If all of the long-range missiles fail to neutralize one side of the other and both forces opt to continue the engagement, you get to WVR (within visual range) where infrared missiles and—once those are spent—guns are employed. There could be opportunities here where such a trick might be useful, but only in a 1v1 scenario. For any case where you might have two or more enemies to deal with, such an abrupt loss of energy is suicide. And if you’re on the side with superior numbers, the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor with little chance of you being defensive in the first place. And in the 1v1 scenario, modern infrared missiles like the AIM-9x (which are effective even when launched at frankly ridiculous off-boresight angles) make such a maneuver suicide as well.
So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon… then this might be a Hail Mary to force the aggressor to overshoot so you can turn the tables. But having bled all your energy, you’re going to get at most one shot before you’re back to simply trying to survive.
The funny thing is, everyone already knew this. The venerable Harrier could perform a manoeuvre called "viffing", in which it rotated its engine nozzles back to vertical whilst in horizontal flight. But the ability wasn't used at all during the Falklands war in the early 80's. And here we are in 2020 and people are still debating it.
All that said, I agree with you that it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme. Supermaneuverability has certainly expanded the envelope of potential post-stall maneuvers (and, more importantly, dramatically reduced pilot workload in those regimes) far beyond what the Harrier is capable of, but outside of the airshow circuit it continues to remain a solution in search of a problem.
"Fighter pilots HATE him! Learn this one weird trick that the bandits don't want you to know about and win 100% of your BFM engagements!" If only it were that easy...
I wouldn't be surprised if it was Top Gun and "hit the brakes, he'll fly right by".
At best it is a Hail Mary in a 1v1 WVR knife-fight.
By modern air doctrine, this can pretty much only happen in the specific scenario where every other plane has been splashed, since nobody would willingly enter such a scenario if they could avoid it. Modern IR missiles are more maneuverable than planes, so the aggressor will have to have emptied their missile stores completely. And the defender will need to be in a position where they’ve exhausted every other possible defensive resource and be in imminent risk of being downed by the bandit’s cannon.
If all of that is true, it could be a last-ditch survival effort. If it doesn’t generate a shooting opportunity, you’re dead since you’ll never have a chance to gain the energy needed to stay on the offensive.
Nobody in this entire tire fire of a thread has come up with a single additional plausible scenario.
It’s much safer to teach your missiles to do the manoeuvre instead of making the plane do it first.
Indeed modern air-to-air missiles can do this and much more. They can be launched and lock on after the launch and have full-sphere attack capability (unlike earlier missiles, which even in a high off-boresight scenario would still require the launching aircraft to be behind the target).
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14344/heres-the-defini...
To recap the article, missiles aren't perfect, especially when they've been flown on and off carrier decks. And this "miss" isn't even data; it's microscopic anectdata. In fact, I don't know of another combat launch of the 9x.
The idea isn't that you get shot in the exchange, it's that you force your enemy to abandon their advantage. The enemy has the choice to evade and lose their advantage, or go for the exchange in which case neither has the advantage.
This means that in cases where you have the upper hand you can use better tactics that don't incur high cost to yourself, whereas where you don't you can turn a 0-1 exchange into a potential 1-1 or 1-0 exchange. This is a pure win.
In a 2v1, if you’re the 1, you’re essentially already dead. Either you’re chasing one while the either is getting free shots at you, or you’re simply being chased by one while the other is providing support. Realistically, you’re running for your life with one hand already on the ejection handles. If you’re the 2, there will never be a need for this since the bandit knows that even trying to down one of you is suicide.
In a 2v2+, this kind of maneuver is just going to generate free shots for someone within a few seconds. You’ll be a sitting duck, and anyone can pull off a missile shot on you without even leaving their turning circle, particularly with modern helmet cueing systems and high off-bore missiles (fighter pilots can nowadays literally just turn their head, look at something, and shoot at it with high success rates).
it almost never is. wwii ingrained the wing man concept into every air force and for a good reason, from the thatch wwave onward it allowed nation to rely on training, which can be as abundant as needed, instead of better airframes.
as such the whole pretend scenario is built on impossible foundations. you dodge one attack and the wingman scopes you up, while the attacker just accelerate away to safety.
"but what if the attacker is left alone" - then the attacker retreats. it'd be an exceedingly bad call to keep aggressing without a wingman.
A plane that does everything well, except be ready to fly when you need it, is not going to be a war winner in a serious conflict.
That said, it's a good exercise to expand your scope of "kills" from weapons, rocks, and gas to include things like maintenance and admin.
But they absolutely are a product of a different mindset, and have been wildly successful in certain aspects.
First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.
For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.
