BELGIAN AIR FORCE IN ACTION OVER LIBYA.

Since Monday, March 21 the Belgian Air Force participates in enforcing the no-fly zone above Libya and its coastal waters. To help enforce the naval blockade, there's also the minehunter BNS Narcis. The planes detailed with the task are six F-16s operating from the Greek Araxos AFB, on the north side of the Peloponnesus peninsula. Apart from denying airspace to Libyan aircraft, they also attack ground targets. Just this evening, the Belgian MoD released these images of an attack on a Libyan airfield:











The following video shows a strike on a hangar. What's weird is that the contents of the hangar seem to be blown up while the structure itself remains intact. Our F-16s use either laser or GPS guided GBU12s or GBU38s, to the best of my knowledge it should be possible with both to aim them through the hangar's front and this seems to be what happened:





I am a bit clueless here. When a laser-guided bomb like the GBU12 is used, the target has to be kept in the jet pilot's seeker field. But given the widely different angles on several of the photos I wonder if not a GBU38 JDAM was used. We've shed some light on the former bomb in earliers posts. As for the latter, the Belgian Air Force has had it in its inventory since a couple of years, and has been using it in Afghanistan. Below is a pic of one of our F-16s on KAF (Kandahar Airfield) being armed with a GBU38 (JDAM). It's actually a fairly recent weapon. I think the USAF used it in combat only as recently as 2004, and possibly only in 2006, while its cousin the GBU12 has been in use since 1976.





Naturally, the dumb*sses over at Belgian daily De Standaard, commenting on the strikes, had it completely wrong again when they described the plane destroyed as a "Sukhoi 2": "Het vernietigde toestel was van het type Sukhoi 2, vergelijkbaar met Mirages waar de Belgische tot begin jaren '90 mee vloog."





Translation: "The destroyed aircraft was a Sukhoi 2, comparable to the Mirages with which the Belgian Air Force flew until the early nineties".


Duh. This is a Sukhoi-2:





The Belgian Armed Forces have been starved of funds since time immemorial, but I don't think that even our Air Force wasn't using "something comparable" as late as the early nineties.

Personally I think it's - ahem, it was - rather a Sukhoi-22, of which the LAF at its zenith operated around 90 units. As of January 2011, the Libyans would still have used around 40 of them. If you look at the silhouette of the plane on the second photo above, and then compare it to the photo below, I think a Su-22 is indeed your best bet:





Can't these guys ever get their facts straight?



MFBB.



PS: a Su-22 is now an old plane of course, but no matter what you think of the Ruskis or the Russian commies - they had and have DAMN GOOD engineers. I have always admired them. A pity that so much talent served so bad a cause.