fta: With the F-15 today, you’re very wary of the range of the other guy’s missile, and you basically have to assume that he’s locked on to you, or at least knows where you are since you are in a big, non-stealthy airframe. And since you don’t have a missile warning system, you have to always assume that there is a missile headed your way when you get near an adversary. You wind up playing this game of chicken, where you get close enough to throw a rock, and then you run away to avoid any rock coming back at you. And then you try to sneak back and throw another rock from a closer range. And then you run again and try to avoid his next rock. You hope he runs out of rocks first, or that he’s not looking when you throw one of your rocks. But you never get in there and throw rocks without the fear of retribution. Like the F-22, the F-35 can maneuver right in there and attack with a close-in kill shot without playing chicken. If the F-35 gets in a bad situation, the pilot can extract himself a heck of a lot easier than in an F-15. The F-35 can turn away and still attack because it has eyes in the back of its head coupled with high off boresight missiles. DAS is always tracking every aircraft nearby, in every direction, simultaneously, and looking for inbound missiles at the same time. F-35 mission fusion software keeps targets and IDs sorted out, even in a dynamic turning dogfight or when a target is directly behind you. While flying an F-15 in a dogfight, I have to constantly swivel my head to manually detect and track adversaries and wingmen with my eyes. Situational awareness breaks down quickly, and I’m suddenly wondering if that distant object I’m looking at is an F-15 or an adversary aircraft. I’ve flown against MiG-29s, and it wasn’t until I was up close and saw the paint job that I could be positive it wasn’t an F-15. With your head and eyes shifting back and forth under high G loading in a turning fight, it is very easy to lose sight, get confused, and misidentify aircraft. Data link update rates are too slow for ID purposes in a dogfight. ID correlations frequently are swapped from wingmen to bandits and vice versa as they streak past your jet and swap sides. The F-35 isn’t going to lose those IDs; it isn’t going to lose that situational awareness because there is always at least one sensor with high update rates tracking the various aircraft. In fact, you may even do better by just looking at your situational awareness displays or helmet symbology rather than at the confusing swirl of airplanes to visually sort out good from bad. And if a missile is shot at you in the F-35, you’ll see it coming whether it is smokeless or not. You can take the appropriate measures, or just let the aircraft automatically provide the countermeasures. In 95 percent of the air-to-air kills in history, the victim had no idea he was being shot at. Unless you’re referring to the other guy’s loss rate, that won’t be the case with the F-35.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 21:35:06 +0000
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