Correct and I would guess that the F-15C’s in this exercise had them as they are stationed at the base this effort occured.

Then why use the F-22s as radar platforms?

Surely it would be better to keep them under EMCOM and let them take advantage of their VLO tech to get in and about the red force.

* Every AESA radar can be LPI, its a feature thats inherent to the design -all you have to do is program up the software that way.

No. If you’d read the AvWeek article the F-22’s were also coordinating the defense. Imagine you’ve got seven F-22s cruising around at sixty or seventy thousand feet taking in everything with their much harder to detect radars and both taking shots and passing along the “big picture” to the F-15s. If all the planes are talking to each other and ISTR they can you could have say, F-22 #3 cueing F-15 #17 etc. That way you get the aircraft in the best position going after any particular target and you don’t get two or three aircraft going after one enemy aircraft while three more skate by unimpeded.

So the USAF have just got $ 250 million dollar apiece AWACs?

Swweeeeet :p :diablo:

Thread title:

F-22A Raptor’s Impressive Kill Ratio

When it is not necessarily the F-22 doing the killing and being exposed. Did red air have AWACs support?

After all this could have warned them about the bandits location and allow them to take action accordingly.

Nope. Cobra can be done only at slow speeds. If you pull the stick at high speed you will have a very high pitch rate, but not a Cobra.

So what? We are talking about close combat at high off-boresight anlgles. So what if the missile will lose energy? It is not obliged to travel 10 miles.

Nice scenario, but you ignore that the guy with the helmet would be the first to acquire its target. Also the guy that have just performmed the cobra is low on energy, and even a Su 30 with its fast acceleration, would require a good 10-15 seconds to regain speed.

The missiles that are suposed to have a 360 deg. coverage (PV and soon 9X) do not use visual lock-on, as if firing in the frontal hemisphere.

What do you define as “high-speed” and “low-speed”?

It may be obliged to travel 5 miles, can it do that after making the turn?

Aquire first, by what? 0.5 seconds? Maybe… While HMS man is looking over his shoulder past the vertical fins TVC man is turning and looking through the full cockpit glass.

10 seconds vertical to reaquire speed? Thats from 0 to near 700 km/hr if the aircraft has a T/W of 1 [be 706 neglecting drag].

If the seeker cannot see – it cannot track. It it cued to an area by the HMS, but its not actually tracking anything. At some stage directional control must pass from the cue to the seeker -> its obvious that a missile launched off the rail with seeker lock has a much reduced chance of loosing that lock, while the cued missile may not even make seeker lock [it might not find anything].

An 83:1 ratio was accomplised with 25 F-15s and 7 F-22s.

Does that mean the F-15 can already kill everything in sight?

Lies, damn lies… and statistics.

Anyway, getting back on topic…

It makes sense for there to be prototypes developed and flow prior to finalisation of the type. The RCS prediction software will need verified, and it does no harm to get flight test data [I suppose comparable to the YF-22 for the F-22A] which enables problem areas to be identified early in the process, maybe even before mass production tooling is made.

The various prototypes and demonstrators have allowed Russia to broadly keep up with advances in technology [even if these machines didn’t go to production, the knowledge gained is still there]. With proliferation of computer technology, the one area that western fighters had an advantage – greater CPU power enabling better situational awareness and versatility is pretty much eroded away.

I’m eagerly looking forward to see what kind of plane they build and what its capable of… also looking forward to it silencing half the yahoo’s you find on various MBs :p :diablo:

4X-IL is just another example of an Israeli that cannot even see what they are doing wrong, never mind actually be willing to do anything about it!

For example, using apaches to “hunt down” people is not the actions of a stable, democratic state. As flex has said, the IDF are as bad as the people they are fighting.

Oh, and levelling areas where rockets are fired from will not eliminate the problem, indeed, it will only make it 10 times worse as it will provide a free recruitment propaganda campaign.

Of course a solution can be found, Africa and Ireland (still a work in progress) are examples of it. But, both parties have to be willing to make sacrifices for it, and unfortunately, I don’t think either side is at that stage yet in this conflict.

In the end the Western figures for combat losses are more credible then those from so called Russian sources. Western airforces like America’s always buy their aircraft in batches with the serial numbers applied at the factory. It is fairly easy to trace the life of a particular airframe and the idea that somehow combat losses are covered up doesn’t connect with reality. The idea that somehow aircraft that are shot down can effectively be vaporised removing any chance of wreckage is plain silly. The will always be some form of wreckage if such event happened.

I think the argument is more not loss numbers, but the reason for the loss – as in AAA, SAMs or A2A combat.

My opinion on the matter would be so what.

Historic losses do not take account of the situation as it would apply to yourself today.

For instance:
So what if several MiG-29s were shot down over yugoslavia – they were massively outnumbered, and up against a much stronger support base, and were also not working. AFM did a piece on it a few years back. Not one of the MiGs was in a 100% serviceable condition IIRC.

If I had the money to buy 12 MiG-29 OVTs, properly equipped, maintained, and piloted by well trained crew, and could back them up with a secured GCI system with protection from HARMs – then I could expect to obtain different results.

That’s old news.

Its dated as the 1st of May. :confused: