" Anatolian Eagle " - 2016
The 2016 edition of the Anatolian Eagle took place at Konya Air Base between 30th of May and 10th of June and involved aerial components of Turkish AF, Turkish Navy, Italian AF, Pakistan AF, Royal Saudi Arabian AF, Royal Netherlands AF and NATO AWACS. The Anatolian Eagle exercises started in 2001, after Turkish Air Force participation in 1997-Red Flag edition and Bi-lateral Exercise in 1998. The reason was to reduce the loss of pilots and aircraft caused by un-experienced and increase the interoperability among air forces of different countries. Throughout these years many facilities have been built, like wide aircraft ramp named Eagle provided of buildings for maintenance and storage, where foreign and national aerial assets are stationing during the exercise. With large areas available on land and see, that extend 50.000 Sq. miles in surface and from the ground 50000 feet in height, equipped of threat systems at the state of the art, Turkish Air Force can organize an absolute prestige exercise similar to Red Flag. In Anatolian Eagle exercise there are two adversary aerial components, Red Force and Blue Force. Red force is formed by Konya AB resident unit 132 Filo, which fly Lockheed Martin F-16 in aggressor role, and by ground controllers, nickname Redeye, which monitor the operations over the range and make use of different threat systems against Blue Force aircraft. Blue Force is formed by deployed units (national and foreign) with addiction of NATO E-3A (Konya is Forward Operating Base for NATO’s AEW&C Force) or resident E-7T belonging to 131 Filo. Resident helicopters UH-1H and AS.532AL, belonging to 135 Filo, provide Combat Search and Rescue role for Blue Force. All aircraft participating are controlled in real time by White Force in its own operation room. They develop the scenarios, established different level of training and composition of the aerial assets according different missions scheduled (CSAR, CAS, SEAD, AAR, A-G, DCA, etc) and, of course, they analyze results in each aspect of the missions carried out with debriefing with crew participating. Pictures in this report have been taken from Wednesday 7th to Friday 10th of June. Usually two different missions have been flown each day. Wednesday there were two, while the last Eagle mission of the exercise has been flown Thursday morning. Departures to home bases of all Turkish AF F-16s and F-4s, as well as Italian AF Tornados IDS/ECR were flown Thursday afternoon. Friday morning Pakistan AF F-16s and Royal Saudi Arabian AF Tornados left for its home base in the respective countries.
Renzo Del Bianco
I’d like to thank Turkish Air Force and Public Affairs, as well as 3űncű ANA JET personnel, in allowing to take pictures from wonderful locations and for having sent in advance the news about the exercise. Source : “AE 2016 Intro for MEDIA”. All pictures © Renzo Del Bianco
