It’s funny the way avi­a­tors talk about their air­planes. Every flier’s got his favorite jet, the one he’s most com­fort­able in and which behaves best for him. “Every air­plane is dif­fer­ent,” explains one main­te­nance sergeant here at Al Asad air base in west­ern Iraq.
Each of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332s dozen F/​A-​​18D Hornets has a slightly dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion of sen­sors and sys­tems, which par­tially explains their unique per­son­al­i­ties. But even jets with the same equip­ment tend to have dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ments.
In any squadron, the main­tain­ers know the air­planes in ways the fliers don’t. After all, they’re the ones turn­ing wrenches, pump­ing lubes and bang­ing their shins on pan­els 12 hours at a time to keep the birds in the air for three or four hours every other day. And main­tain­ers will tell you: some­times there are jets that just refuse to coop­er­ate. “Hangar queens”, they’re called.
332 is lucky. It doesn’t really have any hangar queens. And the hard work of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of main­tain­ers, plus a care­ful cadre of pilots, has achieved a notable dis­tinc­tion: in early 2005 the squadron marked 100,000 hours with­out crash­ing a jet, one of the best safety records of any Marine Corps jet squadron. This long streak of good for­tune has made every­one a lit­tle super­sti­tious, and the last jet that crashed, A-​​6E Intruder no. 05 back in 1978, haunts the ready room like a ghost. “Nobody talks about 05,” says one offi­cer.
Jets are like diesel engines: the more you work them, they more reli­able they are — to a point. 332 is wring­ing more flight hours out of its jets than ever, thanks to the relent­less pace of oper­a­tions in Al Anbar province. At some point in the near future, there will be a reck­on­ing. The fly­ing here is not ter­ri­bly tax­ing, just a lot of medium-​​altitude cruis­ing, but still… most fast jets are good for only around 8,000 hours, and the Hornets here have eaten up just under ten per­cent of that total in the past seven months alone. Worse, the Marine Corps’ single-​​seat birds will be swapped out for Joint Strike Fighters some­time after 2012, but no one’s pos­tu­lated a replace­ment for the hard­work­ing F/​A-​​18Ds.
–David Axe

The war in Iraq requires a lot of aer­ial refu­elling and mov­ing a lot of stuff between crappy lit­tle airstrips. No air­plane is bet­ter at both tasks than the ven­er­a­ble C-​​130.
After 40 years of build­ing first-​​generation Hercules for dozens of cus­tomers all over the world, in the mid-​​1990s, Lockheed Martin switched to the new J model, which was sup­posed to be faster, longer-​​ranged and capa­ble of car­ry­ing more cargo and fuel. But J cus­tomers have com­plained that new plane just isn’t as capa­ble or reli­able as the older mod­els. The Air Force took almost a decade get­ting its Js into bat­tle, and now the Marines are fol­low­ing suit. Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 252 has deployed its KC-​​130J tanker-​​transports to Al Asad air­base in Iraq’s Al Anbar province, the type’s first for­eign mis­sion in Marine Corps ser­vice, and the news is good.
The fighter pilots of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 rely on the KC-​​130s to extend their legs over west­ern Iraq. So far, 332 has no com­plaints. The refu­el­ers has been on time with the gas, which is more com­pli­cated than it sounds. Tanker crews have to be flex­i­ble and effi­cient to meet the fast-​​movers when and where they can — and in unpre­dictable weather.
Still, the C-​​130J was threat­ened with shut­down when the Defense Department went cost-​​cutting last December. Congress came to the res­cue, but the Pentagon’s clas­si­fied Mobility Study might try again to can­cel future buys. Meanwhile, the mar­ket for second-​​hand first-​​gen Hercules is white hot, and the Lockheed Martin facil­ity in Greenville, S.C. is work­ing full-​​time to recon­di­tion retired C-​​130s for resale to cus­tomers like Poland and Pakistan. Only time will tell if the J model wins the same loy­alty.
–David Axe

At noisy Al Asad air base, the nois­i­est jets belong to Marine Electronic Attack Squadron 1. It’s hard not to notice the squadron’s EA-​​6B Prowlers, but don’t get caught look­ing. While tour­ing the hangars of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332, my escort and I walked past the Prowlers and caught the evil eye from some air­crew return­ing from a mis­sion.
What exactly the Prowlers are doing in Iraq is clas­si­fied — and even 332’s fliers don’t know for sure. My feel­ing is that it’s got some­thing to do with impro­vised explo­sive devices or com­mu­ni­ca­tions intel­li­gence. The Prowlers are packed with sen­si­tive radio receivers and carry elec­tronic noise jam­mers under their wings.
If the EA-​​6Bs are indeed jam­ming IEDs, they wouldn’t be the only U.S. air­craft doing so. The EC-​​130 Compass Call has also been pressed into fight against IEDs. On one March patrol with the 25th Infantry Division in Qayyarah, I watched the Compass Call make a pass over­head, wip­ing out all radio recep­tion in its path.
Replacement of the 30-​​year-​​old Prowlers — the only fast EW plat­forms in the U.S. inven­tory — is a top pri­or­ity. The Navy has picked the EA-​​18G Growler, a devel­op­ment of the F/​A-​​18F Super Hornet to replace its EA-​​6Bs, but the Marines have yet to name a suc­ces­sor. There have been rumors [ con­firmed ed.] of an elec­tronic war­fare suite in the Marines’ ver­sion of the Joint Strike Fighter, the vertical-​​landing F-​​35B . But it might prove hard adapt­ing a single-​​seat jet to a mis­sion cur­rently per­formed by a jet seat­ing four.
– David Axe