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Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

From the article, the pilot was sitting in a simulator. It’s also unfair to the pilot that he or she was not given all appropriate measures to avoid a gunslinger dogfight using long range weapons, teamwork, and stealthiness, but that wasn’t the point of the simulation.

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Exactly. If two fighters are in a dogfight in 2020 it's because an entire network of systems has failed.

This exercise simply isn't reflective of modern tactics.

Open warfare is rare. Most fighters patrolling near potential adversaries have complicated rules of engagement that give up their bvr advantages.

So you’re in your fancy fighter, patrolling a no fly zone, and you’re vectored to do a viz id on something that turns out to be a helicopter. Now you’re sweating it in case what could be an aid flight is actually going to fire an rpg at you as you pass, or if the whole thing is bait to bring you over aa or an ambush by some outclassed fighter that’s gonna magically arrive on your six...

When war starts someone always gets the jump on someone. Look at the strategic picture. That's one airframe. It's acceptable losses in exchange for not shooting at things you can't see prior to open hostilities.

Then why do we train for it constantly in coalition exercises?

Sometimes entire networks of systems fail.

Because having the training is preferable to nothing in the same way that having poorly equipped, poorly trained fresh recruits manning your trenches is better than nothing.

Yes. He was also wearing an operationally unrealistic VR helmet. So, he wasn't flying a real platform for which he would have had good muscle memory for real flight controls.

This is actually a big deal. Very small differences between a sim and the real platform could be showstoppers for pilots (e.g. the contrived example of the 'fire' and 'radio' buttons being swapped in the sims vs. the real planes). Sims that are used for real combat training have to be exceptionally high-fidelity in all aspects that affect a given training task.

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