>> is needed to make the Raptor's super maneuverability a reality.
The term is "Supermaneuverability"... all one word. This is characterized as post-stall, sometimes called "non-aerodynamic" controlled flight. In short, it means the aircraft remains under pilot control even after the flow has separated from the wing (aka a stall).
The 22 is not considered supermaneuverable by many. It can use thrust vectoring and some fly-by-wire tricker to ape supermaneuverability but it pales in comparison to many russian aircraft. The 22's wing becomes very unpredictable in stall, hence the need for all the fly by wire. It was meant for flying fast in a strait line, and for stealth. It was never meant for things like Kobras or Kulbits. That it could eventually do them was an afterthought. The Russian aircraft have wings designed for slow speed/high AOA maneuverability.
Kulbit / Chakra at about 05:20 and again at 06:20. Note how slow/tight the show is. An f-22 could never perform repeated maneuvers like this in such a confined space.
To add on, supermaneuverabillity looks really cool and is an impressive technical achievement for sure, but its utility in combat (at least for the time being) is likely low to negative. Among other reasons, the more players in a fight, the less anyone can afford to sell all their energy for a shot opportunity--even if it works, it leaves them extremely vulnerable.
This 100%. While really cool demonstrations, the utility of these in a fight is virtually nonexistent. Any air-to-air engagements these days are inevitably BVR (beyond visual range) encounters, where aircraft fire missiles at one-another from extreme ranges. This type of maneuverability has no use whatsoever in such a scenario.
If all of the long-range missiles fail to neutralize one side of the other and both forces opt to continue the engagement, you get to WVR (within visual range) where infrared missiles and—once those are spent—guns are employed. There could be opportunities here where such a trick might be useful, but only in a 1v1 scenario. For any case where you might have two or more enemies to deal with, such an abrupt loss of energy is suicide. And if you’re on the side with superior numbers, the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor with little chance of you being defensive in the first place. And in the 1v1 scenario, modern infrared missiles like the AIM-9x (which are effective even when launched at frankly ridiculous off-boresight angles) make such a maneuver suicide as well.
So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon… then this might be a Hail Mary to force the aggressor to overshoot so you can turn the tables. But having bled all your energy, you’re going to get at most one shot before you’re back to simply trying to survive.
This is a really interesting topic for debate. Possibly the most recent employment of modern air-to-air tactics we've seen in actual combat was in the early '80s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mole_Cricket_19). I hope we never have to see an actual large-scale air war between high-end, near-peer competitors, and can continue to armchair debate these kinds of scenarios.
Speaking about ECM and the Bekaa battle, a kind of similar situation has just happened in the recent months - Turkey found a way for their drones to effectively attack Russian "Pantsir-S1" anti-aircraft system (details aren't clear, seems that in addition to ECM the drone specific aspects like long loitering waiting for opportunity and simultaneous multiple drone attack from different directions played key role), and around 30 Pantsirs have just been lost in Syria and Libya. (Sidenote: Ukraine has recently got those drones from Turkey and successfully tested against Pantsir - Pantsirs are standard air defense of Russian tank battalions and was the main reason Ukraine, who has nor stealth nor high precision standoff, didn't use the air-to-ground attacks against the Russian tank forces when they ventured into Donbass back then in August 2014 and February 2015)
ECM fights happen every day. Every time a eurofighter flies near a boarder. Every time a russian bomber goes on an overseas trip. Radars are always looking and testing themselves. Jamming of things like GPS is so normal that it is expected on every flight in many areas. Jamming of military radars would be a classified event, but as with submarines, aggression does not require physical violence and so would not always make the news.
Yes, and in the WVR fight, doing a trick like that isn't helpful. You kill all your energy. While the nose is moving, your aircraft is still going in a similar plane of motion and has little capability to use the vertical.
Yes, and in the WVR fight, doing a trick like that isn't helpful. You kill all your energy. While the nose is moving, your aircraft is still going in a similar plane of motion and has little capability to use the vertical.
The funny thing is, everyone already knew this. The venerable Harrier could perform a manoeuvre called "viffing", in which it rotated its engine nozzles back to vertical whilst in horizontal flight. But the ability wasn't used at all during the Falklands war in the early 80's. And here we are in 2020 and people are still debating it.
