Toss-bombing always looks cool, but has had very little application before this war. With dumb bombs it’s inaccurate, and with precision bombs countries like America gain air supremacy and fly high and drop from level flight.

We used it for nukes for a while – I remember reading an article from an early Cold War USAF pilot who did it. When you’re throwing the equivalent of tens of thousands of tons of explosives, pinpoint accuracy doesn’t matter too much in a lot of applications.

kagis

I don’t think that this was the article I remember – this guy is Navy – but same idea:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2000/october/bomb-and-i

By 1953, two years after I graduated from the Naval Academy, I was a first-tour aviator (a “nugget”) in an AD Skyraider squadron, where a small, special cadre of pilots were training for something secret. Everything was hush- hush. On cruise, however, our contemporaries in VC-35 (flying AD-4Ns) and VC-3 (F2H-3N Banshees) were more open—they were practicing new ways of delivering bombs using a loft maneuver, a variation on toss bombing.

The AD had an analog toss-bombing computer, and we had all had a fling at toss bombing, theoretically a way to provide some distance between the target and your release point, but we had always done it out of a dive. Now, we did it from low-level with an acrobatic maneuver for recovery—too good to be true for hot (we thought) pilots.

With our new knowledge, we began to practice loft maneuvers (surreptitiously, of course). Racing in toward the target on the deck at 260 knots (attainable only out of a shallow dive), we’d pull up at a pre-determined point, smoothly applying 4.5Gs within two seconds, maintain that G-loading during the wings-level pull-up until the simulated weapon released automatically as we passed through 45° nose-up, continue the pull wings level over the top of a loop inverted, then at 45°nose down—still inverted coming through about 2,250 feet above the surface—roll right side up, and continue diving back down to a low-level run out leaving the target at our six o’clock: a half Cuban Eight. Nobody ever shared with us the real reason for lofting, and we were too naive to figure it out.

It all came together at the Special Weapons School at Moffett Field, California, where we learned all there was to know about the Mark 7 nuclear bomb. The AD could carry one Mark 7, and a special cockpit control box (with a complex set of switches and lights we had to learn cold) readied the weapon for use; an in-flight insertion (1F1) device was the key. The heart of the Mark 7 was a spherical charge of nuclear material, surrounded by conventional explosive and wrapped in an electrical harness. A cone cut from the nuclear material normally sat on the end of a screw jack outside the sphere. With the cone backed out, the bomb lacked critical mass, and thus there was no chance of a nuclear detonation in the event of a mishap; it might go low-order conventional, although even that was not likely. Not until nearing the target would a pilot activate the IFI, which slid the cone into the sphere and armed the weapon. We practiced this in flight with dummy weapons (called “shapes”), and it always worked. We wondered if it would work as well with real weapons.

During training, we used 25-pound Mark 76 practice bombs and, occasionally, a 2,250-pound shape with electrical innards similar to those of the Mark 7. We then practiced (legally) the loft and high-altitude dive delivery maneuvers that were designed to enhance our chances of surviving an actual nuclear burst. The goal was to be as far away as possible when the bomb detonated, and the loft maneuvers generated various degrees of “safe separation” distances. We assumed our chances were not good, but lofting was fun, so we practiced enough to get our circular error probable (CEP) down to a very respectable 250 feet or less.

Note regarding the above with the guy training for nuclear toss-bombing at Moffett Field, which, reading through, makes me chuckle – normally, US airfields have ICAO codes that sound something like the airfield’s name. Moffett does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moffett_Federal_Airfield

Moffett Federal Airfield (IATA: NUQ, ICAO: KNUQ, FAA LID: NUQ), also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale.

I’d guess that that explains where it got its ICAO code.

Getting back to the Ukrainian plane here, that’s gotta be kind of anus-clenching for them, since I assume that by flying up like that, they’re also potentially flying, at least momentarily, into the engagement envelope of a SAM.