A flying legend

Fighter pilot Uri Yaari recalls the reconnaissance missions that led to Israel’s lightening victory in the Six Day War.

By PAUL ALSTER
Uri Yaari 521 (photo credit: Ouria tadmor)
Uri Yaari 521
(photo credit: Ouria tadmor)
It's difficult these days to appreciate just how impressed the world was back in 1967 at the way in which the tiny nation of Israel pulled off one of the most stunning and decisive military victories in modern warfare – the Six Day War.
The spearhead of the Israeli victory were the attack pilots – their daring assaults on enemy air bases in the first hours of the war, on June 5, effectively led to the utter and complete defeat of the Egyptians, as well as routing the Jordanians and Syrians a few days later. Much has been written of the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force while its planes were still on the ground that fateful first day, highlighting the audacity of an assault that Egypt’s charismatic leader, Gamal Nasser, had deemed impossible.
Surprisingly, the planning and incredibly detailed reconnaissance of the enemy targets that paved the way for success has rarely been mentioned. However, there isn’t a shadow of a doubt that without the daring of individuals such as retired Lt. Col. Uri Yaari – a key Israel Air Force reconnaissance pilot during the 1960s and '70s – the operation would not have succeeded so spectacularly, and the war may have followed a very different course.
Some 46 years on from those momentous events, in a rare interview, The Jerusalem Report spoke exclusively with Yaari, now 73 years old and, remarkably, still flying professionally. It’s a story of adventure and genuine heroism, told by a modest and self-effacing man.
Yaari was born in Petah Tikva, in 1940. In 1958, his father, Haim – previously first secretary at the Israeli Embassy in Washington – was appointed Israeli consul to Iran, but Uri stayed behind in Israel awaiting military service at age 18.
“I joined the air force and immediately volunteered to go to flight school," he recalls. "I passed the required tests but my paperwork didn’t come through by the end of boot camp. Everybody moved on, but I was left behind... So I first went to work as an electrical engineer before going to flight school. I essentially ended up with more of a technical background than the others who went straight to pilot training school, so the extra year probably worked in my favor”By the early 1960s Arab nationalism – fueled by Egypt – was on the rise.
Nasser had driven the British, French and Israeli forces out of Sinai during the 1956 Suez Crisis, and Israel knew it had to create a world-class air force in order to repel the anticipated pincer attack - from Egypt in the south, Jordan in the east and Syria in the north - that most people felt was only a matter of time.“In 1961," Yaari tells, "I went straight to the Operations Training Unit and after that was posted to a Super Mystere [French-built fighter plane] squadron.
During the time we flew the Super Mystere [1963-65], there was no war, only ‘occurrences’ here and there. We had a very bad weapons system. The gun sight was so bad that no one shot down any aircraft. No Israelis got shot down either, by the way, and the Egyptians were flying [Soviet-built] MIG-17s, a far superior plane.”
In 1965, with the prospect of war already very much in the air, the IAF phased in a superior plane, the [French-built] Mirage fighter jet, cutting edge hardware that in the right hands gave the Israeli pilots a chance of defending themselves against the far greater numbers of enemy planes.
“At the end of 1965," Yaari continues, "at Tel Nof [air base], they created the Special Missions Squadron. Flying the Mirage was like going from a Fiat saloon to a Porsche. I got involved more and more in the development of the photographic capabilities of the two special planes we had. I became the chief reconnaissance pilot, doing most of the reconnaissance over Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. We did a lot of work upgrading maps – we mapped the whole of Egypt.”
The collation of intelligence gleaned through reconnaissance flying in the 1960s was a dangerous job. There was no open invitation to enter enemy airspace and the penetration of enemy air defences often resulted in a stout response from the Egyptians, and others.
“We were pursued, but our main goal was to get the intel and bring it back ¬– not to get into dogfights. But I was fired on many times and was hit on some occasions,” Yaari recalls.
The adrenalin of flying a fighter jet in difficult circumstances invariably carries fighter pilots through highly traumatic situations. Yaari had his share of near misses and highlighted a couple of instances when fate proved to be very much on his side. “I had two frightening occurrences – after the fact, because when these things happen you are too concentrated on your job to get scared. It’s only afterwards when you sit down and think about it, you realize how frightening it was," he recounts.
“The first was during the Six Day War. I was doing a strafing run on an airport after it was bombed when I hit a stork! It came into my inlet and my [one and only] engine shut down immediately. The engine stopped because there was no air, but luckily enough the stork didn’t go through the engine; it went out through an auxiliary door on the side. I was going down at 550 knots [about 1,080kph], strafing, when I pulled out and realized what had happened. I tried to restart the engine, knowing that if it was still turning it could reignite immediately. I hit the restart switch, managed to catch it, and it came back on. If it hadn’t reignited, I would probably to this day still be somewhere in a field in the middle of Egypt, in the Nile Delta. Of course, the stork is no more.
