You guys have been flying Falcon4 too much.
Missle combat,even up thru the mid-70's were highly unreliable in combat conditions, hard to use, and were not "just point and shoot BVR = kill ".
Not even close!!The Israeli's reported that even during the Six Day War (1967) only 30% of all air to air kills were prosecuted with missles. The rest were conducted with good old fashioned cannons.
During both phases of the air war over North Vietnam the success rate of the Sparrow missle was approximately 12%. The Sidewinder was consider to be "much better". Its success rate was somewhere in the 18% range. Now realize that this doesn't include missles fired 'out of parameters', and also includes the 1972 Linebacker campaigns which helped out these statistics quite a bit. Hell, I saw one statistic recently that stated that something like 30% of Sparrow attempted launches never even left the launch rail.
And this doesn't even start to include issues such as the rate of radar failure during this period. The difficulty of "Friend or Foe" identification and other issues. Realize that during Vietnam, the ROE requirement to visually identify the enemy aircraft before firing was there for a reason.
Do some research guys, its not quite what you think!
