Andy Bush responding to a post on our Jets Forum:

Martin : I just finished reading "Wings of Fury" a very interesting book about fighter pilots, and it brings up a couple of questions, some more "deep" than others:)

Andy: Great questions...I'll do my best on the one's that I can help with.

Q: . A while back I asked about fuel management, particularly about jettisoning empty fuel tanks when engaging air to air in Janes F-15. All the replies (including Skoonj I think, and I know he speaks from experience) told me that fuel tanks were expensive assets, and the drag increase wasn't much, so these were not normally jettisoned. However, in this book's recounts of air battles in the gulf war, every time the f-15's or Hornets are about to engage they dropped their empty tanks. What gives? Did this rule-of-thumb change after the Gulf War? Or were these pilots ignoring their training and "not taking any chances" when it came to the heat of the battle?

A: The question of whether or not to jettison external fuel tanks has not changed much ever since the things were invented! As a rule, tanks are retained for all the obvious reasons. But, when mission survival or success is at risk, those puppies are gone in a heartbeat. F-86s in Korea, F-4s in Vietnam, or F-15s in DS...it's all the same. No matter how expensive they are or how short the supply is, tanks are not worth putting the a/c and crew at risk....ever.

Q: Many times the pilots locked up a bandit very briefly to check up on his aspect heading, closure, altitude, etc., then the broke lock so the bandit wouldn't realize he was being targeted, all the while allowing the eagle drivers to remain undetected. In real life, what accounts for this lag? Why can't the bandit's sensors detect the lock and its sirectional source, even if it's very brief? In the Jane's F-15 game, particularly in H2H, does this lock and break lock work? I'm assuming the second you even paint someone, it show up on their tews, therefore giving away your approximate location. Is this true?

A: Regards short lock times...the cockpit is really busy when you're going beak to beak with a real bad guy...there's a lot to try to keep a handle on. A momentary pulse of the RWR gear is important but unless the RWR indication stays there long enough to be confirmed, it may get ignored. That's the idea behind a quick "sniff"...the person doing the lock is focusing strictly on the lock. When he gets it, he stamps that info onto his tactical SA. The poor dude getting sniffed is not concentrating on that single item...in the exchange of info, he gets the short end of the stick. Will this be the same in a sim environment? Yes, for exactly the same reasons.

Q: Much was made in the book about the tactical shortcomings of fighter doctrine during the war, eschewing dog fighting skills over BVR and technology, etc. This made for dismal kill ratios (at least initially) and eventually led to a whole re-examination of the way US pilots trained and fought, and led to the development of Top Gun, Red Flag, etc. Andy, would you care to share your thoughts on this issue? Did you ever feel like you were hampered by the ROE, your training, or your armament(no guns on some jets)? Did you realize when things began to change, or was it all very gradual and only obvious in hindsight?

A: When I went thru F-4 training in the USAF, we were still suffering from the dictates of "similar air to air training". We were coming to the end of years of thinking that missiles had made the gun obsolete. And we were slowly converting our formations into more maneuverable and tactically sound concepts. Why was this so? What had put us into this situation in the first place? Many reasons. A belief in technology. Hidebound thinking at high levels of command. A belief that what had worked in the past would work in the future. An over-emphasis on safety records that precluded effective air to air dissimilar training. And a belief that we were King Kong and nobody else had the training or equipment to pose a serious threat.

Our (USAF) low kill ratio in SEA also had a number of reasons...weapons designed for non-maneuvering engagements, formations ill-suited to a serious SAM/AAM environment, lack of information as to how to counter a SAM/AAM attack, ROE that took away our front aspect shot, inadequate BFM training, a less than adequate gunsight, lack of an internal gun and the training on how to use it, poor training on how to employ missiles to best advantage, poorly designed cockpit weapon switch procedures, poor leadership at times...the list goes on and on.

As a newbie, I was not aware of this. 15 years later, me and others were, and we did our small part to make sure the lieutenants got a better shake than we did.

Click to continue . . .

On Missile Evasion:

Missile defense in real life is not that much different than what we see in a typical sim. The main difference in a sim is the sim's AI...sometimes the AI is going to kill you no matter what you do...real life is not quite that cut and dried.

Here's a handy way to think of missile defense from a fighter pilot's point of view..

There are three main defensive strategies...in simple terms, avoidance, spoofing, and evasion.

Avoidance.

The best defense is never having to deal with the missile in the first place. For SAMs, we can fly around their "threat rings", and we can use terrain masking to avoid being seen or detected as well as flying below the missile's minimum altitude. For AAMs, avoidance is a bit tougher since the missile's launch site is coming at you!! But with a good knowledge of missile range capability, the pilot can still in some instances avoid danger...this is not often the case since the mission may require the pilot to disregard avoidance as a defensive technique and rely on other defensive methods.

Spoofing.

Spoofing is a general term for techniques that work against a missile's guidance system. Another term for this is "electronic counter-measures" or ECM for short.

Examples of ECM include chaff, flares, and jamming. In simple terms, chaff either "blinds" the missile or offers the missile a false target. Flares are used to decoy the IR missile away from you. Jamming consists of two main types...it either "hides" you from the radar missile's acquisition and guidance system, or it "spoofs" or fools that system into guiding the missile away from you. Most of the newer fighters have their ECM gear built right into the a/c...earlier fighters had to carry their ECM in external "pods".

Evasion.

There are two main types of evasion. First, there is the technique of defeating the missile at long range. This is done primarily by maneuvering your plane to either defeat the missile acquisition system..."beaming" a pulse doppler radar missile system is the best example of this, or by turning away from the missile to place yourself beyond the missile's maximum range. The second and best known form of evasion is that of the "last ditch" maneuver. All end game maneuvering is designed to do one thing...increase miss distance. Missiles are pretty smart and capable but they are not necessarily omnipotent!! Most missile's can be defeated with defensive maneuvers.

To do this, you need three things...you need to see the threat early enough to do something about it, you need to have the energy (airspeed and/or altitude) to expend, and lastly, you need to perform the defensive maneuver at the right time...not too early or too late.

These three requirements are tough, and the omission of any one could prove fatal to the defender. Getting a tally on the missile may only be possible while it is still leaving a "smoke" trail. As in all past wars, it's the threat that you don't see that gets you! Keeping your "mach" up is not that easy in a hard turning defensive fight. If multiple missiles are fired at you, you may not have the energy to defeat all of them. Finally, your defensive maneuver has to be initiated at just the right time..too soon and the missile may have time to correct it's aim point...too late and you might not have the needed miss distance to escape the missile's warhead.

There are other factors that can enter the missile defense picture...stealth, anti-missile systems such as Wild Weasel, etc. Hope this info helps.

Andy