Also, in WVR, the advantage goes to the side with fewer planes. There was a study from the korean war to show this. The reason is because if you and your buddy is fighting 20 bandits, you can shoot at anybody that flies in front of you, while the enemies have to visually identify. And the speed of jet combat makes it impossible to verify before you lose your opportunity.
>So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon
Yup. Just like in vietnam. We are gonna fly up there with our f4s afterburning to mach 2, then we will launch all our sparrows at the bandits, who would fly straight into our missiles because they are dumb, and then we will land just in time for lunch.
You're absolutely correct that ROE can force a VID, but it'd be pretty dumb to box yourself into a corner that would force you into a neutral-ish WVR fight, yeah?
I agree that supermaneuverability has the potential to be useful, but I think it's fair to say that it's very much an edge case, and even then more of an augment to missiles that already have HOBS capability than a replacement for them. It certainly isn't a game-changing capability the way HOBS was. Also, TWR only goes so far to help recover from an energy deficit, especially if you have to go into reheat to make it happen. Gas kills are a thing...
Yes and no. Against a well-coordinated, larger force it's really difficult to win, and I very much wouldn't recommend adopting it as a primary tactic. If you had a fight that magically began at the furball phase (admittedly, this is one potential outcome of stealth-on-stealth engagements, although I imagine we'd need to develop better and different technology to make it a reality), that would be more likely to favor the individual, at least until they run out of missiles (it's difficult to over-emphasize how difficult guns kills are against maneuvering targets, even for a hypothetical magic robot with near-perfect aim). Old-school fights like Korea were much closer to the "immediate, chaotic furball" side of the spectrum than current fights, and there was a much less well-developed set of intra-and inter-flight tactics. A modern 2v1 (even heaters-only) is far more lopsided against the 1 than it was during Korea. With good coordination, this scales. (Aside: a really good book about the air war in Korea is The Hunters by James Salter. Highly recommended--it's fiction, but based on the author's own experiences as a pilot there.)
For what it's worth, technology and tactics have improved in the last half decade (perhaps more than we can say about our judgement?)... The proliferation of certain technologies will force continual re-evaluation of tactics, but I think it's safe to say that BVR is reasonably mature and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. (That said, reports of the death of the air-to-air gun will always be greatly exaggerated.)
Every American stealth aircraft equipped with a radar is designed to be able to use it. There's various tricks involved, which all amount to driving the signal of radar below the noise floor for the adversary, while still being able to have the radar pick out the signal return (which is possible because the radar know what signal was sent out in the first place).
The F-22 has a low probability of intercept radar. They've been testing a window for adding IRST too in recent years. It also has extremely sophisticated passive EW sensors. It was designed from day one to win BVR fights without compromising stealth.
> For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.
It's a very poor tool and should be seen as a last resort.
As for F4's in vietnam and such, the visual engagement rules there were unique and are not going to repeat.
I'd suggest reading CBSA's Future of Air Combat report to understand the realities of this stuff. Supermaneuverability is very close to useless other than an advertising stunt at air shows.
Manned fighters themselves are very nearly obsolete.
Then came the air war over Vietnam, and the fighter crews there soon realized that AIM-7 shots beyond visual range were often more dangerous to other Americans than to the enemy, because there was no (sure) way to identify the target as friend or foe.
For a more "modern" war: https://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/18...
During the Gulf War, the US Air Force launched AIM-7M and AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missile for BVR attack under the condition of "one-way transparency", but the hitting rate was less than 30 percent.
Modern low probability of intercept are designed to emit only intermittently and hop between frequencies. An adversary might be able to detect the signal but probably won't be able to use it for tracking and targeting.
Furthermore data links allow for cooperative engagement. So the shooting platform can leave its radar off and rely on targeting data fed in from other sources.
First, once you have VID you do everything you can to keep the bandit in sight until you have a shot opportunity. This idea that “jets are so fast you lose the opportunity by the time you can tell what it is” is completely unfounded.
Second, those other 20 planes aren’t all wildly trying to shoot you. If you’re chasing one of them, that one is flying defensive and describing the fight to their wingmen (“one circle, bandit co-alt, nose high…”) as their supporting wingmen take turns with who’s engaged aggressive and getting clear missile shots at you (since you’re really focused on only one of them).
Third, even if none of this were true, doing this kind of thing in an N-vs-1 fight for N >= 2 invalidates your entire premise. The guy who’s hanging still in midair doing fancy air-show tricks is just generating free shots for all those other aircraft.
This is simply not true for modern AESA radars. It's only true for radars built with an 80's technology level. Modern radars are capable of producing search beams so narrow that they cannot be reliably used for locating the source. When someone is using a LPI radar near you, you can tell that someone has a radar on, but you will only have a very vague idea of the direction they are in, and no idea at all of how far away they are. And since other planes near you (or even other detectors on your own plane) do not get to see the same beam, only the next one that comes after a random interval, you cannot use multiple detectors for deducing the origin of the beam.
