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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Not parent poster but: by all indications the Typhoon is a superior dogfighter. However it should be noted that modern air combat is not about movie-style dogfighting.

It's about BVR (beyond visual range) combat: launching a missile at a foe and killing him before he knows that you or the missile exist. It's also about survivability against enemy ground defenses attempting to lock onto you with radar and kill you with missiles.

For both of those things, stealth is a bare minimum requirement. The F-35 has it, the Eurofighter does not. (yes, stealth is not a binary property, but that is the TL;DR)

So the Typhoon is going to kick serious ass in certain situations and be completely unusable in others.

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How does this differ from the F4 being retrofitted with a cannon in a centerline pod? It was designed for BVR, but that (politically) didn't work out so well.

I'm just an armchair nerd but I think it's safe to say that BVR was really in its infancy back then in terms of radar, stealth, missiles, etc. The technology simply was not there for an effective BVR fighter.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/more-sixty-years-la...

    "The Air Force didn’t realize those early missiles 
    were terrible.

    Studies showed that 45 percent of Vietnam-era 
    AIM-7s and 37 percent of AIM-9s failed to either 
    launch or lock on, and after evasive maneuvers, 
    the probability of achieving a kill fell to eight 
    percent and 15 percent for the two types, 
    respectively"

Missiles are ridiculously lethal and maneuverable now. They can thrust vector, be fired from crazy angles, etc.

>the F4 being retrofitted with a cannon in a centerline pod

The Air Force and Navy had different solutions to the early trouble with the performance of the F4. The Air Force attached a cannon in a centerline pod, the Navy did not, and invested in more training and the development of new tactics (notably the Top Gun program).

The Air Force's gun pod did improve kill ratios a little bit, but the Navy's training programs improved kill ratios by a lot, using the same fighters and the same missiles as before. The Air Force later copied the Navy's training programs. I'm sure improvements were made to the missiles over the course of the war as well.

So even at the time (in the earliest days of missile technology) it's not clear that BVR focus was the wrong decision, only that you can't expect pilots to automatically understand how to fight in a new paradigm. But today it's 50 years later, almost as big a gap as between Vietnam and the Wright brothers - BVR combat is very well understood and missile technology is vastly better.

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