Heh, I guarantee you that Harriers in the Falklands used "viffing"... as an administrative maneuver. The Harrier family has a whole menagerie of weird and wonderful TVC party tricks that are notoriously difficult to pull off, need a bunch of excess altitude as a backstop for when things inevitably go wrong, and generally aren't applicable to air-to-air combat.
All that said, I agree with you that it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme. Supermaneuverability has certainly expanded the envelope of potential post-stall maneuvers (and, more importantly, dramatically reduced pilot workload in those regimes) far beyond what the Harrier is capable of, but outside of the airshow circuit it continues to remain a solution in search of a problem.
"Fighter pilots HATE him! Learn this one weird trick that the bandits don't want you to know about and win 100% of your BFM engagements!" If only it were that easy...
I mean if you have no other choice but to die. Flying a good gameplan to put yourself in a position of advantage is the normal gameplan. But sure, having this trick after you've messed it up is nice to have.
Not necessarily. There are conceivable situations where supermaneuvrability can turn a situation where an enemy is on your tail and has a lock onto a situation where you fired a missile at them and you're safe. But yes, it's not the normal game plan. The normal gameplan is very likely to degenerate into such situations, though.
Nobody is saying that it’s impossible for this to be useful. We’re saying the odds are incredibly stacked against it.
At best it is a Hail Mary in a 1v1 WVR knife-fight.
By modern air doctrine, this can pretty much only happen in the specific scenario where every other plane has been splashed, since nobody would willingly enter such a scenario if they could avoid it. Modern IR missiles are more maneuverable than planes, so the aggressor will have to have emptied their missile stores completely. And the defender will need to be in a position where they’ve exhausted every other possible defensive resource and be in imminent risk of being downed by the bandit’s cannon.
If all of that is true, it could be a last-ditch survival effort. If it doesn’t generate a shooting opportunity, you’re dead since you’ll never have a chance to gain the energy needed to stay on the offensive.
Nobody in this entire tire fire of a thread has come up with a single additional plausible scenario.
> It’s much safer to teach your missiles to do the manoeuvre instead of making the plane do it first.
Indeed modern air-to-air missiles can do this and much more. They can be launched and lock on after the launch and have full-sphere attack capability (unlike earlier missiles, which even in a high off-boresight scenario would still require the launching aircraft to be behind the target).
If an enemy fighter has you locked up, you're dead. The No Escape Zone of modern infrared missiles (AIM-9X, Python 5, Iris-T, Derby, and of course R-77) is almost always going to kill you unless the missile misfires/hangs.
To recap the article, missiles aren't perfect, especially when they've been flown on and off carrier decks. And this "miss" isn't even data; it's microscopic anectdata. In fact, I don't know of another combat launch of the 9x.
...and if your hail-mary shot misses? In a big furball, the only reason to do this is if you're willing to risk being shot down in exchange, and trading planes 1-for-1 is generally a poor way to win fights.
Even if your missile misses, the situation is much better because although you're in a worse position, the enemy has now lost the initiative and a lot of energy. Presumably you'd be able to, using your superior missile, have another shot, or create an opportunity for your wingmen.
The idea isn't that you get shot in the exchange, it's that you force your enemy to abandon their advantage. The enemy has the choice to evade and lose their advantage, or go for the exchange in which case neither has the advantage.
This means that in cases where you have the upper hand you can use better tactics that don't incur high cost to yourself, whereas where you don't you can turn a 0-1 exchange into a potential 1-1 or 1-0 exchange. This is a pure win.
What? Why would your enemy lose energy here? This makes no sense; you are the one losing energy with this type of maneuver.
In a 2v1, if you’re the 1, you’re essentially already dead. Either you’re chasing one while the either is getting free shots at you, or you’re simply being chased by one while the other is providing support. Realistically, you’re running for your life with one hand already on the ejection handles. If you’re the 2, there will never be a need for this since the bandit knows that even trying to down one of you is suicide.
In a 2v2+, this kind of maneuver is just going to generate free shots for someone within a few seconds. You’ll be a sitting duck, and anyone can pull off a missile shot on you without even leaving their turning circle, particularly with modern helmet cueing systems and high off-bore missiles (fighter pilots can nowadays literally just turn their head, look at something, and shoot at it with high success rates).
it almost never is. wwii ingrained the wing man concept into every air force and for a good reason, from the thatch wwave onward it allowed nation to rely on training, which can be as abundant as needed, instead of better airframes.
as such the whole pretend scenario is built on impossible foundations. you dodge one attack and the wingman scopes you up, while the attacker just accelerate away to safety.
