How good is the Hawk???

What’s the Tigercat…never heard of it :confused:

The Tigercat is a land version of the short range UK Shorts Seacat antiair missile which at one time was the most used naval surface to air missile in the world. It is a simple CLOS subsonic missile.

Jack E. Hammod

SEACAT firing from light weight triple launcher

Tigercat launcher

Old, itty bitty, naval SAM. Sea Wolf replaced it as I recall. Whoops. Looks like it was a land version of the Seacat

Well, more of a Old, itty bitty Land based SAM, Replaced by Rapier in most of the countries that used it. The systm was a Land based version of Seacat with a three round launcher on a trailer. Most users had only the optical SACLOS system, However one user had an all weather radar SACLOS system tacked on. It was used with not much effect by the Argies in the Falklands war. Seacat was replaced by Seawolf on some Leander class frigates, while at least one of the Assault ships, Fearless had Phalanx fitted in its place. However most RN ships fitted with it were never updated and the weapon was phased out as the ships fitted with it were replaced with the Type 22’s and 23’s during the 1980’s.

What’s the Tigercat…never heard of it :confused:

Old, itty bitty, naval SAM. Sea Wolf replaced it as I recall. Whoops. Looks like it was a land version of the Seacat

What’s the Tigercat…never heard of it :confused:

A Real Missile

Well, on the first page from its web site, An Ex Swedish AF guided weapons technical officer states his view of the HAWK in no uncertain terms.

Page link here

Text on the picture of the Bloodhound being fired translates. A Real missile being fired, Not a HAWK or other toy. 😀 😀 😀

As for my own view, the RAF SAM’s were the BH and two fireworks called Rapier and Tigercat.

Folks,

I am not for sure, but I don’t think the HAWK is capable of intercepting an aircraft like the Mig-25 flying at high altitude.

Well that was a useful comment seeing how it HAS done it. :rolleyes:

Folks,

I am not for sure, but I don’t think the HAWK is capable of intercepting an aircraft like the Mig-25 flying at high altitude. It is mainly a low-medium level SAM.

Also, while the US Marines wanted to keep their HAWK batteries they had to retire them around 2000 due to manpower concerns. The Marines are suppose to be getting a HMVEE system mounting the land launched version of the AMRAAM called CLAWS based on system developed by Norway.

Jack E. Hammond

BTW> The Marines in the 1980s were also very interested in the ROLAND but the US Army put a stop to those dreams.

Did you ever get a chance to work with it or with those who did? What was the general opinion of it?

Had the chance to see a French IHawk Battery deployed at Sculthorpe during a NATO Exercise about three years ago, However a major fault on my kit at Neatishead stopped me from going on the day of the visit. I’ve worked with a guy who’d worked on almost all of the major US Army heavy AD systems up to Patriot with the exception of the HAWK (He was one of the US Contractors at Spadeadam), hence I know a bit about the Herc, US Roland and a little failure called Sgt York. However I did have a chat with an RAF SAM Allocator who told me a little story about a SAM Trap he set up in the Yorkshire Dales during a NATO exercise consisting off Dutch Patriot and IHAWK batteries. The debrief on the exercise had a lot of pissed off pilots who suddenly had found themselves under attack by an unknown SAM threat and declared dead by the umpires. The performance of the IHAWK according to him on this exercise was impressive.

Most likely not that much insulation on the sustainer as the booster only burns for 4 seconds.

Did you ever get a chance to work with it or with those who did? What was the general opinion of it?

That makes sense but that sucker must have a LOT of insulation on it to keep the heat from deforming or prematurely igniting the sustainer. That and the booster propellent must burn relatively cool.

Most likely not that much insulation on the sustainer as the booster only burns for 4 seconds.

Come to think of it they could probably do it something like this though it might be a PITA. The propellant around the sustainer would insulate it and at the same time make it easier to make the thing neutral burning. (Fire goes in the white ring.)

Most likely something like this. Star Configuration propellant for the booster (Large surface area of propellant = lots of gas in a short amount of time, hence high power and large thrust). The sustainer is almost a solid stick of propellant that burns from the back end only, a much smaller surface area of propellant burns in a given time , hence lower thurst but the motor will burn longer.

That makes sense but that sucker must have a LOT of insulation on it to keep the heat from deforming or prematurely igniting the sustainer. That and the booster propellent must burn relatively cool.

