On January 17, 1991, Captain Brent Brandon saw a missile coming toward his EF-111A Raven. An Iraqi Mirage F1 had slipped behind the American jet over western Iraq. Beside Brandon, Captain Jim Denton had speed, room to turn, and very little altitude to work with. His aircraft carried neither a gun nor an air-to-air missile.
The Raven crew came home that night. In their account, the Mirage flew into the ground during the encounter. It’s the story behind one of the Gulf War’s most unusual air-to-air claims, and it raises a question that gets to the heart of the Raven’s career. Why would the Air Force send an unarmed jet into airspace dangerous enough to need a fighter escort?
Why strike crews wanted a Raven along
Picture the engagement from the ground. A surface-to-air missile crew detects aircraft approaching and needs a reliable radar track to engage them. Across the cockpit from the Raven pilot, an electronic warfare officer works to deny that crew the information it needs. Even a short interruption matters. The strike aircraft are moving, and every second spent trying to recover the track leaves less time to fire.
That was the job the Air Force had in mind when it converted the swing-wing F-111A Aardvark into an electronic warfare aircraft. Jamming equipment took the place of the bomber’s weapons load. The prominent fairing atop the vertical tail gave the EF-111A its distinctive silhouette. The original aircraft contributed something just as important as the electronics. It had the speed to keep up with the aircraft it was protecting.
For a strike pilot, the most important thing the Raven did might be something the pilot never saw. Somewhere along the route, a radar crew lost its opportunity to take a shot.
When the escort became the target
The Mirage encounter put Denton and Brandon in a different position. Their equipment could help a formation get past radar-guided defenses. Now a fighter was behind them, and Denton had to fly his way out. In the crew’s account, he accelerated, descended, and made a hard turn close to the desert floor. The Raven recovered. The pursuing Mirage crashed.
That distinction matters to the story. The crew claimed a maneuver kill. What happened over Iraq that night came down to the decisions made in two cockpits at low altitude. It was an extraordinary moment in the career of an aircraft whose crews ordinarily judged success by how many other crews got home.
Watch the EF-111A Raven episode
In Episode 3 of Electronic Warriors, we follow the EF-111A from its F-111 roots to its escort-jamming role in Desert Storm, and revisit what Denton and Brandon reported from the cockpit that night.
Next in Chronicles of Airpower, we return to the carrier deck with the Navy’s ES-3A Shadow. Where the Raven transmitted powerful signals to disrupt enemy radars, the Shadow’s crews listened for the transmissions that could give an enemy away.