On Wed, 01 Oct 2003 04:27:15 GMT, "Dudley Henriques"
wrote:


"WaltBJ" wrote in message
. com...
Cub Driver wrote in message
...
I have seen references to the circle's SNIP:
In the Western Desert in WW2 Hans Marseille solved the Lufberry Circle
problem by high angle deflection shooting at minimum range - knocking
down serial kills of Hurricanes and P40s daily. The 'circlers' were
essentially helpless against this tactic when used by an opponent of
superior energy capability.
Walt BJ

Right on!

Lufberry's looked good on paper....that is until the circle was engaged by
fighters with lower wing loadings; and flown by pilots who knew how to bleed
down and arc. Snap shooters like Marseille could play dixie on these
circles...and did just that...against poorly flown Lufberry's. In fact, even
a higher wing loaded fighter could engage through low yo yo's and arcing if
flown by superior pilots. This was the "real" learning period in ACM. It
involved the painful transition from thinking defensive to thinking like a
Hans Marseille......attack! Just like Hartmann, he boresighted for
conversion range using the windshield bow for wingspan instead of using the
sight, then he pulled g for lead; raised the nose in the turn for gravity
drop; centered the ball for trajectory shift, and hosed them at high angle
off before he bled down and out of the cone.
Pilots who were thinking about things like Lufberry's as they entered the
war didn't last very long in combat. Nothing kills a fighter pilot faster
than over thinking the defensive side of the ACM equation.
Dudley Henriques

Great stuff guys. Yet, the primary tactic of the A-10 if attacked by
enemy aircraft remains to "circle the Hogs". As you describe, for the
typically energy superior fighter, the problem is simply one of flying
back and forth across the circle taking high angle shots (or for that
matter, all-aspect IR shots) at the rotating targets.

The theory of the Hogs is that with their tight turn radius they can
snap the nose around and bring the gun to bear on the attacker.
Unfortunately, the attacker simply zooms out of plane, exceeding the
energy ability of the Hog to sustain an extreme nose high position for
more than a few seconds. Throw in lack of a lead computing sight, and
the big gun become little more than a nuisance threat.

On the positive side, the low altitude denies half the maneuver sphere
to the attacker, and ground IR return helps to reduce IR missile
effectiveness, but modern missiles are pretty good discriminators and
Doppler based radar missiles don't much care about ground return.

From another perspective, however, I had always learned that a
Lufberry was a 1-v-1 situation in which the attacker and defender were
trapped in a single circle, same plane fight, tail-chasing each other
and simultaneously trying to attack and defend against the other guy.
If transitioned from horizontal to vertical, it became a rolling
scissors.