I've seen a couple of written discussions about how these latest exercises turned out. As we know, the Cope India exercises from a few years ago seemed to reflect badly on our F-15 and F-16 fighters, at least on the surface, when facing the Su-30. But those results seemed to be completely reversed in this exercise, with the F-15 and F-16 "dominating" the Su-30 (the colonels words, not mine). In fact, after a number of 1 v. 1 engagements against our Eagles and Vipers, the Indians didn't wanna do any further 1 v. 1 stuff for the remainder of the exercise. Hehe.  Anyway, here is a detailed video report on the Su-30 from F-15 pilot Colonel Terrence Fornof:

2008 Red Flag Lecture Part I

2008 Red Flag Lecture Part II

The cliff notes version? Jamming between aircraft nullified the radar missiles and allowed the aircraft to come into the merge. The Indians tried to use their post stall maneuvering (i.e. "air show tricks") early and often. The US pilots had learned to counter such moves through mock ACM with the F-22. They used the tactics they had developed to easily move in behind the Flankers when they started "sinking" and to quote the pilot, "drilled their brains out with guns".

We also learn what most of us already know through Colonel Fornof's lectures: The Su-30, though able to perform similar maneuvers during air shows, isn't anywhere close to being in the same league as the F-22 in reality.

He does go on to state that once the Indians truly learn how to "fight" their Flankers, then they should start winning more than they lose against standard F-15C and F-16C models. But the Su-30 doesn't even begin to approach the Raptor. And it also sounds like he is hinting that upgraded Eagles with AESA radar may also prove superior. Obviously, in a close-in dogfight, the F-15 in it's current state is more than capable of fighting against the Su-30 and winning as long as it is being operated by quality crews.

At any rate, I just found those videos interesting when I watched them last night. I figured I might as well post them up this morning for anyone who may not have seen these. Pretty interesting insight from someone "in the know". While good, obviously the Su-30 isn't quite the invincible machine many people have tried to make it out to be in recent years. In fact, it appears it only achieves parity at best with a design 20 years older than it is!

Tag so I remember to check this out when I get home from work.

You have to watch the Youtube video of the Indian response to this. LOL. They're talking about disciplinary charges against the speaker.

Actually, probably not.

In a truly "to-the-merge" fight, the Su-30MKI's vectored thrust (something neither the F-15 or F-16 have) could easily prove to be the deciding factor. Basically, turning radius is drastically reduced. The guy who can point his nose at you first owns the sky in a dogfight.

I think the gist was that the Su30MKI's vectored thrust system was rather crude, and it's performance was nowhere near promised. The F22's system is much more effective. But the F15 is still a very maneuverable "dog fighter" and it's airframe was designed with maneuverability as a primary design facet.

No so much an issue now with off axis launch capability with missiles like the AIM-9X or its Russian equivalent.

got a link?

Interesting for jamming to be so good.

It gives me some hope that space battles may be fought WVR.

What a blatant hack job that Indian new report was.

I'm no air combat expert, but I always suspected that coming to a dead stop in the middle of a dogfight was a bad idea.

That would be interesting  to  see. It sounds like the Indians are still working out their new toys. The Su-30 et al doesn't have to be better than the Raptor, as there really aren't enough Raptors to go around, and most likely never will be. They just have to be on par with or better than everything else, and deployed in large numbers. The  Chinese have the numbers, or will do. The real question is how good is it against 4-4.5 gen fighters when competently flown and supported?

TagForLater

So our 30+ year old airframe designs still own the skies.


Wait till they see the raptor.

A turning dogfight is NOT the type of engagement that our pilots are taught.  Our pilots are taught to use the vertical.  This has been true since WW1, and will continue to be true.

tag for home

They said it took years for our F-15 pilots to start flying F-15's like F-15's instead of the F-4's they were used to.  The Indians may well be looking at a similar curve with their SU-30's and I would think that we are only going to get better with the F-22's.




-K

 

If we started buying brand-new F-15s with all the updates (including AESA radar) in addition to F-22s, we'd still own the skies for decades to come.

There is an Indian news report criticizing the briefing as 'offensive.'  It states that the officer giving the briefing was reprimanded...

I heard something similar:  That pilots who got the F-15 as their first fighter assignment flew it better after being in it for six months than veteran F-4 pilots who transitioned into the F-15
and spent six months in it.  

Old habits die hard.  Putting a sharp, eager young pilot into a new airframe means he doesn't have any old airframe habits to affect his flying.  


For the  same reason, I would expect that Raptor pilots who START in the Raptor will surpass those who transitioned in from other fighters,
at least until the veterans fully readjust and no longer fly the new plane like they flew the old one.


