Plus, they had all wanted to fly the Rafale in combat, but had never had the chance.
One of them was Jacques Arcement, who like the other instructors insisted on flying as wingmen, with their Qatari cadets in the lead. One reason for all three was that it was, after all, the Qataris’ air force.
For Jacques it was also that he genuinely considered his Qatari cadet to be a better natural pilot. Part of this was a function of age, but by no means all.
Mansour Al-Attiyah’s situational awareness and lightning-quick reaction time made him one of the best pilots Jacques had seen in any air force. In fact, part of what had motivated Jacques to volunteer was to give Mansour a chance to put those talents to use, since Jacques feared without the experience he and the other instructors could bring to bear the Saudis’ superiority in sheer numbers would be likely to overwhelm the QEAF.
Jacques stood on the runway's edge well away from his Rafale as he enjoyed a cigarette from what was likely to be his last pack of Gauloises. As he smoked it to its unfiltered end, he had to smile. Here he was smoking a Gauloise as he prepared to board a Rafale to do battle in a nearly hopeless cause. The only way to make the moment more French would be to find some fitting music played by an accordion.
The Rafales were out in front of the formation because they were one of the few aircraft that thanks to its two Snecma M88 engines could
“supercruise,” meaning it could travel faster than Mach 1 without using its afterburner, even when fully loaded with four missiles and a drop tank. So could the Typhoons with their two Eurojet EJ200 engines, which followed right behind them, primarily because the QEAF had more Rafales than Typhoons.
When he saw the Saudi attack group on his scope, though, he realized the battle would not be as lopsided as he’d thought. For a start, there were far fewer Typhoons than Jacques had expected. This was partly because all of the RSAF’s Typhoons, in Squadrons 3, 10, and 80 were based at King Fahd Air Base near Taif, a full one thousand kilometers from Prince Bilal’s force.
Jacques had no way to know the other reason was that only the Typhoon carried the Brimstone 2 air-to-ground missile, the RSAF’s only hope to take out the remaining S-300 guarding the northern invasion force. Many of the missing Typhoons were being fitted with Brimstone 2s at the same time as the strike against the Qatari force to do just that.
There were two big questions that Jacques knew would be answered in the next few minutes. The first was whether the Saudis had been arrogant enough to think that they could outfit their strike force with a mix of anti-air and anti-ground missiles to destroy the Qatari armored force and the QEAF in a single engagement, or whether they planned to take out the QEAF first followed by returning and rearming to destroy the now defenseless armor.
The second was whether the Typhoons that were approaching carried the Meteor. The first modern air-launched anti-aircraft missile to be developed by the Europeans, it had a classified range of “well over” a hundred kilometers, while the older AIM-120C that was the best carried on all Saudi fighters as well as the QEAF’s F-15s had a maximum range of about a hundred and five kilometers.
A new model AMRAAM, the AIM-120D, increased the missile’s range to one hundred sixty kilometers. So far, though, the Americans had only agreed to export it to Australia.
The Meteor’s hardware and software had been integrated into Typhoons in European air forces, and French technicians had completed the work for the Rafale in both the French and Qatari air forces, as well as the QEAF’s
Typhoons. Jacques thought the fact that the first air force outside Europe to receive the Meteor was flying the Rafale might have been because the company making the Meteor had a French CEO.
But Jacques was probably being too cynical.
Qatar didn’t have a real military intelligence service, relying on a few paid sources in the militaries of surrounding countries. They said the Meteor was not yet on any Saudi plane.
Today, they would find out for sure.
The Rafale had been upgraded in 2014 to the RBE2 AA active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar with a range of two hundred kilometers, and this upgrade was included in the Rafales delivered to Qatar in 2020. In theory that made it superior to the one hundred sixty kilometer range of the APG-63 in the F-15s flown by both the RSAF and QEAF, and the CAPTOR-D in the Typhoons flown by both the RSAF and QAEF with about the same range. Though only qualified as an instructor pilot in the Rafale, Jacques had also flown both the QEAF’s Typhoon and F-15 jets, and thought in practice all three radars’ performance was about the same.
Now it let him monitor a sight very rarely seen — the simultaneous launch of five dozen Meteor missiles by thirty-six Rafales and twenty-four Typhoons at the advancing RSAF planes. All Rafale and Typhoon pilots had been briefed before takeoff to launch their Meteors as soon as they all had a lock, even though this would make a hit unlikely.
In training Jacques had told his pilots to wait, if the tactical situation allowed it, to launch from sixty kilometers away from the target. The Meteor’s manufacturer MBDA called this the beginning of the “No Escape Zone.” Jacques made a point of telling his students there was no such thing, but it was true that a hit was far more likely at the lower range.
The point of firing the Meteors now anyway was to occupy the RSAF planes with something other than destroying Prince Bilal’s tanks. To some extent it worked. All planes with a Meteor locked onto them changed course and began using their electronic countermeasures.
Jacques swore as he heard AGM-114 Hellfire launch warnings, which answered his first question. The Saudis planned to take out both Prince Bilal’s force as well as the QEAF.
When no answering swarm of Meteors came, though, Jacques knew he had a happier answer to his second question. It looked like the RSAF didn’t have them yet.
Just a few minutes later, the range had been closed to the point that the QEAF’s three dozen F-15s could send their AIM-120Cs at the RSAF fighters. An answering and much larger swarm of AIM-120s came from the RSAF jets, though not from all of them. Some of the Meteors had scored hits even from extreme range and many other RSAF fighters were still occupied with evading them, and so were unable to lock onto a QEAF jet.
Now came the most difficult part of the engagement. Jacques and all the other Rafale and Typhoon pilots were going to ignore the AIM-120Cs headed their way, and fire another five dozen Meteors at the RSAF from within the so-called “No Escape Zone.” The orders at their briefing had stressed they should still have time after firing a second Meteor to evade the AIM-120C.
Well, Jacques thought grimly, the operative word is “should.”
From the point of view of the QEAF Commander, he thought the second Meteor plan made a lot of sense. More RSAF planes would probably be lost to Meteor hits than QEAF planes to AIM-120Cs, and in the meantime nearly all the RSAF planes would be too busy to attack Prince Bilal’s tanks.
Jacques’ point of view, though, was dominated by an AIM-120C that appeared to be very serious about killing him. Today would see the first real test of the Rafale’s self-defense suite, with the French acronym SPECTRA.
The capability of greatest interest to Jacques was its supposed ability to do active cancellation. In theory, this worked by sampling and analyzing incoming radar and feeding it back out of phase, which would interfere with the returning radar echo.
As Jacques tried every maneuvering trick he could think of to evade the AIM-120C, all he could think of was that his late father had been right. He had been an NCO in the French Army, and when Jacques had told him he planned to enlist in the Air Force had given him just two words of advice — never volunteer.