On March 30, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lynch make history by using Sonic boom as an weapon . With another F16 Lynch was wondering in Iraq sky and waiting for any distress call.
They received a call from a team of 52 British special operations soldiers were surrounded by about 500 Iraqi soldiers .Soldiers wee in full-blown panic mode.They need immediate support other wise iraqi soldiers would have killed them .
Both pilots decided to help them but British and iraqi soldiers were so close that they can’t boom them . If they launched their bombs, they could take out both the besieged British and the besieging Iraqis. And time was running out for the former.
So Lynch did the only thing he could. F-16s produce sound waves as they fly. If they fly fast enough, those sound waves become compacted, but if they break the sound barrier, those waves create a sonic boom.
Lynch zoomed above the cloud cover, then dived at the speed of sound. At 3,000 feet, he pulled up – pummeling the ground with a massive boom. But now Lynch was in trouble. An Iraqi missile had locked on him. So he pulled up… and the missile overshot him.
Back at base, he learned that his maneuver had worked. The Iraqis had scattered from the boom, thinking it was a missile attack. And the Brits? They got away.
