Jags
Have been trawling through a few old videos of the original 1991 Gulf War. One of the stand out aircraft was the often overlooked Jaguar, which did not suffer any losses and had an excellent record of hitting its targets.
Does anyone have any records or accounts of the types of mission the Jaguar took part in?
And I don't know how true it is, but apparently an RAF Jaguar managed to look horns with an Iraqi interceptor and came very close to shooting the MiG 25 down, the missile narrowly missed its target, but causing the MiG to flee. Pub talk? Or does anyone have any proof about this?
Thanks for any help.
It was indeed an amazing aircraft and I was very lucky to spend in excess of 10 years serving on 6 sqn based at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk. I actually deployed to GW1 with 41 sqn, as i did not originally deploy with my regular unit (6 sqn) when they initially deployed to Oman 48 hours after Saddam invaded Kuwait and they then subsequently moved to Bahrain.
I deployed with 41 sqn from Nov 1990 until April 1991 and saw how reliable the aircraft was during the entire period of the deployment. from my recollection I can only recall 2 sorties where the initial aircraft went u/s (unserviceable) and therefore another a/c was operated. This as oppossed to the Tornadoes based in Muhurraq, Bahrain aswell, as they regularly crew all 12 a/c that they had in theatre for an 8 a/c mission, due to the Tornado's unreliability.
I cant recall any reports of run in's with Iraqi aircraft, but I do recall that the first day that the Jag was used (which was 4 days into the air war if memory serves me) we had 2 aircraft that returned with 1 sidewinder missing rffrom the newly installed overwing pylons. Neither were launched due to air to air combat. One was launched in error when the pilot meant to test his guns and had the missile selected and another pilot, believe it or not, launched the missile at an Iraqi military truck when he got a lock on "growl" from the sidewinder. If you manage to search for any GW1 photos of the Jaguar a/c you may stumble upon the nose art and take a good look through the photos and you will find the 2 aircraft that launched the missiles, one has a sidewinder painted with "(oops!)" where we painted alll the stores dropped during the war, and the other aircraft has a sidewinder painted on the aircraft with " ( x1 Truck!) " written next to it.
Those were some great times to be serving on the Jaguar force and even though no-one really ever wants to go to war, I was and still am very proud to have served with such a fine group of people and such a wonderful aircraft. The jaguar definitely had it's issues and problems at times, but I honestly believe that it was the most reliable time I had ever known the aircraft to be.
Only 2 aircraft only sustained minor flack damage during the whole conflict and that damage only required panel replacements and did not involve grounding the aircraft.
