Air Superiority (US-Soviet Fighter Match-up)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Soviet Sukhoi 27 fighter interceptor NATO codename Flecker US Air Force f-16 Falcon fighter u.s. Navy f-14 Tomcat fighter interceptor US Navy f-18 one fighter US Air Force f15 Eagle fighter Soviet mig-29 fighters NATO codename Vulcan these six airplanes are the ones intended to rule the skies the top-of-the-line fighters from the world's two major air pounders they are lethal fighting machines with awesome firepower and weapon systems these Soviet and American fighters have had no reported encounters with each other and in this era of Soviet glasnost it's more likely to find them flying in a friendly formation than dogfighting over Eastern Europe like when US Air Force have 15s calmly escorted Soviet mig-29s through Alaskan airspace on their way to a recent abbotsford airshow and handed them off to canadian cf-18 a's it was a measure of military and political cooperation almost unimaginable for the previous three decades and yet in the months before and after these friendly flights and even today pilots from both sides trained for the unlikely eventualities that they would have to face off against each other and launch the missile or typically Soviets and Americans perceive each other as the enemy in reality however while it may be US and Soviet made airplanes in a dogfight the chances are slimmer today that American and Soviet pilots will be at the controls more likely are conflicts like the one over the Mediterranean in early 1989 when a pair of patrolling Navy f-14s encountered a pair of aggressive Libyan mig-23s as seen in this simulation the Libyans coming head-on from a higher altitude kept on closing the gap even as the f-14 jinked repeatedly away from a confrontation now from actual f-14 gun camera footage listen to the critical moments of the fight as missiles are fired and watch the shadowy images of a MIG 23 during the encounter Richard Borowski is an Air Force test pilot fighter pilot and director of the flight dynamics lab the Mediterranean is indicative of what we might expect in a third world situation where you don't know when an engagement starts that it is in fact going to be a hostile engagement to airplanes point their noses at each other and if one of them decides that it is going to be a live engagement the other guy has no way out except to win winning a painfully obvious goal in the design of any airplane whose mission is air combat it's no wonder that the modern fighters from the USA and the Soviet Union tend to look so much alike yet each has a role each has strengths and while they may not be obvious each has its vulnerabilities one factor all designers of modern fighters seek is agility in a typical air-to-air fight you will move very rapidly from one end to the other of the flight envelope you will move in altitude you'll move in G you'll move in speed and the airplane that is able to make those movements most precisely most quickly as the airplane is probably going to prevail and if the pilot can't outfly his adversary his next goal is to out fly any missile that's launched anything certainly in in the air-to-air business today we think of the primary threat and the primary weapon as being the long-range high technology radar guided missile and that's the weapon of choice in air-to-air missile engagement flies much higher speeds than the airplane flies the missile also has relatively small wings once that missile is launched it's another airplane coming at you it has areas of advantage of disadvantage it's area of advantages speed it's area of disadvantages maneuverability if you can maneuver harder than it can you can cause it to miss you if you can maneuver hard and cause it to dissipate its energy in attempt to maneuver you can cause it to miss you and more agile airplanes are more effective at doing that mirowski offers his pick for agility and probably the outstanding example flying today in the u.s. is the f-18 the airplane rolls well and has good high love attack flying qualities it accelerates well it decelerates well the pilot is generally generally feels very precisely in control of that airplane others however have their own preferences Mikhail Simonov general designer for the Soviet Sukhoi design bureau and a member of the People's Party Congress spoke of the agility demonstrated by the su-27s unique Cobra maneuver as this suppose this case is quite simple the pilot shows cooperation and love the people compare and see if there is any other aircraft we can do the same from the point of view aerodynamics and performances at McDonnell Douglas Irv burrows chief test pilot during f15 development during the early 70s sees the su-27 a little differently our speculation is that it's not as good at handling as the f-15 it looks like it's not as crisp as it maneuvers it has the maneuvering capability but it's not as crisp in terms of tracking a target nor in stopping at a given bank angle and that sort of thing but again that speculation to some extent the f-16 is the smallest and lightest of the current fighters Harry Hilliker the key designer of the airplane for General Dynamics sought to make it especially agile ok the f16 was the first operational airplane to have relaxed static stability or or to fly unstable statically unstable not dynamically unstable and it's proven to be no difficulty and received with great enthusiasm well if you make something too stable why comes hard to control it won't move it's like inertia there's the more stability you have any more difficult it is to make it move in whatever direction you command it to movement this Soviet informational film gives a pilot's perspective on the mig-29s flight capabilities it is easy to fly the plane didn't take much to get trained I didn't need to take special class and started because this involved as regards aerobatics that is not as difficult as with previous point efficiency Thank You high 21 or mig-23 is especially easy to learn the plane this is a very good plane and I think it fully meets its requirements the Soviets have begun to open their aviation doors to the West and each day we gain further insights into their airplanes their designs and how the airplanes fit their defined roles and limitations the Soviets have brought large contingents of fighters and transports to air shows and just recently allowed aviation week video onto an active Moscow area air defense base a fundamental tenet for the Soviets is defense of the motherland the vast territory of the Soviet Union which spreads across the bulk of Europe and Asia encompassing 11 time zones with torrid deserts in the south and frozen tundra in the north they anticipate quick high attrition air battles and expect their airplanes to be able to operate on any climate from unpaved surfaces or ice or snow covered runways Soviet doctrine stresses short-term reliability and quick readiness of the aircraft fleet and they expect this with minimum maintenance and service in the field they accomplish their goals through simplicity as compared to u.s. designs dick Ward an aircraft designer and analyst and teacher of Soviet logistics for the Defense Department says that in the USSR fighter construction may appear to be lacking in attention to detail they figure that not only must you build your aircraft in peacetime but also has to be built and more time under the wartime conditions including the poorly trained Kadri that you would have available to you at the time that you're building the aircraft and wartime also due to the lack of vendors the infrastructure that would be disrupted during wartime and so the technologies applied to Soviet aircraft are based on many criteria that West many Western observers in Soviet aircraft is being poorly designed very roughly constructed well that's that's not necessary if your aircraft only going to average a few hundred hours in combat why had all this gold plating as we call it to the aircraft once you make it cheaper make it quicker to build indeed a look at welding patterns for example helps tell this story these welds on a mig-29 look uneven and sloppy but they are on a non-critical access panel where time and labor-intensive attention just isn't needed workmanship on critical structures matches Western standards another area where the Soviets simplicity and maintainability as obvious is in electronics the Sukhoi 27 instrumentation is rudimentary compared to that installed in an f-16 which was developed also in the late 1970s Soviet designers bemoan the state of their electronics they claim their airplanes can accomplish the same tasks as US aircraft but to do so they carry a substantial electronics weight and volume penalty which can degrade performance and range climb and payload the f-16 is the lightest and smallest of the bunch and it's the one that differs with single vertical fin and single-engine and it's the one the Russians seem the most intrigued with Valery menisci chief test pilot for the Mikoyan Bureau and one of the most respected flyers in the Soviet Union attended a recent aerospace engineering symposium at the University of Michigan along with several design chiefs and the Soviet minister of aviation industry we asked minutes key which u.s. fighter he'd like to fly yes the cosmos announcement oh yeah well if there would be only one I will choose the f-16 see you see our company has experience in designing aircraft for different tasks being a fighter pilot and a test pilot for jet fighters I warmly love the lightweight fighters first of all I think that it's Formula One in aviation the need for the f-16 arose during the Vietnam War when delta-winged mig-21s were proving to be a formidable challenge in air combat against the heavier and less agile f4 phantoms the Air Force was looking for a new airplane that could be more fair the f-15 a larger longer range fighter came into being prior to the f16 as a match for the mig-25 but the Pentagon ultimately backed the need for a lightweight fighter the f-16 I think it's interesting that Lenin many years ago said that quantity is a quality of its its own and so we adopted that as a basis for the airplane and at that time was strictly to be a lightweight simple air-to-air fighter which many people felt was of no use as a consequence of the f4 nothing more than a hot dog type airplane to be flown at county fairs on a hot summer afternoon concept being so small wouldn't carry anything when go anywhere there was some basis for that with the technologies that were emerging I think the f16 has shown that's not the