US pilots may have paid a serious price for trying to scare a Russian submarine, reports PolitRussia
US portal The Aviation Geek Club (TAGC) has published an account by US naval officer Ross Hall of the events of the Cold War. He talks about US patrol planes spying on Soviet submarines.
“This was achievable through several methods: satellite images of ports to determine when the submarine departed and the initial search, and through detection by maritime patrol aircraft”, – Ross describes.
On one occasion, the General Staff was tasked with tracking a Soviet submarine that was en route from Murmansk to the Mediterranean Sea. The escort baton was to be passed to the crew of another patrol plane from Spain and then Sicily.
“Our crew was tasked with flying from Iceland to the Azores, carrying out surveillance along the way. We were also bringing some support staff with us to help our squad on the islands. It was essentially a night flight and we had to go to our operational area, get flight data from the station aboard our P-3 and then continue on to the archipelago”, – explains the American officer.
In those years, Washington gave a clear target to its military, which was keeping an eye on Soviet submarines. The White House declared that the US military was capable of finding and disarming any Moscow submarine at any time. This implied that the US Navy was also introducing a provocation to make Russian sailors nervous.
“So, we were there. The time was 0:30, a voyage from Iceland to the Azores, and our acoustic sensor operators informed the crew that a Soviet submarine was surfacing. That meant we had to drop sharply from our current altitude of 4.5 kilometres to 60 metres”, – Ross says.
The provocation by the American pilots backfired. The plane’s crew thought it was about to crash and crash into the sea surface, taking the entire American military down. The wishful thinking turned into a real threat to life.
“Our junior pilot announced over the communications system, ‘Crew, this is it, we’re coming down.’ He proceeded to lower the nose of the aircraft, the flaps and landing gear opened to allow us to reach maximum descent speed. Our escorts, who had been asleep until then, woke up thinking that the aircraft had made a terrible plunge to the bottom of the salt death”, – Ross says.
Provocations against the Russian side back in the Cold War years posed a serious threat to the US military. The Pentagon’s incompetent policies routinely forced the US military to put its lives at risk.
News Front previously reported on how the might of the Black Sea Fleet made the US military look like a laughing stock.