“The second," Yaari continues, "was during the War of Attrition in 1970/71 – I became IAF chief test pilot in 1970. I was visiting a friend – a Mirage pilot – at Bir Gifgafa base in Sinai. He had to go to the toilet so asked me to just take care of his things for a minute. He’d no sooner gone inside than sure enough the alarm rang and I jumped in [the Mirage]. I’d gone [to Sinai] in a [US-built] Phantom and I took off in a Mirage!  I was away and gone while he was still in the toilet!
“We went down to Port Said and engaged the enemy MIGs. I got behind the guy in the MIG, pressed my missile launch, and the missile blew up on my own wing! I lost all electrical power, including my radio, but still had control of the airplane. I went down very fast but managed to pull up and eventually landed back at Bir Gifgafa with half a wing missing, blown apart and black. The airplane looked like shit.
“When I got down from the ladder and saw the wing, that’s when I really got shaken up. The other pilot [at Port Said] had seen me blow up, called on the radio and told the ATC [Air Traffic Controller] that No.2 [me] was gone. He thought I’d blown up, but I was already on the ground back at Bir Gifgafa when he returned. Wow, he was surprised to see me.”
Back in 1966, reconnaissance missions were stepped up as war with Egypt drew closer. Yaari and his five pilot colleagues in the reconnaissance unit worked long hours, often in difficult conditions.
“The [reconnaissance] pilot flies alone with a heavily equipped aircraft, taking all the pictures as well as flying the plane" he says. "You use stereoscopic photography, meaning you can look at two adjacent pictures immediately and see them in 3D. When you fly at such high speed, you need these special cameras. The cameras were purchased from overseas, but the integration, the special nose, the windows and the prisms that moved around the panoramic cameras giving a continuous strip, we integrated ourselves.
“The Egyptians had a trick – they used main highways as aircraft landing strips in the Nile Delta. There were hints about that, and sure enough we found some parts of the road that were runways and they became targets that we destroyed. That’s true for Egypt, for Syria, for Iraq, for Lebanon, Jordan, the whole region. But war really became imminent when Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran on May 23, 1967.”
One of the most astounding aspects of the Six Day War remains the fact that the Egyptian Air Force parked many of their hundreds of aircraft outside on the tarmac in full view, having been well aware that the IAF had flown missions to chart their territory over the previous years.
“They assumed that we were too scared to start a war with them”, Yaari states in a matter-of-fact manner. “We had a plan [codenamed "Operation Moked"] for years. Remember, the air force is not there to conquer. The mission of the air force is to gain air superiority and give a comfortable arena for the ground troops to do what they do. In Operation Moked every pilot knew exactly what he had to do. There had been something in the air for a few days, but the actual orders that Moked was going to happen came on June 4.
“Everybody knew his exact time of departure and where he was going. I suppose I knew the territory better than anyone because I had done the reconnaissance, but they all had maps and all the information. I flew at 100 feet to fly below the radar. We didn’t have GPS of course; we had a map, a compass, a clock. At 0800 sharp, we dropped our bombs. Everything was on target – all the planes were on target. It was very, very professional.”
There’s a twinkle in Yaari’s eye and a wry smile dances across his lips as he becomes more animated and uses the coffee table in his lounge to recreate the bombing mission.
“You fly low, you pull up, see the runway, then you roll over and straighten yourself along the runway," he recounts. "Then, at a certain altitude, you put your gun sights on target, stabilize for a second, let go of the bombs, and pull up. At this moment, you don’t see anything, but you feel the bomb leaving the plane. Then, when you start turning, you see the runway and what has been done. You do a 270 degree turn and then select targets for strafing; you do one bombing run and three strafing runs. We met very little resistance. It’s about right that around 90 percent of the Egyptian Air Force was damaged that day.
Some MIGs did get off the ground and I think we lost a couple of planes, but overall there was very little resistance.”
It all sounds so simple now, but the airborne attack was one of the most audacious in modern warfare, and was made possible because of the intricate details of the enemy targets that had been prepared by Yaari and his fellow pilots, supported by on-the-ground intelligence. The shock of the devastating attacks not only destroyed most of the Egyptian Air Force, it also dealt a massive blow to the morale of the Egyptian forces and the Arab armies across the region in general.