"but what if the attacker is left alone" - then the attacker retreats. it'd be an exceedingly bad call to keep aggressing without a wingman.
I agree that there are conceivable circumstances where this kind of maneuvering is useful. One thing to consider: fights are rarely 1v1, and even if it works perfectly against the guy you're fighting at the moment, one of his buddies will almost certainly have at least one shot opportunity against you. Energy is easy to give up and hard to get back.
The real issue in a war with a well-equipped equal - as opposed to an incursion against an inferior state - is reliability and availability of parts and servicing. The F22 is neither cheap nor quick to service after flights.
A plane that does everything well, except be ready to fly when you need it, is not going to be a war winner in a serious conflict.
The multitude of fighters works both ways. While an enemy might gain a shot on you, your energy disadvantage is less significant in the short term and your buddies should have an easier time due to pragmatic numeric advantage.
Maybe. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. That said, if I had to choose between fighting someone who employs this tactic as a part of their standard game plan or someone who doesn't, I'd choose to fight the former pretty much every time.
Yes but to win the fight first you have to get to the fight. These low-speed abilities mean russian aircraft can operate from much shorter/poorer strips than western jets. They are the product of a different mindset, a more defensive strategy. I doubt the f22 has ever touched grass.
To be fair, even non-supermaneuverable Russian jets have good unimproved-field performance--old-school tech like intake screens plays a much bigger role here than fancy thrust vectoring and fly-by-wire controls.
But they absolutely are a product of a different mindset, and have been wildly successful in certain aspects.
Obviously. A fighter jet has a trust-to-weight ratio of about 1. Even ultra-old air-to-air-missiles whose specs are declassified like the the AIM-9B from the 1950s have a T/W ratio of over 20, and they are much easier to make maneuverable compared to a 30 ton jet that shouldn't break apart or kill its pilot.
Precisely. Your missiles are far lighter, can turn on a dime before firing their rockets, and—most importantly—don’t need to worry about survival after a missed shot.
First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.
For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.
Also, in WVR, the advantage goes to the side with fewer planes. There was a study from the korean war to show this. The reason is because if you and your buddy is fighting 20 bandits, you can shoot at anybody that flies in front of you, while the enemies have to visually identify. And the speed of jet combat makes it impossible to verify before you lose your opportunity.
>So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon
Yup. Just like in vietnam. We are gonna fly up there with our f4s afterburning to mach 2, then we will launch all our sparrows at the bandits, who would fly straight into our missiles because they are dumb, and then we will land just in time for lunch.
Oversimplified for sure, but I think "extremely wrong" is unfair. I think the jury is still out on whether or not a stealth-on-stealth fight (or a more conventional fight in an ECM-heavy environment) inevitably devolves into a WVR knife fight. There are a number of reasons why this doesn't have to be the case.
You're absolutely correct that ROE can force a VID, but it'd be pretty dumb to box yourself into a corner that would force you into a neutral-ish WVR fight, yeah?
I agree that supermaneuverability has the potential to be useful, but I think it's fair to say that it's very much an edge case, and even then more of an augment to missiles that already have HOBS capability than a replacement for them. It certainly isn't a game-changing capability the way HOBS was. Also, TWR only goes so far to help recover from an energy deficit, especially if you have to go into reheat to make it happen. Gas kills are a thing...
Yes and no. Against a well-coordinated, larger force it's really difficult to win, and I very much wouldn't recommend adopting it as a primary tactic. If you had a fight that magically began at the furball phase (admittedly, this is one potential outcome of stealth-on-stealth engagements, although I imagine we'd need to develop better and different technology to make it a reality), that would be more likely to favor the individual, at least until they run out of missiles (it's difficult to over-emphasize how difficult guns kills are against maneuvering targets, even for a hypothetical magic robot with near-perfect aim). Old-school fights like Korea were much closer to the "immediate, chaotic furball" side of the spectrum than current fights, and there was a much less well-developed set of intra-and inter-flight tactics. A modern 2v1 (even heaters-only) is far more lopsided against the 1 than it was during Korea. With good coordination, this scales. (Aside: a really good book about the air war in Korea is The Hunters by James Salter. Highly recommended--it's fiction, but based on the author's own experiences as a pilot there.)
