"Bravo Sierra" check (was "China's Army on Combat Alert")

"Pepperoni" wrote in message
...

"Michael Zaharis" wrote in message
...
xxxxxxxxxxx

I remember reading about this one in AW&ST about this. This was,
interestingly enough, a strategy developed by some US Air Force people
who were researching potential threats. They came up with some sort of
a strategy where a SU-27 or derivative uses some Cobra-like maneuver to
drop the aircraft's velocity below the threshold set for the Doppler
radar to discriminate between ground and moving aerial targets. How you
would maintain that is fuzzy to me, but it seems that you'd have to
maintain some flight path that keeps you at a constant, or slightly
decreasing, radial distance from the aircraft trying to detect you.
xxxxxxxxxxx

The maneuver is to pitch the aircraft into vertical flight and maintain a
constant altitude with the throttle. The aircraft has near zero airspeed,
and constant altitude.

This is not a good position to be in when a combat is taking
place, the phrase sitting duck comes to mind. Talk to any
combat pilot and he'll tell you energy is life. The pilot trying this
trick is a dead man.

This causes the targeting radar to disregard the return.

Horse****, radars have variable settings and they manage
to detect large stationary objetcs like airships very handily.

Additionally they have IR guided missiles which will happily
lock on to any heat source and a cannon who's shells
could care less.

The radar,
looking for a moving aircraft does not identify the echo as a jet
aircraft.
Meanwhile, the attacker is emitting radar seek signals, closing on the
target and being tracked by passive infrared. (and also giving a radar
seek
signal vector)


You aint tracking anything if you are joggling the throttle trying
this trick, its akin to balancing a beer bottle on your nose
and tring to fire a rifle at the same time and your radar
and weapons systems are pointing straight up into a
clear, and empty, blue sky. OOPS

I'm quite sure the Russians developed the maneuver to exploit our radar
weakness before we had any idea.


Russian built fighters have an exceedingly poor record against US
aircraft in the last 30 years or so. If the tried the trick you propose
the the US pilot ,ight die laughing but I doubt it.

Keith