No Mission Is Impossible by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal Page B

to take off and fly in complete radio silence, at the lowest possible altitude—below the zone covered by radar—and to reach their targets at exactly the same time. Most of the flights would need to be carried out over the Mediterranean Sea in order to reach Egypt from the north. Others, directed at the most remote airfields, would fly over Israel’s Negev Desert and the Red Sea. It was necessary to lay out precise flight paths and timetables, and endless drills were conducted involving takeoffs and flights at an altitude of up to one hundred feet above sea level.
    To carry out its plan, the air force would need 530 attack planes, even though it possessed just two hundred. The solution, it turned out, was born out of a remark made by David Ben-Gurion during a visit to the Ramat David airbase, when he asked the base commander, “How long does it take you to prepare a plane that has just returned for another mission?”
    That vital period of time—for refueling from tankers, bringing in ammunition trucks and more—was between an hour and an hour and a half. Ben-Gurion’s remark was a wake-up call for the air force staff,who decided to shorten drastically each plane’s prep time before its next flight. Fueling pipelines and hoses were laid to the underground hangars where the planes were parked so that they could be refilled the moment they arrived. In each hangar, a load of munitions and bombs for one or two missions was kept at the ready, and the moment it was placed on the plane, another load was sent to the site for the next flight. Ground crews were trained to perform all the preparations and checks in record time. Their commanders stood next to the planes with stopwatches, assessing ways to cut additional minutes and seconds. Contests began among the squadrons’ air crews and even among the different bases.
    Each fighter plane’s prep time was shortened to between five and seven minutes; as a result, the air force’s power increased several times over, as the number of planes was multiplied by the number of additional missions they could now carry out. And, as the Arab Air Forces’ planes spent longer periods on the ground between flights, it was possible for Israel’s Air Force to launch several offensive waves with a much smaller number of aircraft.
    The bombing of the airfields was now planned. At some, the runways had been paved with concrete, and with asphalt at others. Each type of runway required a different weapon. The air force had bombs weighing 110, 154, 551 and 1,102 pounds, and needed to match the types of explosives and attack planes with the airfields. Some airfields had just one runway, but Egypt’s MiGs could also take off from the taxiway that ran parallel to it; it would be necessary to hit that strip as well. At other airfields, the runways intersected. Several had runways that were more than 1.85 miles long, even though the MiGs needed only a third of that distance; in those cases, it would be necessary to divide the runway into thirds and hit each part with precision strikes.
    The research lab at Israel Military Industries (IMI), under the management of the engineer Avraham Makov, had overseen the development of the anti-runway penetration bomb, which would be dropped from roughly 330 feet overhead. A tiny parachute would immediately eject, directing the nose of the bomb at a sixty-degree angle toward the ground; simultaneously, a retro-rocket in its tail would activate, propellingit with great force toward the runway. The 154-pound bomb would penetrate the concrete runway and explode six seconds later, leaving a crater nearly five feet deep and more than sixteen feet in diameter. IMI had also developed a large anti-runway penetration bomb of even greater strength and, by the start of the war, had supplied the air force with sixty-six of the larger model and 187 of the smaller.
    The question was how to bomb the runways. Would a plane carrying