What I’d really like to know though is what the hell does the motor look like inside the casing (yes, the sustainer is inside the booster):

Length 108 inches
Diameter 14 inches
Weight 849 lbs.
Burn Time: 4.5 sec boost, 31 sec sustain

Maximum Thrust 15,000 lbs boost, 1900 lbs sustain

Most likely something like this. Star Configuration propellant for the booster (Large surface area of propellant = lots of gas in a short amount of time, hence high power and large thrust). The sustainer is almost a solid stick of propellant that burns from the back end only, a much smaller surface area of propellant burns in a given time , hence lower thurst but the motor will burn longer.

What I’d really like to know though is what the hell does the motor look like inside the casing (yes, the sustainer is inside the booster):

Length 108 inches
Diameter 14 inches
Weight 849 lbs.
Burn Time: 4.5 sec boost, 31 sec sustain

Maximum Thrust 15,000 lbs boost, 1900 lbs sustain

By the way, since 1981 the Egyptian ADF received 16 Batteries of MIM-23B Improved HAWK.
The improved examples are still in use in many countries and have interoperality with the Patriot.

The marines were the last US users but it is still used overseas to my knowledge. Here is a video (I think it’s recent) of some Hawk and PAC-2 launches from an exercise.

http://rapidshare.de/files/30599134/Patriot___Hawk_-_Excellent.flv.html

You’ll need an flv player to view it.

Sounds like it made quite an impact, thank you Sens but I didn’t know it had been retired. The pic I posted was taken only a couple of years ago in a Greek military parade, is Greece still using it or have all operators stopped its use???

It had a considerable impact during the YKW 1973 f.e. In low level performance it was similar to the SAM-6. The Arab AFs were teached by the Russians to fly a special attack profil against the Hawk-threat. The EAF trained against mock-up targets in the Western Desert. A MiG-17/Su-7 has to fly as low as possible in the threat area, pop-up, track the intended target by eye, dive in, drop and dash away as low as possible again. All related to stay below the 90 seconds limit, what was the minimum time-demand of the Hawk-system from first detect till firing procedure to hit something, that info was given by the Russians.
All that limited the radius of action of the EAF to around 100 km inside Sinai through higher fuel demand for example from the start. Navigation was hampered by that low profile too and all targets were preplanned ones therefore.
All pilots trained for a single target in the Western Desert mainly, till they stayed inside the 90 seconds limit. The pilots learned the missions from recce-pics too and were well prepared to hit those. All was planned to the minute, when the EAF opened ex/ingress routes through
the own SAM-belt to the preplanned tight time-scale. For the EAF all had to look like MOKED from 1967, when the circumstances were very different related to details.
In 1973 most of the targets were “hit”, but the results stayed far beyond exspectations from that. In many cases the compounds were empty and deserted from alarmed Israeli troops. Something the Egyptian pilots realized during dive-down onto intended target, but could not do something about, but stick to the order and shift some sand and stones by that. In other cases some split seconds wrong timing related to the preplanned mission was enough to foil a proper bombing run at all. The most fatefull failure was the bombing run at the Golan. A flight of Su-7s attacked the compound of the 188. ‘Barak’ tank brigade, where all the officers were gethered to be briefed about the coming Syrian attack at “sunset” at the Southern Golan. All the bombs felt into a wadi 200 yards away and exploded there without doing harm.
After the surprise was lost, such pin-point attacks became scarse and nothing was corrected about that really.
That example showed the hard-kills for the ‘Hawk’ were seldom, but the posing threat from that was much more important. The Arabs adopted a Russian tactic to avoid that hard kill danger most of the time, but doing so limited their hitting power too.
When the Israelis realized that effect during and after the YKW 1973, they were very pleased, when the Egyptians did prefer to keep silent about that.
At least they could claim that their attacking force had not a higher loss-rate compared to first day of 1967.-
Pictures of Hawk-sites in Germany for example, do show peace-time ones. When alert of coming danger was rised, all Hawk Btls were dispersed to multiple war-time sites in an unpredictable manner. Even the former WP-forces were not numerous enough to whip-out all dispersed Hawk-sites in a short time scale. When we remember the YKW example, we get an idea about the negative effects from that for WP-forces.

Well they’ve hit a Foxbat at altitude and before they were retired they’d recieved antimissile capability and taken out tactical ballistic missiles in tests.