“The attack on the Egyptian Air Force was not only on the airbases," Yaari says. "We looked for and destroyed missile sites and gun sites as well. In the meantime, the ground troops started moving, so we gave them support. It was a fast-evolving operation. The air force completed its main mission – to gain air superiority – in one day. The following days, we did a lot to support the ground troops. I’m talking not only about Egypt, but also in Syria and Jordan.
“I flew over Syria and I bombed in Iraq as well, not far from the Syrian border, where there were a couple of airfields along the Tripoli oil pipeline.
“At the end of the first day, there was a feeling that we had done something very special. For us, it was a feeling of accomplishment, completing the mission exactly as planned. I was scrambled again at 10 that first night because there were shells falling on Tel Aviv and they thought we were being shelled from the sea; but it turned out they were coming from Qalqilya, [West Bank] and were being fired by the Jordanians. They were taken out. That was my fifth flight that day.”
By June 10, it was all over. The Egyptians had been routed and driven out of the Sinai, lack of air cover for their ground troops made defeat almost a formality and they suffered heavy casualties. The Jordanians had been driven out of the West Bank after a series of ferocious battles, and the Old City of Jerusalem had been captured. The Syrians also failed to stop the Israelis as the strategically essential Golan Heights in the north were captured.
According to Foreign Ministry statistics, 776 Israeli military personnel were lost during the Six Day War; estimates place the Arab losses at 15,000 -20,000. “When the war ended, we had a big party, a very big party; everybody from the air force was there. It was a hell of a party," Yaari recalls.
Yaari enjoyed a productive few years after 1967, and after a bizarre incident in 1968, he found himself playing the role of mouse to his colleagues’ cats. “There were two Syrian pilots who landed their MIG-17s in Israel – by mistake!" he recounts. "Obviously, we confiscated the planes and did a big training program. I was one of the pilots who flew for almost a year in the MIG-17s, training our pilots to fight them. I played the part of the enemy. It proved very useful in 1973 [Yom Kippur War].”
In 1969, Yaari was sent to England to train at the internationally renowned Boscombe Down Test Pilot School, the first Israeli pilot to undergo such a course. He returned to Israel the following year and established the Tel Nof flight test centre, working at the same time on the development of Israeli-built Kfir fighter jet, right up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
“We worked closely [on the Kfir project] with the US," he says. "There were some very interesting programs that I can’t really talk about, but there was one interesting case in the '73 war. The Kfir was still in development, so we flew many [US-built] A-4 Skyhawks. However, during the first three days of the war, the Skyhawks started falling out of the sky after being hit by infra-red Estrella missiles fired by Egyptian ground troops. They used to lock on to the tailpipe of the plane and blow the whole control system of the plane apart.
“One of my engineers at the test centre suggested we extend the tailpipe by a metre so the missile would hit and explode, but not damage the controls. So he built a prototype. I took it up for the test flight to check that it didn’t alter the stability of the plane and it felt fine. Over the next few days, we adapted all the A-4s; and from then on, not one A-4 came down again.”
Even the best of fighter pilots need their share of luck to come through the vagaries of combat missions. Yaari’s luck ran out during the 1973 war.
“I was on a mission and I had to break from a missile that was shot at me," he relates. "You turn hard. Normally six Gs is the level, but I did it at 12 Gs; and as I looked behind me to see where the missile was, the G-force broke my back.
One of the vertebrae got badly broken and my legs were semi-paralyzed, but I managed to get the plane back down. I couldn’t get out of the cockpit because of the injury and had to be pulled from my seat. I was in a wheelchair for a month. The paralysis was temporary; but since then, I have a very sensitive back. I didn’t fly as a fighter pilot again.”
After recovering from his back injury, Yaari was offered the post of assistant air force attaché in the US, becoming the liaison between the Israeli and American air forces, coordinating and exchanging information.
“We arranged a lot of exchanges – we flew with them, they flew with us. I stayed in the US until 1976 and came back as a lieutenant colonel, and then decided to become a civilian, and worked with El Al for five years.”
Since 1981, Yaari has enjoyed a range of interesting roles. He returned to full-time flying in the 1990s and started his own commercial aviation company, ferrying both Israeli government officials and private clients all over the world.
“There’s a good saying in aviation: 'What's better? Being a good pilot, or a smart pilot?' People tend to say being a good pilot because a good pilot can get out of every situation. But a smart pilot would never get into the situation in the first instance,” Yaari quips. “I’ll keep flying as long as I feel OK and as long as they are willing to keep me. I have 23,000 hours flight time logged since 1959. I’ll keep doing it as long as I get out of the plane with a smile.”
Paul Alster is an Israel-based journalist who blogs at www.paulalster.com and can be followed on Twitter @paul_alster