Photos of a Sukhoi Su-27 dogfighting with a USAF F-16 around Area 51 | Hacker News Reader

Photos of a Sukhoi Su-27 dogfighting with a USAF F-16 around Area 51

theaviationist.com

102 pointsInconel36 comments

How come the US Air Force has Sukhoi aircrafts? Did they buy them from Russia? I can't imagine Russia selling their top aircrafts to an enemy.

According to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-27, there are two in private ownership in the US. It's been in service since the mid-80s so not so new, and not surprisingly available outside Russia.

Reminds of a scene in JAG where the main characters, 2 US military officers, steal a Russian jet. The Russians wonder why they stole the plane, as they could have just bought it. [1] I miss that show.

[1] https://youtu.be/Ei9KEF7OsKQ?t=2m

Well, it kind of happened but with a Soviet pilot (defection).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

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

The USAF has a long history of acquiring foreign aircraft[1], sometimes through defectors, other times by purchasing them from foreign militaries. I don't know the source of the Su-27's in question here but I believe the USAF acquired a few airframes from the Ukrainian Air Force. Various MiG's have also been acquired from the Moldovan and Belarusian Air Forces.

Also, there were two Su-27's for sale privately in the US a number of years ago[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4477th_Test_and_Evaluation_Squ...

[2]http://www.prideaircraft.com/flanker.htm

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-27#Operators)

Two Su-27s were delivered to the U.S. in 1995 from Belarus.[60][72] Two more were bought from Ukraine in 2009 by a private company, Pride Aircraft to be used for aggressor training for U.S. pilots.[73]

The two Su-27s that Pride Aircraft acquired and certified were big news when they were publicly put on sale around 2009-2010 but I'm not sure if they were actually bought by the USAF or a private company to do contracted DACT.

I imagine it is tough work maintaining them. A decades old soviet plain, and you have no access to the manufacturer. I suppose the cannot just call Russia and order parts.

Similar to Iran trying to maintain a fleet of F-14s.

And does Russia have any F-16s?

It's very likely. The US has sold F-16s extensively.

I don't believe so, or at least I've never heard about Russian F-16s. Iran still flies some old F-14s though.

The USAF seems to be pretty strict about not allowing more modern fighters to end up in private hands. There are a number of F-86s, F-104s, F-5s and I believe one F-4 Phantom still flying around the US in the hands of private collectors and air museums but nothing newer like F-14s, F-15s, F-16s or F-18s.

Edit: While I've never heard of any F-16s in Russia I'm sure the Russians have had plenty of time inspecting and probably even flying F-16s, it was a very widely exported plane.

Never mind that Iran is still flying F-14s...

Does Russia have an equivalent of ITAR? If not, that could partly explain why US aircraft are less commonly sold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arm...

> And does Russia have any F-16s?

Not publically but I would assume they've had access to Venezuela's F-16A/Bs, though those are probably in fairly poor condition by now and are nowhere representative of current avionics capabilities.

After the close of the Vietnam war the USSR, and lesserly Poland and Czechoslovakia, extensively tested US-supplied ex-VNAF ( southern ) aircraft such as the F-5E but since then such opportunities have been very limited.

I've seen SU-27s a few times in the air and on the ground here in Australia. The Indonesian air force has them and they have visited our shores as part of exercise 'Pitch Black' in the past, and probably will do in the future.

MiGs are not 'top secret' jets behind the iron curtain any more. Lots of friendly Air Forces have them now (India etc.) and they routinely co-operate with western forces on exercises.

I remember seeing a Su-27 do forward flips, backflips and cobra maneuvers during the 2001 Paris air show.

It looked pretty damn sweet - was the best part of the show for me.

I was fortunate that while serving in the USAF we had an alternate for the Thunderbirds on our base. Watching him fly was a good reason to just sit on the ball fields even in the hottest afternoons. One takeaway from a meet and greet was it was real fun for him and all those cool moves are just that, simply cool with little application outside of stunt flying.

Don't forget the Aggressor squadron. They play a similar role (tactics, strategy) but with different equipment.

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

The dogfighting scenario is pretty much extinct.

The F-16 is sort of old by now, except the drone version, which is reportedly for use as a training target.

Probably it's a drone F-16 against a Su-27?

>The dogfighting scenario is pretty much extinct.

That's been a common theme since the advent of the air-to-air missile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight#Balkans_conflict

NATO air forces still fly the F-16. The Su-27 and newer models are large planes with a long range (similar to F-15) and would be expected to fly into NATO territory to hunt NATO refuelers and AWACS.

