Re: CEP ? Korean War Jet CAS

Korean War rockets were the old 5" HVAR which mostly had minds of their
own. No idea what a ballistics test CEP would be; I'm of a later
generation and fired 2.75s. Oddly enough, we never used them when I was
at Da Nang. The only people who did were the FCs, slow and fast, who
used the 2.75 WP rockets for target marking. Ed's remarks on dive
bombing struck home. All those factors kind of went out the window
except for canned situations. But doing CAS a lot of TLAR was used and
we got pretty good, but then we were lower and faster, typically 30
degree dive, 500K, and 2700 foot release. Dropping 3 at a time made up
for a lot of range error. Hi-drags and napalm were dropped lower
because these were troops-in-contact loads. Then we went as low as the
mission required. Up north it was 45, 500 and 8000 foot. Dropping all
at the same time covered a lot of error, too. 12 Mk82 plus 2 CBU52 does
cover some ground. (Standard load for that mission in 71/72). BTW dive
toss was not very reliable in SEA; I watched 4 birds from Ubon
completely miss a SAM convoy moving into Laos about 25 miles south of
Mu Gia. They were rolling in from an orbit way higher than our own
orbit altitude. When our turn came we were now short on fuel so it was
one pass haul ass time. We released at 3000 AGL and got good BDA from
the Nail FAC. I never did get very good doing DB on the range - skip/LA
and strafe were my games.
Among IPs it was a buck a bomb and a nickle a bullet. What I lost on DB
I made up in skip and bullets. "Way back when' among IPs only hits on
the fly counted in skip bomb. BTW at Bitburg we put on a fire power
demo at Grafenwohr for the grunts. dropping live bombs, dive-bombing,
etc. One of our guys hit an old junked tank square on top of the turret
but the bomb dudded. The grunts jeered. We told them to go look at the
tank. There was a hole slightly bigger than the Mk82 clear through the
tank, top to bottom. Made them think a bit on that one. Back to teh
thread - iron sight bombing is an art because unless it's a canned
situation you never know the wind nor the target altitude so that first
pass is to discover how much Kentucky windage you gotta use. But the
closer you get the closer you hit.
Now with the magic built into the delivery systems - much of the TLAR
and the personal art is gone. Good riddance.
Walt BJ

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