C-130 helps damaged British jet land in Iraq

[unhappycamper]

C-130 helps damaged British jet land in Iraq
Staff report
Posted : Monday Dec 15, 2008 17:53:21 EST

A deployed C-130 Hercules aircrew is earning praise for guiding a damaged British jet to a safe night landing in Iraq.

On the night of Nov. 30, pilot Capt. Daniel Hilferty was flying near the worst storm he had ever seen when his crew heard a distress call from a Royal Air Force Hawker 800 passenger jet.

The RAF executive jet had been damaged by the storm and didn’t have a working weather radar or a fully functional yaw dampener to prevent the plane from swinging left and right. The British crew also didn’t know how much damage hail had done to the jet’s fuselage.

The C-130 crew, assigned to the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing, used readings from their weather radar to guide the RAF jet around the storm.

“It was pretty neat that we were helping them, to be their flying radar in the sky,” said flight engineer Senior Airman Sean Ryan. “Sometimes we could see better than they could, and we would tell them to turn a certain way to avoid this cloud or this part of the storm.”


Rest of article at: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/12/airforce_c130_emergencylanding_121508w/%2e