German Tornados fly first successful Afghan mission By Can Merey

dpa German Press Agency Published: Sunday April 15, 2007

By Can Merey,
Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan- At 10.25 the highly
anticipated moment has arrived. The German army camp in Mazar-e-
Sharif is rattled by the drone of the afterburners that the Tornado
pilot has turned on. The aircraft accelerates and flies into the
steel blue sky. A second Tornado follows.
Ninety-five minutes later the jets rush back, reappearing out of
nowhere to land, turning one last time before touching down at the
camp. The soldiers on the ground are relieved that their fellow
soldiers have returned safely.

At midnight on Sunday the German army informed the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) that the first two Tornados were
operational. On Monday, groundstaff will begin to prepare the
aircraft for takeoff.

Tractors drag the four Tornados from the hangar. Two will be put
in use, while two more will remain on standby, should technical
problems arise.

Soldiers inspect the jets in the burning heat, the air pressure of
its tyres is measured, the cables are checked and ammunition is
loaded into the machine guns.

The mission's technical leader arrives by bicycle and stops near
the hi-tech flying machine to greet his troops and look to the right.

He feels "a certain pride," says the technical chief whose team
achieved an enormous logistical feat to ensure that the Tornados
could actually take to the skies.

It took 650 tons of material flown in from Jagel in Schleswig-
Holstein and 100 technicians to work on six German Tornados.

"We had to lay half an airfield here," says the engineer, who
observes the aircraft start up from the edge of the airfield.

"Everything has gone off marvellously," he adds afterwards.

"Now, ideally, they must only come back." He is not handling a
test flight back home. "Naturally, it is more dangerous here than in
Schleswig-Holstein."

The Tornados took off in Mazar-e-Sharif, just hours after a
rocket-propelled grenade attack near another German base at Feisabad.
Two grenades had been fired shortly before midnight Saturday, a
spokesman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in Berlin Sunday. No one
was wounded.

Tornado crews will also "have to contend with the threat that is
there," says the squadron chief, Captain Thorsten Poschwatta.

"One must always go into the mission with a certain amount of
tension."

During the first flight, there were no threatening situations.
After the landing the pilots described an "impressive landscape."

Afghanistan is "a very interesting, beautiful land from above,
bearing in mind, of course, destruction and war also prevails here."

Locating the enemy is generally part of the mission, but on Sunday
that was not one of the duties, Poschwatta said.

With details of the NATO mission a secret, the captain said only
that the photographs shot during the reconnaissance flight were of a
"high quality". About 45 minutes after the aircraft land, the images
are presented as a NATO briefing in Kabul.

The photographs, captured from an altitude of 5,000 metres, are so
sharp that vehicle registrations are clearly visible. A good aerial
photography analyst has to have 10 years' experience, experts say.
Then he could even read information from the shadows in a photograph.
The German army analyst can.

"The first feedback from NATO is outstanding," Poschwatta
stresses. "It says, that is exactly what it needs here."

The highest levels of concentration are required, not only of
analysts on the ground, but also of the pilots in the air in a
difficult working environment even before the beginning of the war.

The glowing sun heats the glass of the cockpits above the
stationary jets, in which the air conditioning system functions only
during flight.

Crew endure heat of around 60 degrees before take off, says
Poschwatta.

After Sunday's deployment the crew is exhausted and while they
recover from the strain, the next crew prepares the mission for
Monday.

© 2006 - dpa German Press Agency

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