case that small doesn't necessarily represent no capability if you do it right it's good the latest model the f-16 C has grown in weight and capabilities from its original concept and now includes beyond visual range radar intercept capability but still with its 25,000 pound thrust engine it has greater than one to one to weight ratio in an air combat configuration one feature that distinguishes the f16 from the others is the bubble canopy with no frame or bow and low side rails pilots say they feel like they're writing on the fighter rather than sitting in it the advanced radar in the f-16 C can track 10 targets simultaneously it's computer interprets threat priority and displays targets and friendly forces as well with such a radar aboard the fighter needed advanced missiles several M Rams a medium-range missile can be directed to targets at the same time this aircraft also has night and all-weather attack capability against ground targets while f-16 development has taken great strides since it first entered service in 1979 it maintains its unique appearance with one tail fin and one engine hairy Hilliker the designer couldn't do it the other way even though the original concept for the airplane called for two tails when we wind tunnel tested twin tails on airplane we could not make it work in fact if you look at the shelves that go to the back end of the airplane they're into the horizontal tail not too many people realize those are left over when we had twin tail airplane when we couldn't make it work we went to the single tail and we could make that work I've been asked this many times and the principle answer I can get and maybe there are two of them one is that the engine cartel is apparently so strong that they demand each engine have his own vertical tail to tell it what direction to go the reason that the f-15 and that class airplanes were twin engines from my perspective is not for safety a reason that they were twin engines was cuz airplane that way 40,000 pounds when we wanted to 1.2 to 1.4 thrust to weight ratio nobody was making any fifty thousand pound thrust engines so they had a gold but twin engines they went to two engines pure and simply to get the thrust they needed for the gross weight that the mission demanded and the systems and armament the airplane was too quick to carry and so to me one versus two engines is pure and simple matter what the mission is but equipments and armaments you expect the airplane to go to carry twin tails atop 20 engines has become the fighter design norm at McDonnell Douglas as Irv burrows who made the first test flight in the f-15 explains twin tails have evolved and you can see the same in the Russian airplanes through the need for directional stability at high speeds high Mach numbers and high speeds and the twin tails allow us structurally to put the directional stability surfaces back there without overburdening the afghan the fuselage in other words bill essentially two bills back to the twin tails which is more effective than having one single huge tail it also allows us to position the vortexes coming off the forward portion of the inboard part of the wings to help us at high angles of attack the other element that is sort of traditional with us and has become with the comparable Russian airplanes is twin engines where a twin engine factory almost with the exception of the av-8b but you'll notice there's a difference between our airplanes and the Russians in that our engines tend to be quite close together in fact ours are quite a bit closer together than the f-14 for example we've liked that because it essentially gives you a centerline thrust and a an engine out situation loss of one engine doesn't give you an isometric thrust problem similar to the one that the mig-29 had in Paris Richard borovsky found f-15s to be a formidable foe and Mach air combat the f-15 like the f-14 is an exceptional radar platform having a good radar today means you've got to be a big airplane because you've got to carry a big radar dish with you the difference between the f-15 and the f-14 is that while the f-14 is primarily an interceptor the f-15 is an air superiority fighter and those words may be a little misleading what that means is that the f-15 wants to operate in an environment where it can establish a favorable exchange ratio it wants to not sweep the skies totally of enemy airplanes but dominate the skies which means there may be a few of those guys around but they're all at serious risk and that's a subtly different mission from what the f-14 does the f-15 carries a significant amount of ordnance it has excellent acceleration rate of climb it maneuvers very well at medium speeds the transonic envelope 30,000 feet point nine Mach is the heart of the envelope for the f-15 it does excursions away from that heart of the envelope comes back to that heart of the envelope and continues to dominate it's an airplane that is intended to begin engaging the enemy at beyond visual range with the sparrow missiles and the excellent radar continue that engagement into Sidewinders in fact tried to engage several enemies simultaneously and if necessary can close in tight and use the gun the exceptional power of the f-15 as it was originally built and as it exists today with the upgraded engines