For what it's worth, technology and tactics have improved in the last half decade (perhaps more than we can say about our judgement?)... The proliferation of certain technologies will force continual re-evaluation of tactics, but I think it's safe to say that BVR is reasonably mature and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. (That said, reports of the death of the air-to-air gun will always be greatly exaggerated.)
> A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.
Every American stealth aircraft equipped with a radar is designed to be able to use it. There's various tricks involved, which all amount to driving the signal of radar below the noise floor for the adversary, while still being able to have the radar pick out the signal return (which is possible because the radar know what signal was sent out in the first place).
> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.
The F-22 has a low probability of intercept radar. They've been testing a window for adding IRST too in recent years. It also has extremely sophisticated passive EW sensors. It was designed from day one to win BVR fights without compromising stealth.
> For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.
It's a very poor tool and should be seen as a last resort.
As for F4's in vietnam and such, the visual engagement rules there were unique and are not going to repeat.
I'd suggest reading CBSA's Future of Air Combat report to understand the realities of this stuff. Supermaneuverability is very close to useless other than an advertising stunt at air shows.
Manned fighters themselves are very nearly obsolete.
Then came the air war over Vietnam, and the fighter crews there soon realized that AIM-7 shots beyond visual range were often more dangerous to other Americans than to the enemy, because there was no (sure) way to identify the target as friend or foe.
During the Gulf War, the US Air Force launched AIM-7M and AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missile for BVR attack under the condition of "one-way transparency", but the hitting rate was less than 30 percent.
A low observable fighter using its radar is hardly analogous to a man turning on a flashlight at night. This isn't the 1960's anymore where air search radars were turned on for extended periods on a set frequency.
Modern low probability of intercept are designed to emit only intermittently and hop between frequencies. An adversary might be able to detect the signal but probably won't be able to use it for tracking and targeting.
Furthermore data links allow for cooperative engagement. So the shooting platform can leave its radar off and rely on targeting data fed in from other sources.
You have lost your mind if you think any fight that’s 2v1 or worse odds is going to go well for the underdog. I mean, it’s not like 2v1 ACM doctrine isn’t a thing. It’s practiced regularly by fighter pilots. The side with 2 wins an overwhelming amount of time once practiced. It turns out we’ve learned new lessons and adopted new techniques in the 70 years since the Korean War.
First, once you have VID you do everything you can to keep the bandit in sight until you have a shot opportunity. This idea that “jets are so fast you lose the opportunity by the time you can tell what it is” is completely unfounded.
Second, those other 20 planes aren’t all wildly trying to shoot you. If you’re chasing one of them, that one is flying defensive and describing the fight to their wingmen (“one circle, bandit co-alt, nose high…”) as their supporting wingmen take turns with who’s engaged aggressive and getting clear missile shots at you (since you’re really focused on only one of them).
Third, even if none of this were true, doing this kind of thing in an N-vs-1 fight for N >= 2 invalidates your entire premise. The guy who’s hanging still in midair doing fancy air-show tricks is just generating free shots for all those other aircraft.
> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.
This is simply not true for modern AESA radars. It's only true for radars built with an 80's technology level. Modern radars are capable of producing search beams so narrow that they cannot be reliably used for locating the source. When someone is using a LPI radar near you, you can tell that someone has a radar on, but you will only have a very vague idea of the direction they are in, and no idea at all of how far away they are. And since other planes near you (or even other detectors on your own plane) do not get to see the same beam, only the next one that comes after a random interval, you cannot use multiple detectors for deducing the origin of the beam.
The fact that this myth of radars telling everyone where your are is so persistent is annoying, but also somewhat useful. Simply because if someone repeats it, it tells everyone that they have not updated their ideas about how air combat works since the cold war ended and they should be ignored.
Not necessarily. In a reality where your missiles have a huge delta-v and acceleration advantage against the enemy, while your plane itself is deficient in energy generation and retention, supermaneouvrability might be a logical and effective option.
Indeed, if you're a Russian Su-27 that just shot off two R-77 at targets at the cost of its energy, you just forced two of your opponents to disengage and lose all of their useful energy as well as targeting opportunities, and they might even be shot down. Evading a missile is so costly in terms of energy and opportunity that getting a shot off by sacrificing your energy can be viable.
