A-4 Skyhawk Vs AV-8B Harrier Falklands War Dogfight | DCS |

hey guys how you doing we're back today with another harrier video and this time we're doing a more historical engagement we're doing the harrier versus the a4 skyhawk during the falklands war argentina lost 45 aircraft 22 of these were shot down by sams or other aaa fire from the ground 23 of these aircraft were lost to british harriers these numbers are a little bit disputed but for the most part they seem to be the accepted numbers the british on the other hand lost no harriers to air-to-air combat but they did lose 5 to ground fire and 4 more to accidents so that brings us to the following question why were the harriers so successful in air-to-air engagements against the argentine air force part of it was because the british pilots fought their own fight they refused to engage argentine mirages at high altitudes and played to their own strengths the british also had a better missile but there were other realities of the situation that needed to be addressed such as the fact that the argentine attack planes were not too focused on air-to-air combat their main priority was to knock out british ships most of the a4 skyhawks shot down by harriers were carrying air-to-ground ordnance intended to hit landing troops or battleships in the area there were also other logistical problems like shortage of fuel which meant that the a4s had to hit their targets and get out of there there was no time to stick around dog fighting and often they were shot down while on the run these air-to-ground aircraft often had high altitude escorts in the form of argentine mirages however the mirages were also often short of fuel and could not come down to lower altitudes to fight the harriers who stayed at these lower altitudes because their aircraft performed better down low in fact one mirage who did come down to fight the harriers was shot down on the 1st of may by a sidewinder harriers would also often loiter just outside the fuel range for the escorts and pick off a forge that attempted any attacks on the ships or landing forces so there really wasn't a true air-to-air engagement between british harriers and argentine a4 skyhawks where both sides showed up fueled up and ready for an aerial dogfight but what if it had happened we're gonna explore that here today and see how it may have played out let's get started with the video all right guys here we go harrier against skyhawk uh interesting matchup i think both aircraft i think the harrier's a little bit better but i think it's a decent match up it's much more even than harrier versus hornet that being said i have the sidewinder 9m which is a better missile than what he's carrying he's carrying the p5 he can't carry the 9m and i can't carry the p5 so that's as even as i can get it you know and we're both carrying two of them i could carry four but he can only carry two so you can see the advantages here you know if i'm doing fleet defense as a british harrier like i can carry four missiles man i could get you know up to four kills theoretically um so big difference there all right there's the merge you saw me dump my nose and try to pull it through and uh he actually did a nice tight turn he's now behind me over that mountain top and i'm going to try to turn around and get my nose on hopefully get a sidewinder off and wrap this fight up really quickly you can see i'm right over the top there if you watch that there's the flares you can see him there come on give me a lock okay fox 2 holy [Music] oh my god he shot down my missile man so i fired a missile and he fired his and it looks like the missiles either kinetically hit each other or proxy fused on each other i don't know what happened but it was so close to him that i thought the explosion may have hurt him anyway i was expecting like pieces of an a4 to come out of that fireball and uh just the whole intact a4 just comes out of the smoke that was that was pretty cool um you saw me just waste another fox 2 there so i'm get down to guns only and ah i really thought that one might hit him i don't quite understand the pipper on the harrier just yet i mean i understand the cross and you know the line that you see on the hud is the projectile path but we talked about how the harrier doesn't have a radar in the last video and without a radar you can't get any ranging information on the target it can't give you a lock and you know tell you where to put the paper in order to get the kill so it's more difficult you kind of got to get a feel for it you kind of got to do the whole world war ii shooting um a little bit i mean again i have no ranging information but i'm sure once you practice a little bit with it it's probably not that difficult to get air-to-air gun kills with the harrier i know it for a fact it's much more difficult in the a4 skyhawk i mean that thing is uh that thing's old compared to the harrier you're doing straight up world war two shooting in that thing you know um so you can see i'm actually getting up behind him a little bit it's very very oh here we go hold up hold