Publisher's Synopsis
The extraordinary story of the band of maverick missileers and the first combat downing of the STEALTH aircraft in history.All they have is less than 30 seconds to acquire the target, engage it and bring it down. Everything longer than that short time frame means possibility of their own destruction.What was their "tool of trade"? The obsolete missile system...a slingshot to fight most modern aircraft of the mightiest military alliance in the world...And they used that slingshot to bring down those aircraft. They were targeted many times, attacked with the missiles and packs of SAM hunter-killers but they withstood and survived to fight another day...and to win their own battles. This is the story about them...The story of the band of maverick missileers and the first combat downing of the STEALTH aircraft in history as seen through the eyes of someone who was there...but this is also the story of their opponents as well...and the story about the technologies - radars, stealth, missile guidance, SA-3 on their collision courses which culminated on March 27, 1999 at the sky over Serbia in the night when the air warfare changed for good... The intention of this book is to describe and enlighten in detail one event that shook, shaped and steered the aviation twenty years ago. That event happened when something that was marvel in aviation been brought down with something that was, at the time of use, almost obsolete. This book took the approach firstly through the eyes of missile crew than through the eyes of pilot in the last war of 20th century where one small, independent country, in the middle of Europe, was brutally attacked by mighty alliance for the sake of political reasons that are very controversial. But this event was not just the end of experiment, rather the beginning. Definitely, in the future stealth and missile will meet many more times in the sky over some other countries. Both authors participated in that war in the air defence and intelligence roles. Lt. Col. Anicic, as a missile battalion deputy commander and executive officer, was personally involved in downing F-117A. Because of the necessary requirements of security, both stealth and air defence materials are not widely known and there are a lot of speculations about these events, both in the printed material and also on the web. Some of them are pure imagination and some of them are close to the truth. The real truth is now known to a very narrow circle of experts but even there some the finest details are not known. The intention of the authors was not to write a pure technical book simply because there are plenty of technical publications and manuals about the radars, stealth, missiles, air defence suppression, development programs etc. The intention was also not to just address the historical events, but rather to combine all of that in a story which can tell both professional in their respectful field and also general public how the clash of two technologies culminated in the sky over Serbia and what are the consequences for the technology development and impacts on future of the air warfare.One of the challenges with this type of approach is to objectively expose error without casting the slightest shadow on those who took an oath and fought for their countries. In majority of books about air warfare, there is usually an accent on one side, depends who the author is and for which audience the book is intended. Of course, majority books are related to the pilots - fighter pilots, bombers or "wild weasel" crews.This book took another approach.This edition consist revised and corrected noted errors.