allows it to function very well in that environment the one one thing that I'll always remember from mock yard air combat with an f15 is when I thought I had him in trouble he simply pointed his nose straight up and left the fight vertically and there was nothing I could do to follow him in the particular airplane I was flying at that point how does Sukhoi general designer seminoff feel about the f-15 which parallels in many ways the mission of his su-27 nostoc Assizes sublimino oculina somato yes I'm greatly impressed by the simplicity and efficiency of the f-15 design while the name MIG is almost synonymous with fighters from the USSR the Sukhoi design bureau which seminoff currently oversees also has a long history of building fighters and strike aircraft but it is the su-27 which has really spread the sukhoi name the airplane while it looks similar to a mig-29 is roughly 40% larger in size weight and power the su-27 astounded airshow watchers at Paris in 1989 when test pilot victor Pugachev showed for the first time the cobra a dramatic pitch up and speed reduction maneuver that could offer some tactical advantages in combat who Tkachev demonstrated the airplane to Aviation Week video at kubinka air force base north west of Moscow and flew for the cameras the weather was treacherous with 300 foot ceilings and visibility at about a mile and a half in fog his demonstration was flawless general designer siminoff talks about the design and mission of this airplane the first fly-by-wire Soviet fighter ever shown to the public Robotnik's Pizza system we designed a special engine protection systems which prevents any foreign objects from the ground from the wheels of the aircraft or from the aircraft which is in front of this one to penetrate the engine and to prevent it from all of life it is an aircraft designed to intercept aerial targets in order to achieve this goal we used the latest achievements in aerodynamics namely they are stable control system and we believe that the capacity of the aircraft to cover the distance of 4,000 kilometers and to stay in there for five hours is a very good operational feature if there is an indication of any target the aircraft speeds up to their interceptor speed and rushes to the interception therefore the aircraft can operate in two modes whereas interception and loitering for long periods this way we can compare as the su-27 airplane to phantom f-4 since it is known that F were opened a new year innovation for the fighters having about 5 tons of fuel onboard su-27 has got about 10 tons of fuel onboard we paid a lot of attention to the simplicity of aircraft operation with a considerable angle of attack margin and they're marching against aircraft stalling or diving well the idea behind the design was also to make the aircraft as simple as possible for any pilot and secondly to make the aircraft forgive the pilot his mistakes there should be able to operate both in the areas where the ground support is considerable and where the ground support is poor and it is dictated by the idea that in case of a war conflict the area with our world round with a good ground support can very quickly be turned into an area with a poor ground support the all these factors dictate the mission of the airplane that is to be able operated with ground support without air support to be able to detect and including to follow it to intercept it and depending on the set task either to make it land in the selected area or if it's a more tragic accident to destroy it Air Force colonel borovsky whose area of expertise is aircraft agility says that from what he sees he'd feel comfortable flying the Soviet fighters I am NOT ready to say that they are superior to the airplanes that we're flying today I think it's probably reasonable to expect that they have areas of superiority that's almost always the case again it's like like boxers any two boxers that get get into a ring with each other one of them will have the better long punch together will have the better short punch they'll try to bring the fight around to the place where they have an advantage same true is true with these airplanes they will have areas of specific advantage I can't say from watching an air show exactly what those areas of specific advantage are you can be sure that intelligence people on our side on their side are working very hard to figure out what the other tactics people are working very hard to develop tactics to cause them to exploit the areas of weakness that the other airplanes have we certainly expect that they're able to fly well at low speeds we understand have every reason to believe if they have excellent power and those are two very strong attributes that make them forming letters the u.s. fighter that most closely matches the mission of the su-27 is the Navy f-14 it can patrol for hours the radar intercept officer scanning the skies with high-powered radar watching for any approaching threats as a Navy airplane its principal job is to protect the fleet and make sure nothing gets past its line of defense its long-range Phoenix missiles go after distant targets the sparrows are fired when the target gets closer and for near targets Sidewinders are also on board the Tomcat and service now for almost two decades is the only u.s. fighter