up come on come on come on come on come on i suck i'm so bad i'm so bad oh tried to hit me with a little sidewinder there all right let's try to force an overshoot put some flares out because he still has one more missile so oh he hit me oops all right there's the overshoot very good and then we're gonna recover the aircraft here i'm gonna recover the aircraft here okay all right and uh all right so you can see i can kind of turn with them i can i don't want to say i can one circle fight him i think he might be better at that just because the stability on the harrier um but in terms of you know turning with him and all that stuff it seems like i'm capable of that and so i got the line on him here i don't i don't know i might have hit him there at least once i'm not sure i don't think i did though is he going down no he's fine and so the a4 was called the scooter it was nicknamed the scooter because it is a nimble little bird and it's quite fun to fly from what i hear and uh you know it was used you know we saw it in top gun in the top gun program i think a stripped down version of it was used to dogfight the f14 i assume they stripped it down because the f14 would absolutely goof on this thing if it tried to you know like i'm not having too much difficulty in the harrier but if you give me an f-14 i mean that thing would barely stand a chance right all right here's the i can maybe get the line on him here and get a kill ah i don't understand this gunsight i don't understand it at all to be honest i think what's happening is i'm not leading enough and those rounds are falling short it is a 25 millimeter round so it is a little bit heavier than the the normal 20 millimeter that i'm used to firing so i may not be leading it enough that could be the issue like the mirage for example or the russian aircraft they fire the 30 mil and it's quite a heavy round you got to get close and you got to lead a decent amount to hit him i think i can hit him here though come on see those are those are short for sure i'm shooting short for sure so i think i kind of i'm understanding what's going on here and i've only got 134 rounds left so i see ah yes okay now that i have a slightly better understanding of the uh the gun and i can actually maybe hit him he is smoking pretty nicely here i see lots of black smoke white smoke i think i could probably wrap this up and get the kill i don't have too many rounds left though i got 107 but the the good news is if i can hit him just one more time he's definitely out of the fight there so i'm i didn't want to shoot there just because i want to be a little conservative with the rounds i don't want to waste too much more just in case i need them and so you can see at this point he's actually maneuvering a little better i don't know if he's leaking fuel if he is leaking fuel then uh he's gonna be performing a little better as he gets lighter and lighter you know and that i would venture a guess that that's what that white smoke is that you see i think that's leaking fuel because i did pepper him pretty good there i think i hit him at least three or four times uh in that little segment and so here we go we're i'm kind of trying to turn fight him a little bit i know you guys said to put the nozzles down to 30 or 40 degrees for this but i'll be honest with you i'm a little bit scared to do that i don't quite understand the harrier fully yet to do that i don't know if you need to use flaps so i gotta fly the hairier more before i start doing some of those hairier tricks but i did read the comments and i i did see what you guys said to do so i appreciate you guys giving me that kind of feedback i'm going to try it in later videos i had the line on him sort of that's my fault i'll give it that and how did i miss that you see that he was what 30 centimeters off my nose there and i missed i missed that that's embarrassing i might have to cut this out of the video i i think i can get him here if he would just climb which he seems like he's doing here and as he climbs he's going to get slower and getting a little slower is going to be an easy target there it is boom there we go there's the ejection and splash one so that was uh one of the longer dogfights i've ever done and uh i think it was uh it was very rewarding and a good fight to the a4 [Music] [Music] all right ladies next round so the skyhawk uh you can see it's kind of at a disadvantage you know it kind of feels like it doesn't have as much power as the harrier and even even though none of these uh aircraft have afterburner which i think is uh is a good matchup imagine if the harrier had afterburner and it was fighting against the uh the skyhawk i mean it would absolutely dominate it uh but the skyhawk you know it holds its own for you know a vietnam era air-to-ground aircraft it can kind of give the harrier a hard time if it really tries i do think that the missiles make a huge difference the fact that he only carries the uh aim nine p5 as the best missile he can carry and i carry the 9m which means i'm carrying a significantly better missile there's the