On the opening night of Operation Desert Storm, an Iraqi Mirage F1 came up behind an American EF-111A Raven. The Raven carried no guns and no missiles. How did its two-man crew come home with a claim to an air-to-air kill? In Episode 3 of Electronic Warriors, we follow the F-111 Aardvark’s transformation from strike aircraft to radar jammer. The Air Force called it the Raven. Its crews called it the “Spark Vark.” With a pilot and an electronic warfare officer sitting side by side, the Raven could keep pace with a strike package and jam the radars that surface-to-air missile crews relied on to track incoming aircraft. We’ll look at how escort jamming worked, why timing mattered to the pilots flying under its protection, and what Captain Jim Denton and Captain Brent Brandon reported when a Mirage found them over western Iraq on January 17, 1991. Subscribe to PilotPhotog for the rest of Chronicles of Airpower. Next up in Electronic Warriors is the Navy’s ES-3A Shadow and the carrier crews who hunted for enemy emitters. #EF111A #ElectronicWarfare #DesertStorm
Source: Why the Air Force Turned the F – 111 Into a Supersonic Jammer