with variable-sweep wings tucked back the airplane takes on the appearance of a sleek delta-winged fighter able to maneuver almost as adeptly as airplanes dedicated totally to air combat but with wings extended the f-14 has the slow flying qualities needed to get it safely onto the deck the features that make it land well mean it can do battle at low speeds as well does that mean that the low-speed envelope is a particularly productive envelope for that airplane may or may not be in the particular naval environment for the size of the task or of the incoming force is relatively well known and that size of the incoming force may be relatively small it's reasonable to believe that you can engage someone one-on-one slow with relative confidence that there's not somebody else looking in the weeds ready to come into that fight at a higher energy state and prevail what also makes the f-14 and most u.s. fighters especially flexible is their aerial refueling capability Soviet fighters in including prototype naval versions of the su-27 and mig-29 just now our testing aerial refuelling when two airplanes enter an engagement fuel can but not will be the thing that brings that engagement to an end obviously you need to leave that engagement with enough fuel to get home or you're as good as having been killed as far as the combat situation is concerned if you compare American and Russian airplanes Russian airplanes have tended to have less fuel onboard that American airplanes Russian airplanes tend to operate closer to home so that's not necessarily inappropriate aerial refueling makes a big difference if you just come off the tanker you have the possibility of entering into an engagement with full fuel tanks but remember that when you get into that engagement the engagement is probably not gonna last so long that you exhaust your fuel unless you're already low on fuel barosky sees the Navy's other principle carrier-based fighter the f-18 as an extremely versatile airplane the airplane rolls well it has good heinel of attack flying qualities it accelerates well it decelerates well the pilot is generally generally feels very precisely in control of that airplane the current trend and flight control systems is for a multimode flight control system the airplane actually flies differently depending on what your what mission you're doing it can be optimized to fly precise tracked through the air or it can be optimized for precise pointing in the air and of course let's say you're shooting a gun you're aiming a missile pointing is more important than the track you fly if you're delivering a the track like Helios it's really important and those kinds of changes can be within the flight control center today the f-18 being a later airplane uses later flight control system technology and for that reason is probably the most versatile of the airplanes flying today of the US and Soviet fighters the two that most closely compare in an air combat role are the f-18 and the mig-29 they match closely in size weight fuel capacities and looks McDonnell Douglas is acutely aware of the mig-29 similarities and differences the mig-29 is a an airplane of about the same size as the f-18 and about the same vintage by the way late 70s I believe mid to late seventies it has high thrust-to-weight probably a little bit higher than the f-18 I believe is probably more better than 1 to 1 on takeoff and it has an interesting characteristic in that it's a pure ol mechanical hydraulic mechanical flight control system where our planes if they're not pure fly bar fly-by-wire that is no mechanical connection at all there at least they at least have a fly-by-wire system overlaid on the mechanical system that's waiting f-18s so we are essentially flying that airplane electronically they're flying the mig-29 hydro mechanically the same sort of thing the f4 had years ago so the fact that they're able to do the things they are with that airplane speaks well for the aerodynamics of it I suspect it's a higher top end top speed I believe it is 2.3 than the f-18 so it does have that advantage on the other hand it's as I described in the su-27 a very archaic but even more so than the su-27 there back in the air for days relative to their cockpit technology on those two airplanes it clearly doesn't have the air-to-ground capability that the f-18 does I say clearly because we've never seen any evidence of that sort of capable in the airplane and they typically will talk about the sort of thing they can do so and they haven't it's a single place airplane except for their trainers same as the early f-18s and has some of the very same characteristics to look at as the f-18 some physical characteristics are the same the leading-edge extensions from the wing roots are typically f-18 the twin tails are very similar don't for a minute however think that the mig-29 is just a knockoff of a fine u.s. fighter the MIG design Bureau has been in the fighter business since World War two and some world-class airplanes have come off its drawing boards standouts include the mig-15 the mig-21 mig-23 and mid 25 the fastest fighter in the world which served as the basis for the current mig-31 still one of the most classified aerial war machines in the Soviet fleet a long-range high-altitude interceptor that can