abbr. [军] Airborne Warning and Control System,机载报警与控制系统
They needn't have worried, said several female crew members assigned to a U.S. AWACS surveillance plane stationed in Saudi Arabia.
The AWACS generally flies only with fighters in the area to protect it, but still is extremely vulnerable to attack.
There is at least one AWACS in the air around the clock monitoring Iraqi air activity.
If communications were lost, crew chiefs aboard the AWACS would work with their weapons officers and could make the decision to fire on Iraqi jets provided certain criteria were met, Air Force officers said.
Boeing crafted almost 1,000 of the 707s and still turns them out as military tankers and AWACS radar warning planes.
It costs $9,400 an hour to operate such a plane, Olmstead said, adding that the AWACS and the carrier-based E2C are far too sophisticated to be operated economically for anti-drug missions.
The U.S. military refused to confirm or deny reports that allied forces in the Persian Gulf went on alert after detecting the missiles, presumably with spy satellites or AWACS airborne early-warning radar planes.
He supervises maintenance for U.S. AWACS planes and had several stints here in the early 1980s when Americans were training the Saudis to fly the airborne radar stations.
Bliss said the American planes have superior computers and other equipment but that the Saudi AWACS have newer, more powerful engines because they were purchased several years after the American planes were built.
This is AWACS Fleet Support Central.
More of the Air Force's Airborne Warning and Control Systems, or AWACS, surveillance aircraft also will be used in the Atlantic.