar to the north. With each passing second, they neared their intended target…
The tension in the cockpits increased.
Two minutes away from being close enough to take their R-77 shot at a good engagement range, the RWRs started squawking inside their ears indicating that a flight of J-8IIs had activated radars to the north and were painting them for a missile shot.
The game was up.
The two Mig-21s did not budge away from their flight-path. Their job was not done and they weren’t going home empty handed. Deep inside enemy airspace, the two pilots finally activated their electronic-warfare pods and went active on their missile guidance radars…
Take the damn shot!
A voice in the flight-leader’s head shouted. His index finger rested on the launch button. Every second of delay meant greater chances of killing the target. But give it too much time and chances were that the J-8IIs would knock them out of the sky without warning. The trade-off was the key to success…
“Blue-Five. Taking the shot… now!”
He said over the radio and pressed the launch button on his control-stick. The cockpit shuddered as the R-77 round fell off the pylon, lit its motor and boosted it away. His wingman did the same and the two missiles were on their way.
Twenty kilometers to the north, the Tu-154 flight-crew was banking their aircraft to its limits to deal with the sudden and unexpected threat that had materialized just south of them. As the operators behind were shouting at each other and trying to deal with the two missiles heading for them, the Major flying the aircraft and his co-pilot had already pushed the engines to full-throttle and were diving as best as their aircraft would allow.
They had received warning of the threat from the KJ-2000 crew two minutes ago, and that provided barely enough time to react on an aircraft converted out of an outdated airliner. Inside the cockpit they could hear the radio chatter from the J-8II pilots about to engage the two Indian intruders. The latter were racing south on full afterburners.
But it wasn’t enough.
A few seconds later the flight crew on the Tu-154 were shaken in their seats as the first Indian missile slammed into the port wing flaps and detonated. The cabin to the rear was instantly shredded with shrapnel. This killed a good number of the operators where they sat. The port wing broke away from the fuselage and the large aircraft rolled over uncontrollably just as the cabin suddenly depressurized and broke into pieces.
When the second R-77 slammed into what remained of the aircraft fuselage, the Tu-154 disintegrated midair…
The extremely small speck of white light in the night sky amplified by the NVGs was cue for the Indian pilots that their job was done. Their radar display said the same thing. By now their RWRs were screaming of inbound threats all around them, they had no weapons to release other than cannon rounds and fuel was low. There was every motivation for the two Indian pilots to break flight, dive for the deck, throw chaff and flares all over the sky and begin praying that their fuel would last the extended low level flight back to Indian airspace…
It needed to be done quickly.
The airbase was still under threat from almost regular Chinese cruise-missile attacks and it only took one shot to make it lethal for a target as large as the Il-76 parked on an open tarmac. It was therefore no surprise to Wing-Commander Dutt that it had taken so long for his airlift to take place. What had been planned for the morning had taken till nightfall…