dash at nearly Mach 2.5 and dominate hundreds of square miles of airspace Rostislav Belyakov now general designer of the bureau and with 50 years of service there prides himself on his team's accomplishments and on the mig-29 mig droite Sudeten I mean Roboto so Masamune we may 29 was designed to to change the previous generation to switch from previous generation of so it frontline fighters such as the mig-21 and mig-23 to rearm the frontal aviation and so of course we used all the experience gained on the previous problems and we especially strengthened its agility and its capabilities in a close dogfight and we think that the combination of thrust to weight ratio initial collaborate maneuverability the maximum speed at low altitudes and well maneuverability is whole I think that this combination of the mig-29 surpasses the same features of any aircraft existing in the world now new she's a medium he concedes the difficulties however Saitama is a plucky Lozada by shri middle part of course we paid a certain cost to obtain these capabilities because we have well a cross section that is all lodged to ensure a high air consumption for high flash engines and also wherever a well bubble canopy that also increases threat but we used it to ensure pilots visibility and limitations in electronics technology clearly bother Belyakov teh illu stupid to achieve the technological parity with the Western designs we had a harder job to do because our electronic industry lags behind judging from the Western standards so we should more volume to the electronic devices of the same level and that's why our aircraft having the same overall efficiency would usually be heavier than the Western effort of the same efficiency and of course it increases the cost on page overall program because the cost of the program usually usually very closely follows the weight of the air is a detailed review of the mig-29 shows how its design fits molds created by Soviet doctrine and history Soviet aviation expert dick Ward explains so many of the Soviet design criteria for their aircraft are not based on what happens when the airplane is flying but when it's on the ground the landing gear design is based heavily on sod fields and so rather than design the lightweight landing gear they designed the most rugged landing gear Inlet designs are based on foreign object damage plus it has bypass inlets to be able to run the inlet air for the inches commitment over-the-top the aircraft during takeoff and landing the Soviets used containers to store fighters in a near ready state and also to ship them from remote sites to factories for overhaul the mid 29 had to fit the same container as earlier fighters and in doing so they had to design the engine to be shorter than would be optimum and they had and they had a time of development of extended development or difficult development on the afterburner of the engine in a trying to meet this length constraint towing and shelter constraints meant wingspan limitations the mig-29 with its outer wing panels removed is shown here between a MIG 23 and a MIG 21 Abbotsford canada's air show in 1989 featured the first mig-29s ever to be displayed in north america a quick friendship between a Canadian f-18 escort pilot and a Soviet test pilot led to one of the most remarkable events in recent a V Asian history major Bob Wade was ultimately allowed to fly the MIG during the air show with Valery menisci chief test pilot for MIG and back know a girl wait well Bob wait actually performed the whole flight by himself from takeoff to end and just a few Corrections from my side and I should mention very high skills of Bob wait because everything that we did we did in 12 minutes only by have not very good English and Bob doesn't speak Russian at all but you see we were both professional pilots and we have excellent knowledge of what we wanted so we had no problems during the flight I think what I expected was less quality in the mig-29 than what was actually there if I was surprised at anything it was the performance of the airplane or the performance capability of the airplane when it appeared to be so rudimentary in construction in an engagement that was one V one f-18 against mig-29 the biggest single factor that would decide the outcome was the training and proficiency and competence of the aircrew themselves the both aircraft would have areas of advantage the mig-29 perhaps in speed where the f-18 would be able to display more information simultaneously would be better capable of employing weapons perhaps at especially at short range because of the sophisticated technology incorporated in f-18 I think the mig-29 pilot would be busier flying the airplane than what a pilot from a fly-by-wire system would be because it physically demands more of your time I think the mig-29 pilot would be busier trying to assimilate information because he has less access to it the problem with systems like the f-18 is that they display too much information too you require experience to know when to prioritize or how to prioritize that information coming in to you so that it's very easy to become saturated with information flying an f-18 and disregard the important thing but I think the biggest single deciding factor as to who would win the majority of the fights 