Most fights will inevitably go from BVR to WVR-- ECM is continually in a war of escalation with munitions and ECM is almost always ahead.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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".