The F-35 was scheduled to take over those roles.

The F-16 is massively exported and now many countries have them, so that's why I was speculating about a variation.

F-16 is far from irrelevant.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, we routinely get a lot of Asian air forces over here on exercise (in Australia). I go to their open days all the time and talk to the pilots and take photos of the planes.

Interestingly, the Royal Thai air force has the older Block 30 airframes, whereas the Singapore Air Force as the newer Block 50 airframes fully fitted out with ECM packs etc. They almost look like two completely different aircraft models if it wasn't for the iconic under fuselage intake.

> The dogfighting scenario is pretty much extinct.

This is oft repeated but not true. As advanced as missiles are, counter-measures are equally advanced. When two equally sophisticated planes engage each other, there's always the possibility that neither will shoot down the other, and they'll wind up in a dogfighting scenario.

Of course in recent history warfare has been highly asymmetrical, with advanced militaries only engaging weaker forces.

nah. as sensor packages and missile technology advances, so do countermeasures, while the good ole bullet is harder to fool.

"The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter proponents’ riposte has been that the AIM-120 is a 100% reliable and 100% kill probability missile, so each F-35 carrying four AIM-120’s will account for four Sukhois or MiGs. This is a dangerously naive assumption. Operationally, the AIM-120 has achieved 10 BVR kills from 17 shots – a Pk or “kill probability” of 0.59 (59 percent) against benign or “dumb” targets. The AIM-120 has been tested in over 200 test firings, with a reliability of about 85 percent, so statistically speaking, about one of those four AIM-120s will be a dud." > http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-070109-1.html

also, once the 6-10 aa missiles you carry are spent, if you aren't faster than the enemy you cannot just disappear.

> The AIM-120 has been tested in over 200 test firings, with a reliability of about 85 percent, so statistically speaking, about one of those four AIM-120s will be a dud.

I didn't realize it's that bad. I guess action and sci-fi movies make you believe military equipment is much more reliable than it really is.

well don't take my comment as a slam to miltech, it's actually quite good once you consider it's gonna need to work at supersonic speed with all the forces entailed, targeting and intercepting a supersonic target, while being subject to all kind of electronic countermeasures, starting from beyond visual range and flying for an extended time before target acquisition via remote radio controls.

>'Operationally, the AIM-120 has achieved 10 BVR kills from 17 shots – a Pk or “kill probability” of 0.59 (59 percent) against benign or “dumb” targets.'

Fyi, frequencies are not probabilities. That was one of the points that, as he neared the end of his life, lead Ronald Fisher to say that mass confusion over stats would be the downfall of the next set of nations:

"We are quite in danger of sending highly trained and highly intelligent young men out into the world with tables of erroneous numbers under their arms, and with a dense fog in the place where their brains ought to be. In this century, of course, they will be working on guided missiles and advising the medical profession on the control of disease, and there is no limit to the extent to which they could impede every sort of national effort." Fisher, R N (1958). "The Nature of Probability". Centennial Review. 2: 261–274. http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher272.pdf

Here is another good paper from him on that: http://www.phil.vt.edu/dmayo/PhilStatistics/Triad/Fisher%201...

Chapter 9 here also covers it from a different perspective: http://omega.albany.edu:8008/JaynesBook.html

ikr, but there is no much more operational data beyond that. also, not my quote, and the point was just that at some point you need a fallback weapon

I had never seen evidence of the "guided missiles" part of Fisher's prediction before. In medicine it is obvious...so maybe I am just not familiar, is there mass confusion in weapons research too?

don't know about missiles but if we include rocket science in general there is plenty literature on how they cheated statistics to get the shuttle going https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...

I beg to differ. Even without mentionning "exotic" manoeuvers such as what you can perform successfully in flight simulators (that may not be as easy to do in reality), the electronic war superiority demonstrated recently by Russians would let me believe that they could easily approach any US target. And let me tell you, it's very difficult to hit a close target when you only have long range missiles...

> the electronic war superiority demonstrated recently by Russians

Do you have any references on that?

I think he's referencing hype news pieces produced by RT and alike about their 'accomplishes' in Syria where they've 'bested US and NATO' forces.

Should take that with spoons of salt though.

This particular dogfighting scenario is pretty much extinct, but there's a line of thought that "stealth" aircrafts would in fact bring back dogfights. It's pretty logical: if you can't detect an aircraft from far away, that leaves only one place to meet it: up close.

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