A few of them don't make it through the canyon even more pilots fall to the obstacle the enemy had waiting at the end, and the protagonist only survives because of an obscure fact about the jet he was piloting: the F-8 Crusader can fly while its wings are folded for carrier transport. During the mission briefing, the base commander overlays cross-sections of the three narrowest sections of the canyon to prove that there's barely enough space for a fighter to fly through. Area 88: All adaptations except the video game include the early mission where the base pilots have to fly through a narrow, winding canyon to evade radar and SAMs en route to an enemy base.But they’ve proved they can get creative, and find some way of striking back against their attackers. Maybe the Ukrainians, if that’s who’s responsible, can’t mount another Mi-24 raid on Russian territory as the war enters its second phase.

Ukrainian brigades are counterattacking around Kyiv in the north and Kherson in the south, chasing after exhausted Russian troops who are retreating-“redeploying,” according to the Kremlin-toward separatist-controlled Donbas in eastern Ukraine. As the war enters its sixth week, Ukraine clearly has plenty of fight left in it. The statement the Ukrainians apparently made on Friday arguably matters the most. More importantly, the Russians have been targeting Ukraine’s fuel depots, too, potentially starving Kyiv’s planes and ’copters of the fuel they need for intensive operations. Ukraine went into the current war with just 125 fighters and bombers and 60 helicopters-and already has lost at least 11 of the former and two of the latter. It’s not clear the Friday raid is a prelude to a wider campaign of deep strikes by Ukrainian aircraft. The attack poked a hole in Baghdad’s air-defense network for subsequent U.S. Special Operations Command MH-53 transports, flew hundreds of miles and fired Hellfire missiles at a pair of Iraqi radars.

17, 1991, eight Army AH-64 gunships, led by two U.S. In ambition if not in purpose, the Friday attack echoes a U.S. The crews may have hung external fuel tanks under the ’copters’ stub wings, giving them a bit of extra range. On internal fuel alone, the 13-ton gunship can range just a couple hundred miles. It’s possible the raid stretched the Mi-24s’ endurance. Both Mi-24s apparently safely returned to whatever hidden base they launched from. They got close and let fly brute-simple, unguided rockets requiring no guidance by forces on the ground. They flew low, under cover of darkness, staying below the horizon of air-defense radars. If other forces supported the gunships, it wasn’t apparent in the dramatic videos of the raid that circulated online as the fires still burned. The Mi-24s flew through air space that, in theory, is heavily defended.

It’s hard to overstate how daring the raid was-again, assuming the attackers were Ukrainian. And on Friday, two of the twin-seat Mi-24s seem to have flown potentially a hundred miles or more to lob S-8 rockets at the Belgorod depot. Analysts have confirmed, via photos and videos, just two losses among Ukraine’s pre-war fleet of around 30 each active Mi-8 transports and Mi-24 gunships.

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