I've also heard it said that superagility in a dogfight is a trick you can try ONCE,  because when you use it, you will lose energy and your next move
must be to recover energy.  During this recovery period you're fully defensive.   If you're going to maneuver your way through a stall to get a snapshot
at your enemy, you'd better get it.   Otherwise he'll drill your ass right after you miss.


He who makes the first mistake dies.


CJ

That right there is the key to the whole thing. An AESA equipped F-15 (and we already have a number of them) changes the situation dramatically. While an AESA LPI equipped F-15 would still be at a major disadvantage against a true 5th generation fighter like the F-22, it would be superior to an aircraft like the Su-30 in BVR mode. The Su-30 has the RCS of a mountain. Give the Eagle the better radar and AIM-120D missiles and the Eagle driver ends up getting the first look and first shoot. The LPI radar would also reduce the chances of enemy countermeasures being effective. The only warning the enemy pilot would have that a missile was inbound would occur only a few seconds before impact, as the AMRAAM goes to active mode. It would make the F-15 far more lethal and survivable against the advanced Flankers.

That said, we still need the F-22 and F-35. And we need them in decent quantity. If Russia/India ever get the Sukhoi PAK FA thing going (a project that seems to be slipping in terms of schedule), then an F-15 with its relatively large RCS would be at a major disadvantage no matter how much you upgrade it. But the fact that current F-15s can hold their own against the best Flanker variants makes the cost needed to upgrade the C model Eagles well worth it. The newer Flanker variants are likely going to be the most capable aircraft we'll likely face when it comes to 95% of our potential enemies for the next 20 years. Therefore the newer Eagles that still have a decent amount of life left in their airframes should be updated to give us the extra numbers we need to compete against a larger force of Flankers (i.e. China).

Interesting video.  One thing I noticed was that he mentioned turn rate, while most armchair aces talk about radius.

Too bad the F-22 will likely take a big hit from the hostile Obama administration and congress.

did you guys notice that he says that due to both sides jamming, neither was able to use their radar missiles?

An article in the paper today states that the F-22 program is divided among 44 states-that's a whole lot of Congresscritters that will piss and moan if any cuts are made.

The correct answer is "whatever gets you into firing position first" is what you want.

A small turning radius doesn't help matters much if you can't get a firing solution on your adversary before HE does.

A fast turning rate also won't help if you turn too far inside your enemy and don't get close enough to shoot.

Yeah, I'm an armchair pilot.  But I've learned enough to know that the guy who wins is the guy who knows his
plane's performance better and also understands the dynamic geometry of the engagement.   Sometimes just trying
to get on your opponent's tail is the wrong thing to do.    You may never get there.

Flying simulated engagements has an armchair pilot like me at a disadvantage due to the limited field of view given by
a monitor, which impedes your sense of 3D spatial orientation.   Pilots who get to practice their skills in a real sky
have a far better grasp of dogfight dynamics than I'll ever get in front of the PC or by reading any number of books
or watching any number of films.   You can't learn to catch a ball by watching TV, either, and that's a simpler task.


CJ

From articles I read at the time, the setups for those engagements were politically influenced; they were set up for the opfor to win.
 

What I really know about dogfighting you could fit in a thimble...but that was my first thought.  Switch the crews and the F-15's and F-16's get owned I would expect.  Our pilots not only make up the difference but = a gain in the older jets compared to the Indian pilots in the 30's.

We should buy a few 30's and let our guys mock it up against the 15's, 16's and 22's.

This probably simply proved how much better our training and tactics are than the Indians.

Were you the one that decided to eliminate the gun from the F4?  

God bless our pilots!

Tag

That's my boss, I will have to ask him if he knows that he is on Youtube!

Knowing your equipment and putting it to practice is all part of the aerial warfare realm.  While the 15 and 16 are no longer cutting edge, they are still quite capable aircraft.  I fail to see how buying a bunch of SU30's to train against would be better than flying against the 22's which are much more capable.

So it still comes down to the lowest common denominator, Tactics and Training.

That's a lot of video to state the obvious IMHO.

I agree with the red part.  Which is exactly why it would be nice to have a few 30's to run through the ringer.

We won't be going up against 22's in the near future.  And if knowing your equipment and putting it into practice is all part of the aerial warfare realm, I'd expect that an enemy's pilot training program designed for the 30 is going to maximize the advantages of that airframe and minimize it's deficiencies.  And since the 30 isn't the 22, those advantages and deficiencies are going to be different. So we can reasonably expect that the chinese aren't going to teach their flyers to fly their 30's exactly like we fly our (superior) 22's.

