Live Gun Practice

So yesterday I strapped on an F-15 all loaded up with live bullets and went out to practice shooting at a target over the ocean.  Doing the preflight I look up into the magazine and there are 940 huge shells 7 inches long all loaded up ready to fire.  Our gun is a six barrell electrically fired gatlin gun that shoots 6,000 rounds a min.  That's 100 high explosive bullets every second.  Combine that with a great radar computed lead sight and a pilot who can make it happen and it's a very lethal weapon.

The way we shot is one jet had a target (30ft x 2ft) that it towed a couple thousand feet back.  Then it started out high and went into a tight spiral at 350kts for about four minutes down to the floor.  Two of us would then take turns cycling behind it, lining up on the little banner (which was hard to see) and taking a one second burst, then repositioning outside the turn circle.  It was pretty cool to see these three jets swirling down with one taking a shot every 15 seconds.  The first time I rolled in and pulled the trigger I was so concentrated on what I was doing I forgot the gun was actually going to shoot, so when I heard this loud "brrrraaa" and felt the jet shake a little it surprised me.  When the other guy took his shot you could see the smoke pouring off the wing which was pretty cool too. 

The end result was that I was very encouraged by this exercise.  I ended up having direct hits on that tiny banner (much smaller than an actual airplane in profile) half the time and within the scoring cone on all of the passes.  I figure if we can hit something that small ( really could hardly see it) then tracking an airplane is definitely possible.