merge by the way and uh you know it makes a difference in these fights man because i can shoot him head on i think uh p5 shot head on would be very difficult and i think that gives him a major disadvantage here's the lock fox 2 and he's dropping all kinds of flares that missile is going to miss good pre-flaring by the uh a4 skyhawk there so yeah the the difference in missiles is a huge huge uh a big deal my nine m's can actually pull a little bit with a turning aircraft not like a 9x obviously um but if you're turning i can fire a 9m at you and it might turn and hit you i had to go for guns there was going to but he closed really quickly his missiles the 9m uh what am i saying the aim 9 p5s they don't really turn well if the if the bandit is doing any kind of turning really those missiles don't tend to turn very well and makes it very very difficult to get a hit here he is climbing this is exactly what i want come on we're gonna put guns on him here i got a good feeling about this one yes see i'm getting the hang of those guns all right he's definitely going down like he has all kinds of messed up here um he was on fire on both wings there's no way he survives that no way and splash one good fight good fight getting the hang of that that uh hairier gun is uh it's nice you know it's nice to be able to hit things with it [Music] [Music] all right guys so we'll do the last fight here and uh yeah so i was looking at the uh history of the whole falklands uh air war and it's quite interesting like there's a little bit of a debate that goes on about the numbers you know definitely there there was one incident where they said that maybe a harrier was shot down the argentines made that claim i believe it was shot down by a mirage but the uk denies that so i don't know if that's true um if you have information or an article or something that i haven't seen by all means post it below and i'll have a look at it but as far as i know no harriers were shot down and you got to have a little bit of respect for these uh argentinian guys who showed up to a place where they knew there's the merge by the way who knew that a lot of their buddies had been shot down here by harriers and they were pushing outside of the the cover zone where the mirages could cover them oh he he got him behind me and uh you know they were they were pushing past their air cover and uh with air-to-ground ordnance and trying to hit ships and stuff you know whatever side you're on you gotta admit that take some balls so uh you know both these guys and the british too really they fought really well and uh so did the argentinians um this guy's actually pushed up behind me and he's doing a really good job of maneuvering this time i'm having a bit of trouble shaking him off me you can see he's trying to pull his nose around pull some lead get those shots off he still has sidewinders at this point so i'm just dropping a couple flares here or there and so he's doing he's doing really nice this time i think it could be problematic this time there's that sidewinder you see what i'm saying when i say it can't turn um it's good for you know targets flying straight maybe if you can sneak up on somebody then those sidewinders are effective otherwise they're kind of just uh they kind of suck not gonna lie um okay and uh so here we're gonna try to force an overshoot and try to do that same stuff and there's that sidewinder goes right by me and uh he tried to gun me he flew by i love that overshoot man you can make just about anything overshoot in a harrier and it's it's kind of fun as we dubbed it in the last video it's called a harrier and uh i'm not gonna lie it doesn't really get old i quite enjoy it and so i'm gonna try to put some guns on them that time and i was just kind of hoping i was trying to get lucky there to be honest i don't think any of those were actually close to hitting him and that's gonna go short all right you can see he's dumped his nose a little bit he's trying to use as much of that altitude that he can and i got a sidewinder fox 2 and that's going to go for the flares we'll give another one fox 2. and that one was too close and also seem to maybe have gone for the flares so i'm all out of sidewinders now which is uh it's not a it's never a good sign you can still get a gun kill but [Music] you're kind of starting to run out of options here and he's going to come up behind he actually hit me there so like i said he's flying a little bit better this time a little bit more aggressively okay here he is on the six and we'll see if we can make him overshoot again oh ouch he actually hit me that again and again and again this is bad and again oh okay i'm busted up pretty bad that time he flew pretty well i'm out i'm out he messed me up pretty good we're out good kill to the a4 that time well done all right guys so we'll do our quick tack view review i don't want to take too long on this one because the video is already pretty long there's the merge you can see i'm coming in at uh indicated of 532 mach 0.9 he's coming in at mach 0.63 so he's significantly slower than