1v1 it's going to be pilot experience pilot pilot competence Aviation Week and space technology magazine four months had been requesting access to Soviet fighters on a snowy January with the flight almost scrubbed by the Russian winter and snow-covered runways Dave North managing editor of Aviation Week got his turn in a mig-29 at kubinka a mig-29 air defense base west of moscow north a former navy attack pilot with over 100 missions in Vietnam was about to become the first journalist to fly the airplane snow had fallen all morning and low clouds remain as shown on the hand-colored weather maps prepared with the base meteorologists by mid-afternoon with early darkness approaching North was on board backseat due to the poor conditions with test pilot minutes key upfront soon they ward off the 8,000 foot strip and disappeared into the low clouds their flight lasted about 40 nights [Music] well it was a very agile aircraft the the combination of the the power and the agility of the flight control system was it was very good it's a manual system but it reacts much similar to a to a fly-by-wire system well it with the tail slide other maneuvers where we went to 30 degrees angle of attack zero air speeds where you had flight control ability throughout the manoeuvre told me that the lateral the lateral stability of this airplane or the ability to control it very slow speeds is excellent and it's it's a very high-performance fast aircraft we didn't get beyond we never we could not get supersonic but the the low-speed characteristics are excellent we did the tail slide several times where you achieve zero speed and actually come back down on the tail pipe for about three to four seconds at the max and then go into burner once we win her back after burner and once we went to military power and again as we're coming down and going to the creased engine power there was no faulting or no stopping the engine whatsoever there wasn't even a coffin I found the mig-29 to be a highly maneuverable aircraft with very good responses from the flight control system and also a very good meld of engine power that never faltered during some very demanding maneuvers the mig-29 and its Western counterparts are the latest in air superiority today but what's coming what will give these airplanes and their successors an even greater edge the Soviets won't say much a fly-by-wire neutral or negative stability mig-29 is now being tested at the Sukhoi Bureau testing is underway of a sea-based version of the su-27 it's been making carrier landings and sloped ramp takeoffs from the carrier tube Lisi for months now and features a canard wing up front for enhanced low-speed control but dick Ward the Soviet Air Operations Analyst is looking farther into the future in the mid-1980s Ward reviewed the history developments and technology at the mig design bureau and published a booklet called mig 2000 2000 is the year Ward predicts the next radically different MIG fighter will go into service the hottest one yet with speeds of nearly mach 2.6 thrust-to-weight nearly one point for internally stowed weapons a moderate degree of stealth and short takeoff and landing capability asked general designer Belyakov what he's up to and he says to ask dick ward at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft they're applying some of these techniques in the f-15 stall and maneuvering technology demonstrator now undergoing flight tests at Edwards Air Force Base it sports a canard wing up front for better high angle capability but it's most notable if not so obvious features are movable 2d thrust nozzles developed by Pratt & Whitney they also offer reverser capability for dramatic impact on speed and pitch these new features can combine effects to give the f-15 demonstrator the capability to take off and land within 1500 feet Richard Borowski is involved in the aircraft tests what that means that you come blowing into a fight at a relatively high speed Mach 1.6 or so and then having launched your missiles you want to slow down very rapidly so that you can make a very tight radius turn and then get out of there as quickly as you can so that you don't need to engage at close range the stole demonstrator would in flight thrush traversing makes that possible but thrust vectoring we're able to use the thrust vectoring to pitch the airplane make the stabilator again available to make the airplane roll and the airplane at relatively high speeds go out to the high G loadings which is really the heart of the air combat envelope we'll have a much better capability to roll while simultaneously pulling G that allows you to change the plane of the fight and changing the plane of the fight now allows you if you can operate in the plane that the other guy is not in it's very difficult for him to bring his weapons to bear on you McDonnell Douglas also is developing a cockpit display concept to help give fighter pilots a better picture of the aerial battlefield and deal with it on a single screen by touch voice and perhaps by brain activity there are no buttons or knobs gene Adams is designing the display we looked at the conventional warfare environment of the 90s and realized that the only way we could show a pilot the complex interrelationship of all of the aircraft surface-to-air missiles and