After all, if you've got a missile on your tail you're not much of a threat anymore. If there are many enemies, not only are you not much of a threat but you're soon dead.
Why would shooting two R77 missiles cost the SU-27 its energy?
Those are medium/long range missilea, why on earth would you need super maneuverability to do that?
Even for very close range, if you use aim-9x or python 5, you can just shoot at an enemy on your back without turning at all.
Fighter pilots are not what you think. They know thier planes and thier enemy's planes, but those are always many years old. Few pay any attention to cutting edge technology as it doesn't impact thier work. They are not experts in missile development nor even aerodynamics. Point to a bit on a plane and they can say what it does, but ask them to explain exactly why it is engineered as it is and they will not have specific answers.
A cop is not an expert on ballistics just because he uses a gun. He knows his gun and how to best use it, but debates about the latest gun technology isn't necessarily his interest as they don't change how he uses the gun he has today.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Diesel has met a few fighter pilots. It's not a monolithic culture--there are plenty of pilots out there who are exactly as you describe, but also a number who not only can explain why a thing is engineered a certain way, but actually did some of that engineering themselves. Even if they're playing supporting roles in flight test and weapons development, they absolutely take the lead in tactics development/refinement, which is intimately tied to current knowledge about both friendly and enemy systems and tactics.
Besides, believe it or not, some of them are huge nerds...
Both. This would mainly be WVR, but there are variations for use in F-pole/BVR in general, especially if there is significant vertical angle between both. In theory this could be adapted as an F-pole manoeuvre against a plane with an altitude advantage in which you could defeat radar and shoot off a missile at the same time.
Why do you need to turn your nose that far that fast in a BVR fight? It may not even be possible in the flight regime you're in. There are a lot of other potential issues with this kind of maneuvering.
I agree that there are some potential uses in a WVR fight (particularly a 1v1 fight), but I think it's pretty fair to say that it's generally preferable to bleed off the missile's energy and preserve your own (which makes sense considering that countries tend to procure HMCS and HOBS missiles long before supermaneuverable aircraft). You don't get extra points for a missile making it to the target at a higher energy state, as long as it has enough energy to get there to begin with.
What prospects do you think there may be for active anti-missile tech like Trophy on fighters? The demonstrations I've seen of that system were mind-blowing and it doesn't seem too far-fetched to put on a jet.
I find active missile countermeasures weirdly ignored in these discussions. Compared to ground engagements it seems like there's plenty of time to engage. It's not like missiles are especially maneuverable. It's not like planes are cheap and disposable. And yet all the defenses we seem to talk about are passive (more stealth! more speed!)
The first impulse with naval, ground or even space doctrine is to at least try to shoot down missiles but it's like we don't even talk about it in the air. Am I missing something?
That's a good question! For something very similar to Trophy, I'd generally say low for at least 3 reasons (weight/size/complexity, issues from moving 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than armored ground vehicles, and the fact that you need to consummate the intercept at a much further range because airplanes are much more fragile than tanks), but never underestimate what a few billion dollars and several decades of research can achieve.
I'd expect to see something like this to show up on transports and tankers long before it shows up on fighters, and probably in the form of an antimissile missile (EFPs might not mix well with relatively delicate airframes) or a similar expendable. This is more in the realm of plausibility, and the idea actually has some historical precedent as a proposed defense against SAMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pye_Wacket
That said, there are other forms of active defense against missiles that don't rely on physically destroying their airframes. Generally, I think those technologies are more promising, particularly when they aren't limited by ammunition.
Suffice to say, there's a big Red Queen's race going on between countermeasures and counter-countermeasures.
> That said, there are other forms of active defense against missiles
Ah yes i'm reasonably well aware of some of the EW/optical suites being deployed. Was just wondering if anything kinetic was, er, on the radar. Totally agree that Trophy et al is not really going to work - they just want to avoid a direct hit whereas even 100m away could be fatal to an airplane. But these BVR missiles are active - flinging something back almost seems like low hanging fruit!
Perhaps no-one really knows. The lack of any peer air confrontation in 50 years definitely shows. The f-22 is a marvel but I for one have trouble seriously believing it can just boop su-35s out of the sky from a hundred miles away completely risk-free. None of this has ever been tested. Frankly, without some astonishing tech breakthrough, i find the idea of routine BVR shootdowns of peer adversaries to be kind of wishful thinking...
