Tiger Meet program
Tiger Meets are the Associations reason for being. While in the early days the Tiger Meet was mainly a social get together from Tiger squadrons things changed rapidly and tactical flying exercises were soon implemented into the Tiger Meet program.
On a typical Tiger Meet flying program you will find missions like: range firing, air-to-air, low level nav and COMAO missions... all of them with briefings and debriefings. Due to the growing helicopter force within the Tigers they are intigrated within the mission as Forward Air Controllers or in a CSAR role. Besided their work within the COMAO's the helicopter force ofter practices with local army (special) forces.
The last 4 NATO Tiger Meets were even incorporated into larger scale exercises like AIRNORTH's Clean Hunter 01 and Daring Eagle 02. During an avarage Tiger meet not less then 250 sorties are flown by the Tigers. No need to say that people involved in mission planning and aircraft maintenance also have a busy working schedule.
An AG-51 Tornado, tasked for aerial reconnaisance leads the formation in one of the COMAO missions during NTM 2003.
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Briefing, planning, flying the mission, debriefing... a Tiger Meet is hard work for both air- and groundcre
So what's the program of a typical 8 day NATO Tiger Meet? Well it all starts of with the arrival of the participants and an opening ceremony were all flags are raised till the last day. From then on the operations start. In the morning most participants fly local missions among each other, while in the afternoon the COMAO's are flown against 'red forces' which are in most cases units from the host nations country acting like 'enemy forces'. No need to say that all these missions are carefully planned, briefed, executed and debriefed. This schedule is followed for most of the flying days.
By the end of the OPS week it is time to tighten social strenghs between all participating units. It is during these days that the well known Tiger Games are executed. Tiger Games are mainly a mix of fun and sports.
The Tiger Meet is always closed by lowering the flags, after that cermony the tradional farewell party is started an various awards are handed out, of which the Silver Tiger Trophy is the most important one. |
