Mavericks live at Patriot Rifle III

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Greg Steele
  • 917th Wing Public Affairs Office
Barksdale AFB, La. --  The 917th Wing deployed 55 personnel and six A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, on September 9, 2009, to participate in exercise Patriot Rifle III.

Patriot Rifle III is an exercise which gives pilots and maintainers the opportunity to train and launch sorties employing live AGM-65 Maverick missiles. The AGM-65 is a guided air-to-ground missile which is primarily used to attack heavy armored vehicles, such as tanks and armored personnel carriers.

"Our training missiles back home have the same seeker heads as the live, but don't actually leave the jet when fired," said Maj. Garrett Povar, 47th Fighter Squadron pilot. "This is a convenient place to shoot Mavericks since we get an allocation every year and can't shoot them at our home ranges."

The Utah Training and Test Range, which covers roughly 12,000 square miles, is one of the largest live-fire ranges in the United States. Inside UTTR is Kitty Kat Range, which is controlled primarily for live fire AGM-65 missile sorties.

"This section of the range and targets is reserved for AGM-65's," said Willie Crouse, UTTR Range Manager. "The missile has about an eight- mile footprint, which means once it's fired, you have to have a lot of room for the missile to travel."

Over the course of two days, the mission objective was to successfully fire twenty-nine AGM-65 Maverick missiles that had been allocated to the 47th FS. The primary target for pilots flying over Kitty Kat Range was a 15-vehicle convoy made up of APC's and large-sized trucks.

"We had 29 Mavericks to shoot, and 27 came off the rail. One had a bad seeker head and another failed to fire," said Senior Master Sgt. Mike Thornton, 717th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron production superintendent. "Each unit is allocated an X number of munitions to expend, this year we were fortunate that we ended up with this number and were able to give a lot of people some first class training on them."

Neil Dunridge, a freelance photographer from Oxford, England, is authoring a book about the A-10 Thunderbolt II and was able to imbed with the 47th Fighter Squadron during the deployment.

"This book will not be just about the A-10, but also about the maintenance personnel who keep it flying," said Mr. Dunridge. "The people were fantastic and the trip couldn't have gone better."