And none of this even touches on the real weak point, the tankers, aka. the reason why none of these planes are ever going to fly over a real adversary anyway.. sure, you can probably get an f-22 over Beijing. Once.
The idea in BVR is that in many situations the enemy aircraft has an altitude advantage compared to you. Therefore, the enemy radar is only able to detect the target if there is a significant Doppler shift compared to the ground. The combination of rapid deceleration as well velocity change drastically reduces the Doppler shift which would lead to a loss of lock.
Meanwhile, the ~120+ degree change in AoA combined with HMCS means that there is a good possibility of shooting off your won missile, putting the enemy in the defensive. Given the advantage in energy of the R-77 this can lead to a situation where even if your missile fails, you have a subsequent energy and position advantage.
Bleeding off the missile's energy and preserving your own is not necessarily the best strategy if your enemy has an energy advantage that is sufficient to prevent you from taking the other hand despite your energy being sufficient to get a kill in a vacuum. If you react fast enough you may be able to throw off the missile or lock entirely and also get your own missile on target.
There are advantages to look-up and look-down depending on the tactic you're employing. It might work well against a radar with a known vulnerability to this type of maneuver, although I'm not sure I would employ it as a general tactic against generic Doppler radars (ignoring kinematic issues here, but they're very much a concern even if the maneuver is both doable and effective).
There are plenty of other ways to skin the cat that I would suggest reaching for before this. We've been fighting with and against Doppler radars for a long time...
I grew up with Top Gun, so I get excited thinking about dog fighting, but in the context of 2020 and cyber warfare, is there really much value in air combat? When is the last time two sides actually engaged fighter jets?
I'm probably blissfully unaware how relevant they are, but it just feels like a massive waste of money continuing to build these projects.
> but in the context of 2020 and cyber warfare, is there really much value in air combat?
Technical fights are surely relevant, but in the worst case you can 'simply' unplug your overseas fibres and be done with it. Also, if someone simply marches/flies in and destroys your IXPs, your technical superiority gets irrelevant pretty quick.
So, you really need to keep up technically with your possible foes. Additionally, it also serves as a demonstration of strength and industry funding. So fighter jets won't be going anywhere, soon.
You can stall with lots of energy, up in the coffin corner. The U-2 pilots commonly fly there. Going slower or turning too much will produce a stall, but going faster can hit never-exceed speed limits.
Supermaneuverabillity would make that portion of the flight envelope much less hazardous.
A supermaneuverable U-2 would be... interesting. I wonder if that would reduce pilot workload or increase it? The engineer in me would suggest a robust automatic flight control system system instead, although considering how insane the procurement process can be, I'm admittedly not all that confident it would save money in the long run.
I'm not a engineer but it seems infeasible to me to create a U2 variant with wings strong enough for such maneuvering. They shaved every ounce they could off those things.
In the sense that the advantages you get from using it could be outweighed by the risks you incur by using it. All else being equal, supermaneuverability is great to have, but when you start looking at design tradeoffs (e.g. canards being great for maneuverability but poor for stealth, the added weight and complecity of TVC) it's not necessarily an advantage.
To be fair, the same systems that enable supermaneuverability typically enhance "normal" maneuverability as well. I don't think the Russian engineers were designing these systems specifically for awesome-looking airshow maneuvers and 1v1 BFM.
It has very little combat usage, there's a reason the Raptor doesn't do it. Any time you see an aircraft do some high AOA (Angle of Attack) maneuver and provide almost zero line of site (not moving up / down / left / right), you know he's slow and you've won the fight if you have airspeed (assuming gun only).
The only benefit would be to get an IR missile off when you've already realized you are losing and he's behind you.
This made me smile. I really don't recommend actually doing this in real life for a number of reasons, but how totally epic it would be is very much not one of them.
JHMCS isn't that useful in such extreme off-axis situations. A missile taking a big turn requires it to expend a lot of energy and drastically hampers its probability to hit the target.
that was done at an extremely slow speed; if it'd be viable at mach, it'd be interesting, as it could throw off a missile target guidance's prediction, but I seriously doubt the wings could survive it at speed, and as such, it looks mostly like a cool party trick at best and a vestigial requirement from previous wars at worst.
What I’m really interested is how do you engineer such a software system? I bet they have a simulation system, how do you validate that? What type of tests do they have? How do they iterate when a deficiency is found?