me and uh we're actually going to speed this up just a little bit and this is the one where the missiles hit each other so he actually turns the wrong way here and i think uh keeping visibility is one of the issues here the a4 doesn't have a fantastic uh line of sight visibility from the cockpit so uh it that's one of the problems with it when you're dog fighting and so here we can see this is the part where i bring the nose around he has found me obviously he sees me now and he sees that my nose is pointing at him so he drops his flares anticipating a fox 2 shot which is absolutely correct the only thing i would say is dropping three flares is not that great you need to drop one two three four five like you just need to drop them in a line like this a little bit more effective than just a pocket of flares and uh so here we get a 3 000 foot sidewinder launch and he actually launches when that missile is a thousand one hundred feet away from him and then let's see what happens here 57 feet i think they may have proxy fused on each other unless his missile was fired with a lock on this missile i don't know what happened there but this is the part where i just see a massive explosion right and oh did he shoot guns as well like a couple of gun rounds went right by me here i didn't even notice that yeah he shot guns there's a little bit of gunfire from here and it went right by my head look at that i didn't even see that in the video so he put a couple of rounds just off to my right and explosion and i didn't i saw a big ass explosion i was like he is dead for sure then he comes flying out of the smoke like that and uh it was a cool little cinematic scene i thought but then anyway from there we just dump the nose let's see some more notable parts so here i try to get another sidewinder off at him uh it's about four thousand feet off three thousand and that's pretty close for a sidewinder a 9m if it was a 9x maybe but uh 9m that's going to be a hard shot and you know then we get into this whole thing i'm doing circles with them on the deck here i actually get a gun solution here the fight really should be over here but uh i'm terrible with the gun and i don't want to do 45 minute tack view review of me missing with the gun but you can see right here he actually forces an overshoot which is very nice good work by him and once i overshoot he fires that sidewinder way too close but i think they're so useless that he's just happy to get them off his aircraft and i start doing some barrel rolls he actually hits me through there but the harrier can take a bit of punishment so we recover the aircraft and uh head back in you can see once again the shooting like you can see how the tracers are you know they're shorter they're longer you know i just don't fully have a grasp of what's going on with the harriers gunsight at that point in the fight and um yeah so the rest of it is really just me sitting behind him and oh we got a little bit of a rolling scissor here going a little bit yeah oh not really i was gonna say i don't remember that from the fight but uh yeah so i just sit back here and just waiting for the gun kill and there's one little part here where he actually starts to out turn me a little bit and it's somewhat impressive it's right around here and it really drills home the point of energy management you can see here he starts off at a true speed of 199 i'm 253 and so i'm not pulling too too hard on my stick because the harrier if you pull too hard it'll just kind of flop over and at this altitude that's really not what i need and so you can see he's pulling uh more degrees a second through that turn than me i'm pulling 15.8 he's pulling 17.6 if he can sustain this he'll come around the circle but here's the thing look at his speed true airspeed 163 162 and he actually starts to lose a lift on his aircraft so he has to straighten out and try to uh you know regain some air speed and that's all i need to come up behind him and uh once again i'm terrible with the gun so he survives that but it really should have been over there and uh the fight just ends right here when he climbs and gets killed all right guys so that's going to be the video for today thank you for watching and a big thank you to longshot for helping out with this video you should definitely check out his channel link in the video description all right guys thanks for watching and i'll catch you in the next one bye guys

Channel: Growling Sidewinder

Views: 446,939

Rating: 4.8559933 out of 5

Keywords: DCS, Digital, combat, simulator, dogfight, hornet, virtual reality, air combat, dogfight a real pilot, rafale, f-22 raptor, army, navy, mirage, military, air force, mirage 2000, tutorial, how to, guide, syria, america, war thunder, us military, aircraft, f14, f-18 hornet, dcs dogfight, mig-29s fulcrum, microsoft flight simulator 2020, ate, real dogfight, dcs world, dcs supercarrier, dcs viper, eagle dynamics, dogfighting, us navy, f-14 tomcat, dcs syria map, ace combat 7, av-8b harrier, av8b

Id: kX9HZlmBfCw

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020