Bill Sweetman has a great story of a recent personal account from a former USAF guy that was part of the Cold War program flying Soviet-made (or similar) MiG aircraft in Nevada.
Those days were secret, dangerous yet eye-opening.
That proved to be a very important test. "In 1987 we had the AIM-9P, which was designed to reject flares, and when we used US flares against it would ignore them and go straight for the target. We had the Soviet flares – they were dirty, and none of them looked the same – and the AIM-9P said 'I love that flare'.
"Why’d that happen? We had designed it to reject American flares. The Soviet flares had different burn time, intensity and separation. The same way, every time we tried to build a SAM simulator, when we got the real thing it wasn’t the same.
"I use the AIM-9P because it is out of the system and I can talk about it. The same thing happened to a lot of things that are still in the system and that I can’t talk about."
4 comments:
Wasn't there a similar story maybe in the last year or so, that F22 or F35 was really only stealthy to US or Western radars?
I think it was Wired defense, not sure, don't think it was AvWeek....
The one about F-35 stealth being detectable by 60's era Soviet radar?
What reminded me was the fact that AIM9 was pretty much being tested to defeat US decoys, even the copied Soviet ones weren't really good "enough". The other article I can't think of pretty much alluded to the same problem, we test against US radars or copies of Russian/Chinese ones, are we sure that LO really works as well against the real deal?
Yeah, those old Soviet radars are still supposed to work pretty well against LO....
Regarding the flare issue in general, I'm curious if the place of ejection has any relevance too?
It seems as if Soviet/modern design fighters eject flares from the top rear of the aircraft, shooting upward? While US fighters tend to eject flares downward, from underneath points?
Now, the way I ponder it, the underneath ejection point might be superior vs ground-launched MANPAD type seekers, but the top-side ejection (especially when in rapid fire dispersal) would probably be more effective vs air-launched IR seekers, especially when in a turning fight to mask the engine nozzles, or with a missile diving down on the aircraft in a head on approach??
Can anyone offer any better insight on that issue? Is there any difference between where exactly the flare is being popped from?
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