How do the team looks like? Is it 10 geniouses keeping the whole system in their heads or 4000 replacable cogs? If the second how do you make sure they all act in coordination?
They do have a very comprehensive simulation system with a large part of the work being done at Dobbins Air Force Base just outside of Atlanta. From what I understand, the team is quite small (<10).
Every device/sensor communicates through a centralized bus which is essentially a messaging system (e.g. MIL STD 1553, ARINC 429). Furthermore, every device has a set of expected outputs for every internal or external input. You can build a software model that mimics that. Then it's just a matter of connecting your software to the bus. Flight control software aggregates sensory inputs from the bus, reconciles redundancies, and makes flight decisions.
These approaches aren't problem free of course. They're definitely slow, and can appear to be inefficient depending on your frame of reference and constraints.
My experience is in medtech which has similar ideas (but again obviously isn't the exact same). Ultimately all simulations used to prove that the software is working correctly are supposed to be validated (either in part or in whole) by some sort of real testing. The most expensive/real version of that is when they go off and do real test flights (or in medtech, when we go and do stuff on real people).
The type of tests of they have is probably "all types of tests". You pick the right set of tests to test your software components at the scale and detail required, while finding ways to validate the assumptions you made along the way. For example, maybe you have a pure function that takes pitot tube measurements to generate air speed. You could test that function with something like a unit test, and then back it up with another set of test cases (integration or system or whatever) that show that the function is being called correctly in all cases.
Every company/project will have their own Change Control process and defect resolution process defined. Typically they consist of someone reporting a defect, some sort of investigation into the defect (determining rate of occurrence, root cause if able, estimating the severity of the defect), which then gets fed into some sort of risk based problem solving algorithm to determine if an immediate fix is needed, or if there's flexibility. Then you go ahead and try to fix the thing, and when you're done, you go ahead and run more analysis to determine the scope of retest you need to do. If you're lucky, everything is self contained within the "pure software" part of your project and the "worst thing" that can happen is you have to re-run the whole software test suite. If you're not lucky, the change interacts with non-software components in ways that cannot be safely mocked out, and you have to add some kind of real world testing.
I think most places lean more towards replaceable cogs - that is the whole point of all of this process and documentation. It's to minimize the overall risk of the project (which isn't the same thing as maximizing benefit). It's hard to minimize risk while requiring super top tier talent.
The F-22 is such a marvel. I really wonder why the F-35 is plagued with so many systemic problems since it should be no more complex (and has the F-22 as an example for many of its own requirements).
The F-22 had plenty of problems during development as well. One reason that you don't hear about the problems is because the F-22 was never sold to foreign countries, so it was easier to keep quiet about the issues. If an issue was deemed a vulnerability it could be declared classified and illegal to discuss publicly. And anything that wouldn't be deemed a vulnerability isn't worth discussing on the news.
In contrast, the F-35 has a crazy fast development timeline, and is being sold to several countries. So they are biting off a much bigger chunk, and being much more public about it as part of the political game. So it's harder to keep quiet when you make a huge deal about showing up at an airshow in the UK and then have to cancel because your fleet got grounded because of fuel system issues. The overall difference isn't that the F-35 has more problems, it's just that they are finding them quicker and you're actually hearing about them. (Edit: the missed airshow was because of engine fires, the fuel system was a separate issue- sorry for the mistake. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/de...)
The F-22 has also killed pilots, caused others to eject with unknown causes, and had other reports of pilots losing consciousness but eventually recovering. They grounded the whole fleet several years ago, the oxygen generation system has been the subject of several complaints. This probably wouldn't have made the news either except for the fact that people died.
The F-22 is designed first and foremost as an air superiority fighter. The F-35 was intended to replace half a dozen wildly different aircraft with a single plane. That was a horrible idea right from the outset.
This is such a silly conspiracy theory. It may make sense for US congressmen to lobby for pork in their districts, but why would the Israeli Air Force invest in defective machines?
Their existing fleet of F-15 and F-16 fighters is getting pretty old. I have been a “fan” of the F-16 since I was a kid and I’m in my 40s now.
I think for political reasons they don’t have access to Russian or European aircraft and they probably don’t want Chinese ones. This is the first new fighter we have available to them.
