[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 96 (Tuesday, June 13, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H5780]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        OUR PILOTS ARE WORTH IT

  (Mr. HUNTER asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, today we are going to be 
voting on a very important measure, the measure offered by the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] and the gentleman from Ohio 
[Mr. Kasich] to cut the B-2 bomber, and that vote, I think, is very 
much related to an incident that happened just a few days ago, and that 
was the shooting down of the F-16 aircraft that was carrying our pilot, 
Scott O'Grady, over the skies of Bosnia.
  During Vietnam, Mr. Speaker, we lost 2,300 aircraft, shot down, most 
of them picked up on SAM radar, surface-to-air missile radar, made in 
the Soviet Union, and hit by SAM missiles. So we developed a new 
technology, an ability to evade radar. That is a stealth technology 
that is embodied in the B-2 bomber.
  If we deny the B-2 bomber to our pilots, we are going to be doing 
something we never did in the history of American aviation, and that is 
tell our pilots and the crews that we had a system that could have 
protected them, but we did not do it. We did not buy it because we 
thought it was too expensive and they were not worth it.


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