October 9, 2016 at 8:32 am
Would it be possible to build a small missile decoy against active radar guided missiles that would fly close to an aircraft, say 500m. When a fighter detects that a missile is launched at it, it can fire 3 or 4 of those, they would have a datalink to tell them where to fly exactly to be between the plane and the incoming missile.
Even something as small as a towed decoy can have an RCS similar to that of a fighter, so I don’t think those decoys would have to be big. A plane can only use one towed decoy at a time, whereas several of these mini decoys could be launched. They don’t need to have a big impulse, for the most part they need a sustained thrust for about 60 seconds or so at most. Perhaps something the size of a 70mm rocket would do the trick. The aircraft could carry a lot of those in a pod, easily 10 or more.