It could be political reasons, or it could be that there are no Russian or European stealth aircraft. And it looks like Israel values the ability of F-35 to fly all the way to Tehran undetected [1].
No, F-22 is not up for export. Also, F-22 serves a specific role vs F-35 which is geared towards multiple capabilities. There are neither mutually exclusive nor substitute for each other.
Arguably it works well enough for the Rafale. But it is an older plane with less specifications constraints, designed mainly for a single small country, and still the development up-to real usability took an insane amount of time (first prototype flight in 1986, really operational since a few years according to former pilots, and still missing some capabilities of former platforms in some roles).
Right now the F-35 is simply not ready, but I'm not sure anybody seriously expected it to be? Comparing the timescales, we should check again in 15 years, or if it goes really fast maybe at least 5?
Now specifically the software dev history of the F-35 is an interesting story..
The F-35's various issues have been exaggerated by the media. All aircraft have teething problems. The F-15 was infamous in its early days, there just wasn't a bunch of websites covering it at the time. The F-22 also has had its issues. The oxygen system has had repeated problems, severe enough that at one point the pilots straight up refused to fly the aircraft until action was taken, believing their life was at risk.
As an aside I thought the prof's comment regarding having commercial co-pilots flying along with the pilot - via remote control - was interesting.
It would seem to me a logical first step to someday having fully remote controlled aircraft flying passengers (which as the F22 pilot notes - is every airline's dream).
I would imagine that cargo planes will have to safely fly on fully remote controlled aircraft for a number of years before airlines start thinking about opening themselves up to such liability...
The level of automation leads one to believe it is not inconceivable there will be versions without a cockpit with even greater flight capabilities.
While many can be seen as making it easier on the human pilot conversely you can see it as making it easier to validate the automation by having a human as a backup.
Why do we time and again see this horrible blog spam, that is The Drive magazine? All they do is keep padding the prose until it is 8-10 paragraphs while paraphrasing and quoting the original source. Stratechery does that as well, but also provides original commentary and insight. The Drive is a terrible source of information.
I find The Drive's content on military and defense news to be pretty valuable and distinctive. Even if they're just an aggregator (which honestly doesn't seem the case to me, at least in this domain), they're aggregating from sources I wouldn't think to look at myself.
I tend to agree..it's a style thing. It has been when the lead author has written for other sites as well. I think it is subtly different from blog spam in that those pargraphs provide a ton of valuable information, but in an attempt to be detailed and precise can become redundant and a bit of a slog. Tyler has an enormous amount of knowledge and...sometimes overexplains or over introduces the simple point he is trying to make for my tastes. It seems to assume every article reader starts from absolutely zero knowledge.
The article almost made me not watch the video. It is poorly written, by someone not versed in aviation terminology. Much of what said of "raptor pilots" is in fact true of all fighters. And some of the facts are so awkwardly worded that they are borderline incorrect. For instance, the F-22 does not fly at 60-65,000 feet. That is its service ceiling, its maximum possible altitude.
> For instance, the F-22 does not fly at 60-65,000 feet. That is its service ceiling, its maximum possible altitude.
So it flies at 60-65k feet. I don’t see how that is wrong? If a pilot wants to keep cruising along at that altitude it is apparently possible, even if they might not generally do so.
The video's over an hour long. The Drive article provides a useful summary so you can decide if you want to watch the video, which is why I linked to it.
They gave a good summary, and links to the video, which is really interesting. What do you want more? Not everyone has 1hr to spend to watch the whole thing.
The term is "Supermaneuverability"... all one word. This is characterized as post-stall, sometimes called "non-aerodynamic" controlled flight. In short, it means the aircraft remains under pilot control even after the flow has separated from the wing (aka a stall).
The 22 is not considered supermaneuverable by many. It can use thrust vectoring and some fly-by-wire tricker to ape supermaneuverability but it pales in comparison to many russian aircraft. The 22's wing becomes very unpredictable in stall, hence the need for all the fly by wire. It was meant for flying fast in a strait line, and for stealth. It was never meant for things like Kobras or Kulbits. That it could eventually do them was an afterthought. The Russian aircraft have wings designed for slow speed/high AOA maneuverability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulbit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jks6TTFsglk
Kulbit / Chakra at about 05:20 and again at 06:20. Note how slow/tight the show is. An f-22 could never perform repeated maneuvers like this in such a confined space.