Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Anaxogoras on July 10, 2009, 11:55:54 AM
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Hello everyone,
While on vacation in California I went on a camping trip with an old friend of mine who serves in the Air Force and flies a 'block 50' F-16C. He got there through ROTC at UC Berkeley. So far he has served in Korea, Japan and Iraq.
I asked a lot of questions while we drank over the campfire, and here are some of the more interesting remarks I can recall:
During red-flag like training in Alaska: "We got our tulips kicked by the F-22s." In my ignorance I asked for specifics about how the F-22 maneuvers compared to the F-16. What really happened is that the F-22s shot down the F-16s without ever being spotted!
If a single F-16 were to engage a single bandit in a maneuvering fight (and let's assume a cold merge to make it interesting), the best speed at which to start is 480 knots. However, you can reach 9 g's all the way down to 300 knots, but of course it's still better to be faster. If the bandit crosses the right hemisphere, the pilot maneuvers his body to the left in order to rest his head to the side of the head rest so he can view the bandit while he turns.
Fights like these end very quickly because of "high off bore-sight" short range missiles like the AIM-9X; being positioned on the bandit's 6 is not required.
The pilot's goal is to fix the bandit in his line of sight. That is, the bandit stays in the same spot from his view through the canopy, which means that the pilot's aircraft is within the turning circle of the bandit. A typical mistake here would be to attempt pure pursuit instead of lag pursuit.
Scissors fights are still an important part of BFM, but from the attacker's perspective "that means you messed up." Just as in prop fighter combat, the winner is the aircraft that has best minimized its horizontal (forward) motion.
On the human side of things, morale is sometimes low because the aircraft are very old, and the number of cockpits is diminishing. Some of the F-16s they fly have more than 5000 hours on them. Pilot jobs are shifting to UAVs that are controlled with a joystick from the ground.
Of the two tours he has served in Iraq, the first had some relevance, but the second was a waste of time and resources. The Air Force cannot say "no" to the Army when it is asked to perform any support role because of fear of losing relevance.
On the debate over the F-22 vs the F-35 he was mostly indifferent, and only cared to see one or the other produced more quickly.
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Nice!
Good post!
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Well i would hope the the F-22 pond the crap out of the F-16. What is the point of having a..........how much dose one F-22 cost? Anyway, what is the point of having the F-22, if the out dated F-16 gets one or more of them.