The fact that this myth of radars telling everyone where your are is so persistent is annoying, but also somewhat useful. Simply because if someone repeats it, it tells everyone that they have not updated their ideas about how air combat works since the cold war ended and they should be ignored.
Indeed, if you're a Russian Su-27 that just shot off two R-77 at targets at the cost of its energy, you just forced two of your opponents to disengage and lose all of their useful energy as well as targeting opportunities, and they might even be shot down. Evading a missile is so costly in terms of energy and opportunity that getting a shot off by sacrificing your energy can be viable.
After all, if you've got a missile on your tail you're not much of a threat anymore. If there are many enemies, not only are you not much of a threat but you're soon dead.
A cop is not an expert on ballistics just because he uses a gun. He knows his gun and how to best use it, but debates about the latest gun technology isn't necessarily his interest as they don't change how he uses the gun he has today.
Besides, believe it or not, some of them are huge nerds...
Now we’ve come full circle.
I agree that there are some potential uses in a WVR fight (particularly a 1v1 fight), but I think it's pretty fair to say that it's generally preferable to bleed off the missile's energy and preserve your own (which makes sense considering that countries tend to procure HMCS and HOBS missiles long before supermaneuverable aircraft). You don't get extra points for a missile making it to the target at a higher energy state, as long as it has enough energy to get there to begin with.
I find active missile countermeasures weirdly ignored in these discussions. Compared to ground engagements it seems like there's plenty of time to engage. It's not like missiles are especially maneuverable. It's not like planes are cheap and disposable. And yet all the defenses we seem to talk about are passive (more stealth! more speed!)
The first impulse with naval, ground or even space doctrine is to at least try to shoot down missiles but it's like we don't even talk about it in the air. Am I missing something?
I'd expect to see something like this to show up on transports and tankers long before it shows up on fighters, and probably in the form of an antimissile missile (EFPs might not mix well with relatively delicate airframes) or a similar expendable. This is more in the realm of plausibility, and the idea actually has some historical precedent as a proposed defense against SAMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pye_Wacket
That said, there are other forms of active defense against missiles that don't rely on physically destroying their airframes. Generally, I think those technologies are more promising, particularly when they aren't limited by ammunition.
Suffice to say, there's a big Red Queen's race going on between countermeasures and counter-countermeasures.
Ah yes i'm reasonably well aware of some of the EW/optical suites being deployed. Was just wondering if anything kinetic was, er, on the radar. Totally agree that Trophy et al is not really going to work - they just want to avoid a direct hit whereas even 100m away could be fatal to an airplane. But these BVR missiles are active - flinging something back almost seems like low hanging fruit!
Perhaps no-one really knows. The lack of any peer air confrontation in 50 years definitely shows. The f-22 is a marvel but I for one have trouble seriously believing it can just boop su-35s out of the sky from a hundred miles away completely risk-free. None of this has ever been tested. Frankly, without some astonishing tech breakthrough, i find the idea of routine BVR shootdowns of peer adversaries to be kind of wishful thinking...
And none of this even touches on the real weak point, the tankers, aka. the reason why none of these planes are ever going to fly over a real adversary anyway.. sure, you can probably get an f-22 over Beijing. Once.
Meanwhile, the ~120+ degree change in AoA combined with HMCS means that there is a good possibility of shooting off your won missile, putting the enemy in the defensive. Given the advantage in energy of the R-77 this can lead to a situation where even if your missile fails, you have a subsequent energy and position advantage.
Bleeding off the missile's energy and preserving your own is not necessarily the best strategy if your enemy has an energy advantage that is sufficient to prevent you from taking the other hand despite your energy being sufficient to get a kill in a vacuum. If you react fast enough you may be able to throw off the missile or lock entirely and also get your own missile on target.
There are plenty of other ways to skin the cat that I would suggest reaching for before this. We've been fighting with and against Doppler radars for a long time...
I'm probably blissfully unaware how relevant they are, but it just feels like a massive waste of money continuing to build these projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_bo...
Technical fights are surely relevant, but in the worst case you can 'simply' unplug your overseas fibres and be done with it. Also, if someone simply marches/flies in and destroys your IXPs, your technical superiority gets irrelevant pretty quick.
So, you really need to keep up technically with your possible foes. Additionally, it also serves as a demonstration of strength and industry funding. So fighter jets won't be going anywhere, soon.
Supermaneuverabillity would make that portion of the flight envelope much less hazardous.
The only benefit would be to get an IR missile off when you've already realized you are losing and he's behind you.
Bummer the Raptor driver doesn't have JHMCS...