It also stands to reason that our pilots flying the 30 will fly it differently than they would the 22...and might independantly hit upon the tricks and nuances that the Chinese will use to fly the 30's.  So it further stands to reason that if I want to train 15 and 16 pilots for likely future engagements, I can't think of a better way to train them for combat against a pilot flying a 30 than to train them for combat against a pilot flying a 30.  

We'd also get a better idea of how our 22's, 15's and 16's really match up to the 30's that way.  I trust our pilots to wring every drop of performance and tactical advantage out of the 30.  Even our allies might feel the need to hold some things back.  So I think it would be better to learn the best the 30 is capable of doing than to rely on our observations of the 30's in more average hands in perhaps more staged engagements.

That's not a slam on the Indian people. BTW. Just my opinion of the superiority of the U.S. military.  So it may be that we find the 30 to be more formidable in our hands than it was in the Indians' hands. If so, it'd be better to realize that now in mock ups than, say, in some crucial engagement with the Chinese a few years from now.

But I just like to eliminate speculation rather than rely on it, when I have the option.  Maybe I'm just odd that way.

tag

Tell your boss that I for one am glad he knows how to tell the truth and not bow down like a puss. SS

Weren't the Indian Su-30's forbidden from using their radar (because it's top secret), amongst other handicaps?

I'm not really worried about how the Su-30 competes against the F-15, F-16, or F-22. The only potential enemy that uses them in any numbers is China. The only close enemy that uses them is Venezuela, and they're only got two squadrons of the things.

It is an unwritten DoD truth that these days the viability of a program is not dictated nearly so much by if the system being developed actually works, but by how many congressional districts the work occurs in.  

Strong Defense programs, would me long term, high tech jobs for Americans....too bad Obongo is against all that and want to give billion to short term construction jobs

From what I've read that's true.  The French, among others, would have loved to have the SU-30s blasting away with every capability/frequency so they could collect more ELINT on them.  

Very interesting movies!  Thanks!

Getting a TrackIR goes a long way towards improving this.  So does attending Air Combat USA a few times if you have the coin. :)

USAF fighting spirit is alive and well.



Makes me wonder if our pilots had been ordered to not embarrass the Indians in the previous exercise. Then they blab how superior they are and this time our pilots are told to go ahead and kick ass.



 

Where's Vito?

As a point of interest,  3D thrust vectoring systems were developed and tested for the F-16 back in the 1980s.   At a per-copy cost of 1 million dollars extra per F-16 if
installed as a regular production option.

And significantly, it was a true 3D thrust vectoring system,  allowing the thrust to be vectored laterally or vertically in any combination.  The F-22 doesn't even have that,
being limited to thrust vectoring in the vertical plane only.

The dynamic capabilities of the MATV F-16 (the one equipped with the 3D vectoring system) were mindboggling beyond belief.  It was able to achieve angles of attack of minus
180 degrees, which is literally flying backwards,  but for a brief time only, obviously.  You'll slow down really fast!   It could also perform flat turns (yaw axis only, wings level)
with a very tight turning radius...but this is a tough maneuver for the pilot as his tendency is to slide sideways out of his seat.  Belts and straps notwithstanding, that's still
an uncomfortable way to fly.    Far worse than the most intense cornering you've ever experienced in any car.


I will always think that our failure to deploy the MATV system to the Air Force's fleets of F-16s and F-15s was a mistake.   Given the relatively low cost of the system
per unit,  and the considerable agility advantage it gives for that low cost,   I can't think of any rational reason why we didn't deploy it.   Big capability upgrade at low cost
sounds like a bargain to me!

And it wasn't like it was even a complicated, failure-prone system, either.  Really it was mechanically rather simple.


Incidentally,  aside from the supercruise capability of the F-22  a MATV-equipped F16 would be at least as maneuverable as an F-22.   In fact, having true 3D vectoring
would likely give it an edge in a gunfight....if it were properly used.   As always,  proper usage of your tools is of paramount importance.  


CJ

"Quantity is a quality in itself"

So how will our vastly superior F-22s fare in 10:1 engagement scenarios?

We need to have many more of them. It is unwise to try to protect the nation with a couple dozen fighters.

The 22 is supposed to have significantly more advanced algorithms for managing flight vector thrust at near- & post-stall velocities beyond anything the Su series is capable of matching, even w/ their 3D implementation, though I've also wondered why the 22 never got the full 3D setup.  Presuming Sukhoi has upped the ante on their SW flight management system development, I can't imaging how maneuverable the S-34 FSW & forward canards w/ 3D vectoring might potentially be.