his mission plan was to overlay that data on top of a map and put it on a large display and we knew that the computer generation and video generation pilot would readily accept it the secret work continues toward creation of the Advanced Tactical Fighter or ATF a high-altitude interceptor that analysts say someday may replace the f-14 and f-15 two teams are building prototypes the one from the Lockheed General Dynamics Boeing team may look like this and is likely to include new airframe materials next generation electronics some stealth technology supersonic cruise and high angle of attack maneuvering capability the prototypes are expected to begin flying this year in Europe a consortium of companies from Britain Germany Italy and Spain is developing an air superiority fighter for those countries called the European fighter aircraft the Eurofighter scheduled for service in 1996 is a single pilot twin-engine design similar in size and weight to another new fighter coming out of Europe the Rafael from Abu Omar salga so the French company introduced the show-stopping roof owl in 1986 as an initial prototype of what is to become a fighter attack land and carrier based airplane for France it's a full fly-by-wire airplane single pilot with speed capability exceeding Mach 2 and is also scheduled to begin service in 1996 a new lightweight fighter demonstrator soon to be flown is designated the x31 and developed under the guidance of the US Defense Department and Navy Rockwell International and mbb of West Germany have built two X 30 ones and the first one rolled out in March of 1990 the airplane will have Mach 1.3 cruise capability but is designed to have an exceptional degree of control Authority at low speeds it relies on thrust vectoring paddles in the jet exhaust to enhance maneuverability and control designers expect it to be able to rotate around its yaw axis at angles of attack as great as 90 degrees for dramatic course reversals which would give any fighter airplane that might evolve from these demonstration airplanes a tremendous air combat advantage the stealth fighter may have been until these films were released in April 1990 the best kept aeronautical secret since the sr-71 blackbird its impact on air combat is just now beginning to be realized built by Lockheed and designated the f-117 a the dart like airplane has a single seat and two engines relying on material design elaborate electronics and special flight techniques the airplane presents a minimal target on radar in fact according to sources the stealth fighters radar image on even the most elaborate radars is smaller than that of a large bird the f-117 a first flew in 1981 and became operational two years later now nearly 60 stealth are an air force service assigned to the 44 50th tactical group and based at Tonopah Nevada its first combat mission was during the December 1989 invasion of Panama two f-117 aise flew a nighttime mission over Rio Hato and dropped to 2,000 pound bombs to disorient Panamanian troops before the base there came under attack by Army Rangers some observers have suggested that stealth will mean the end of air combat as we know it that these high cost fighters will sneak up on a target do their job and run home but other analysts including dit borovsky suggests just the opposite stealth may mean the potential for more close aerial engagements they reasoned first that the pilot and a stealthy airplane that's hard for his opponent to see has the capability to get closer if he chooses second stealthy airplanes may sometimes run with radar off to avoid detection in such a case to stealth opponents may find themselves much closer end to each other before they're aware of the mutual threat and begin the engagement so stealth would tend to drive air-to-air combat closer at this point the Soviets suggest they have no stealth airplanes and would prefer not to develop them they are behind in stealth technology and current economic and political problems in the Soviet Union make stealth development all the more unpalatable they wish stealth would just well disappear that of course is unlikely [Applause] [Music] air-superiority results from no single component but from a complex mix of elements that make up today's fighters the onboard radar the weapons the cockpit and how well the pilot can see the situation around him the threat assessment equipment aboard and how effectively it presents information to the pilot inside the ability of the airplane to respond to the pilots needs and wishes or more simply the fighters agility and ultimately the pilot himself and his training and ability and will to use all of these elements to maximum advantage perhaps no task is more demanding than that of the fighter pilot in battle who knows how that job and the tools of the trade will play out in the future [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Mike Guardia

Views: 105,053

Rating: 4.6845298 out of 5

Keywords: aviation, aviator, pilot, fighter, air force, air war, wings, aircraft, carrier, cold war, top gun, maverick, mig, sukhoi, f-15, f-14, f-18, f-16, viper, eagle, tomcat, dogfight, red wing, aces, combat, flight, history, discovery, time, cnn, foxnews

Id: WnFIMRukr2o

Length: 56min 26sec (3386 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019