October 29, 2016 at 8:08 am
Would it be possible to make a case for a very light anti-tank plane to fight massed armor attacks? Such small planes could be built in large numbers and would saturate the enemy defenses. They would be designed to shoot all their missiles on the first pass to benefit from the effect of surprise, and they would all attack at the same time.
Usually CAS planes have to be sufficiently heavy, in order to be able to carry 500lbs bombs and an internal gun. What I am talking about here is a very light payload, like 6 medium range fire and forget missiles ( like javelin ) or at most 4 fire and forget hellfire in clear weather. A turboprop plane weighing half as much as an A-29 would be sufficient.
In the european theater it would be rather unlikely to be able to see an enemy tank at long range due to bad weather, smoke and camouflage so there is no point carrying weapons with more than 3000m of effective range most of the time.
What would make such a small plane possible are the folliowing things:
– an HMS which would greatly reduce the time to acquire the targets. One target every 2 seconds would be the objective.
– auto-pilot. the pilot climbs to 1000ft and the plane then flies on auto pilot for about 15 seconds while the pilot concentrates on finding targets on the ground. 15 seconds should be enough to fire the 6 missiles.
– a small targeting system, that would be cued to the helmet and that would identify the tanks at up to 3000m. The targeting seeker could possibly be a dual mode IIR and MMW seeker like the SDB2 seeker.
– computer power to identify the tank with image recognition software.
– towed decoy to increase survivability. The decoy would be deployed right before the climb. Plus enough flares.
The fire and forget missile would also be effective against helicopters at even greater ranges, maybe around 4500m.
The plane would have a titanium cockpit with a windshield capable of withstanding light weapons fire. Maybe it would have a datalink, not sure if it would be cost effective. The price goal would be no more than 6 million.
I think that if the pilot has a 50% chance of surviving a hit and ejecting it would be already good. In a large scale war, there would probably be thousands of deads on each side every day if not tens of thousands, so there is no reason the pilots would not suffer losses also. I would argue that not stopping a mass armor attack would cause a heck of a lot more deads in the end. Also, killing the tanks would almost guarantee that the enemy would stop its attack, no need for a CAS planes for that, only a pure anti-tank plane would be enough.