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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| F-35 pilot: Here's what people don't understand about dogfighting, and how the F-35 excels at it |
| 2017-01-04 |
| Since 2001, Lockheed Martin and US military planners have been putting together the F-35, a new aircraft that promises to revolutionize aerial combat so thoroughly as to leave it unrecognizable to the general public. Detractors of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter have long criticized the program as taking too long and costing too much, though overruns commonly occur when developing massive, first-in-class projects like the F-35. But perhaps the most damning criticism of the F-35 came from a 2015 assessment that F-16s, first fielded in the 1970s, had handily defeated a group of F-35s in mock dogfight tests. According to Lt. Col. David "Chip" Berke, the only US Marine to fly both the F-22 and the F-35, the public has a lot of learning to do when assessing a jet's capability in warfare. "The whole concept of dogfighting is so misunderstood and taken out of context," Berke said in an interview with Business Insider. "We need to do a better job teaching the public how to assess a jet's capability in warfare." "There is some idea that when we talk about dogfighting it's one airplane's ability to get another airplane's 6 and shoot it with a gun ... That hasn't happened with American planes in maybe 40 years," Berke said. "Everybody that's flown a fighter in the last 25 years -- we all watched 'Top Gun,'" said Berke, referring to the 1986 film in which US Navy pilots take on Russian-made MiGs. But planes don't fight like that anymore, and comparing different planes' statistics on paper and trying to calculate or simulate which plane can get behind the other is "kind of an arcane way of looking at it," Berke said. Unlike older planes immortalized in films, the F-35 doesn't need to face its adversary to destroy it. The F-35 can fire "off boresight," virtually eliminating the need to jockey for position behind an enemy. The F-35 can take out a plane miles beyond visual range. It can pass targeting information to another platform, like a drone or a US Navy destroyer, and down a target without even firing a shot. While US Air Force pilots do train for classic, World War II-era dogfights, and while the F-35 holds its own and can maneuver just as well as fourth-generation planes, dogfights just aren't that important anymore. Berke said dogfighting would teach pilots "great skill sets" but conflict within visual range "doesn't always mean a turning fight within 100 feet of the other guy maneuvering for each other's 6 o'clock." Berke also made an important distinction that conflicts within visual range do not always become dogfights. Also, "within visual range" is a tricky term. "You could not see a guy who's a mile away, or you could see a guy at 15 miles if you got lucky," Berke said, adding that with today's all-aspect weapons systems, a plane can "be effective in a visual fight from offensive, defensive, and neutral positions." "We need to stop judging a fighter's ability based on wing loading and Gs," Berke said of analysts who prize specifications on paper over pilots' insights. Furthermore, Berke, who has several thousand flying hours in four different airplanes, both fourth and fifth generation, stressed that pilots train to negate or avoid conflicts within visual range -- and he said no plane did that better than the F-35. Even in the F-22 Raptor, the world's most lethal combat plane in within-visual-range conflicts and beyond, Berke said he'd avoid a close-up fight. "Just because I knew I could outmaneuver an enemy, my objective wouldn't be to get in a turning fight and kill him," Berke said. Though it might be news to fans of "Top Gun" and the gritty, "Star Wars"-style air-to-air combat depicted in TV and films, the idea of a "dogfight" long ago faded from relevance in the world of aerial combat. A newer, less sexy term has risen to take its place: situational awareness. And the F-35 has it in spades. So why did they give it a gun? |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #6 Second Times is the Charm, eh? The US bought the "missiles only: beyond visual range" theory going into the Vietnam War dropping onboard cannons. Unfortunately they way, WAY overestimated the lethality of the AIM-7 Sparrow:The Pk (kill probability) of the AIM-7E was less than 10%; US fighter pilots shot down 59[Note 1] aircraft out of the 612 Sparrows fired.[4] Of the 612 AIM-7D/E/E-2 missiles fired, 97 (or 15.8%) hit their targets, resulting in 56 (or 9.2%) kills. Two kills were obtained beyond visual range.[5] |
| Posted by: magpie 2017-01-04 19:54 |
| #5 And as far as the guns are concerned... the F-35c and F-35b mount them in pods for easy removal. The F-35a recess it's gun in the nose, out of the airstream except when actually shooting, hidden rest of the time. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2017-01-04 18:04 |
| #4 Why this is complete BS, we need 1500 more A-10 and force the Marines, the RAF and the Navy to adapt to the past. Throw in 1200 Thuds and you got a mans Air Force. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2017-01-04 18:00 |
| #3 So why did they give it a gun? Actually, a question deserving of an article or two by itself, but the short version is that the USAF and USN embarrassed themselves badly in Vietnam when the F-4 Phantom II - our #1 front-line fighter around the world - was incapable of shooting down North Vietnamese aircraft with the miserable missiles of the time, and they Didn't. Have. A. Gun. Modern missiles (the AIM-9X and AIM-120) are not quite one-shot/one-kill, but they're damned close, and if we deleted guns today you could make a good argument for it - but the services are never going to forget the fact that they couldn't bring down the enemy because they didn't even carry the fighter's most basic weapon. (Not to mention the last gun kill for the US military was by a Hog. No way they're going to let THAT go. :D ) Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2017-01-04 17:19 |
| #2 Uh, not fully buying this one - why, then, did the Pentagon wait months to get this story out? |
| Posted by: Raj 2017-01-04 17:18 |
| #1 "The whole concept of dogfighting is so misunderstood and taken out of context," Nope. Just those who live to fly another day. War is like that. You live or you die. All the rest is Monday morning quarterbacking or excuses by the 'experts'. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-01-04 16:51 |