‘Hack Time’ Gives Pilots New Role in Supporting Assault : Air war: Fliers guard against MIGs, report ‘spectacular results’ in hitting enemy artillery firing on GIs.

Precisely at 3:11 Sunday morning, the moon dipped below the horizon in Saudi Arabia and the soft shadows of the desert night gave way to deep blackness. “It won’t be long now,” Lt. Col. Randy Bigum said to himself.

Forty-nine minutes later, one of the controllers handling Bigum’s F-16A mission said, “Hack time! Hack time!”--military parlance for the stroke of the hour. But in this case it was confirmation that the ground war was under way, launched, as Bigum thought it would be, in the darkest moments of the night.

From air bases across Saudi Arabia, hundreds of warplanes from nearly a dozen nations headed for the skies above Kuwait and southern Iraq as a massive invading force punched its way through Iraqi lines with unexpected speed. For 39 days, pilots had been the stars of the allied war campaign. Now, for the first time, they were in a supporting role.

“My worst nightmare,” Bigum said, “is that the Iraqis get some MIGs together and get something through, and drop chemical weapons on these Army guys. I’ll do anything to keep that from happening.”

“I feel badly the ground troops had to go in,” said Lt. Lou Defidelto, “but I’m sure it was absolutely necessary. I hope it’s quick, with a minimum of casualties. It’s a shame they had to go.”

After more than a month of bombing Iraq, the emphasis of the allied air campaign shifted south Sunday, where skies were cloudy, forcing pilots to stack up while waiting their turn to attack. If they had any doubt whether their moving targets were friendly or enemy, they were told to abort their missions.

The pilots met little resistance from SAM missiles or antiaircraft fire. More troublesome was the weather--an unseasonal rainstorm had struck the eastern Saudi desert Sunday morning--and the lingering clouds of black smoke that hung over Kuwait from wellheads and buildings the Iraqis had set ablaze. But pilots said they still had a field day striking Iraqi positions.

“We got spectacular results,” said Col. David Hamlin, an F-16E pilot who flew close air support for Army troops about 15 miles inside Iraq. Flying with two other F-16s, his target was six artillery batteries that had been shelling U.S. soldiers. They dropped Rockeye anti-armor cluster bombs and 500-pound bombs on the batteries.

“We left five out of six artillery positions on fire, so we were quite pleased,” Hamlin said. Other formations of F-16s also were bombing artillery batteries out in front of of the allied advance. In order to provide the closest support possible for the ground troops, pilots often were not notified of their targets until they had reached the Kuwaiti border.

Pilots flew through four air-control sectors on their way into Kuwait and Iraq, where the targets to be struck were relayed to them by Army ground spotters and forward air-control spotters.

“We anticipate a real fluid situation in the next couple of days, and lines of battle are going to change constantly,” said Lt. Col. George Patrick, who flew an F-16 on Sunday. “The desert battlefield is going to be a lot tougher.”

The concept of coordinated air and ground attacks is one of the keys to allied strategy, U.S. commanders said. With Iraq’s air force having removed itself from the war, the allies enjoy what the commanders view as an insurmountable advantage. F-15C pilots, who fly patrol missions searching for enemy aircraft, rather than joining in ground attacks, were startled by the absence of opposition in the skies.

“We laugh about it,” said Capt. Dan Booker. “We go up there with candy bars and stuff and we will be sitting up there eating over the top of Baghdad, because it is pretty much not a threat to us, even though you still have to watch out for the groundfire and the SAMs.

“You want to yell down at them (the Iraqi pilots), ‘Hey, why don’t you come up and try to save your people?’ ”

From the air, pilots said it looked as though the entire country of Kuwait was on fire. They saw no movement of Iraqi troops in Kuwait or southern Iraq and many of their targets were buried tanks, discernible as hardly more than mounds of sand. “You see an A-10 or an F-16 roll in,” said Booker, “and then you’ll see a big old black smoking hole in the dirt where the mound used to be. And you’ll go, ‘Oh, I guess that used to be a tank.’ ”

This article was written in part from correspondent pool reports cleared by U.S. military authorities.