Air Superiority (U.S./Soviet Fighter Matchup)

[Music] [Music] [Music] Oh [Music] you [Music] so be at sukhoi 27 fire interceptor NATO codename flanker US Air Force f-16 Falcon fire US Navy f-14 Tomcat fighter interceptor US Navy f-18 fighter US Air Force f15 Eagle fire Soviet mig-29 fighter 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 laws most it's more likely to find them flying Anna friendly formation than dogfighting over Eastern Europe like when US Air Force f-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-14 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 okay he's got a nipple off Reaganite do it on one leg okay good yeah I've got the other one work barks - barks - I all got home such a second wife I got the second one on the nose right now hey I'm hiper on you get a pop then lock him up just walking off set Thank You barks - I call the phone so what whatever girl hey is it Richard Borowski is an Air Force test pilot fighter pilot and director of the flight dynamics lab the Mediterranean is indicative of what you might expect in a third-world situation where you don't know when an engagement starts but 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 vulnerability 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'll move in altitude you'll move in G you're moving 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 an a missile that's launched anything certainly 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 error I missed when engaging flies much higher speeds than the airplane flies the missile also has wealthily small wings once the missile is launched it's another airplane coming at you it has areas of advantage and disadvantage its area of advantage of speed its 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 and attempting to maneuver you can cause it to miss you and more agile airplanes are more effective at doing that Murawski offers his pick for agility and probably the outstanding example flying today in the the f18 the airplane rolls well and has good high angle of attack flying qualities it accelerates well it decelerates well the pilot is generally generally feels very precisely in control of that airplane others however had 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 this suppose because welcome this case is quite simple the pilot shows cooperation I love the people from Teheran neither with any other aircraft we can do the same from the point of view aerodynamic and performance 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 if maneuvers has the maneuvering capability but it's not as crisp in terms of tracking a target or 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 will if you make something to stable it comes hard to control it won't move it's like inertia on there so the more stability you have we were difficult it is to make it move in whatever direction you command it to move this Soviet informational film gives a pilot's perspective on the mig-29s flight capabilities it is easy to fly the plane yeah it was your man they didn't take me much too jittery and in aero I didn't need to take apart special ones give us our the finish itself and started a bike okey the wire on the difficulties involved as regards our robotic voice I think that is not as difficult as was previously thank you - morning 21 or mig-23 but is especially easy to vamp the plane this is a very good thing and I think it's 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 in 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 us 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 figured it not only must you build your aircraft in peacetime but also has to be built in 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 more time also due to the lack of vendors infrastructure that could be disrupted during wartime and so the technologies applied to Soviet aircraft are based on many criteria the West many Western observers have seen Soviet aircraft poorly designed very roughly constructed well that's that's not necessary if your aircraft lengthen left a verge of 200 hours in combat why had all this gold plating as we call it to the aircraft wants to 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 is 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 Russian seem the most intrigued with Valery menisci chief test pilot for the Mikoyan Bureau and one of the most respected fliers 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 most military oh yeah well if there would be only one I will choose the f-16 C 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 effective 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 20 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 were 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 a hot summer afternoon concept being so small wouldn't carry anything in going words there were some basis for that the technologies that were emerging I think the f16 had shown that's not the case but 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 in capabilities for much 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 for us 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 on 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 Imran's 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 then 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 went on tested twin tails on airplane we could not make it work in fact if you look at the shelves that go the back end of the airplane there 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 worse we went to the single tail and we could they fact 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 but they demand each engine have his own vertical tail to tell it what direction to go reason that the f-15 and that class airplanes were twin engines from my perspective is not consistent reasoning in favor twin engines this kind of airplane played 40 thousand pounds when we wanted to 1.2 the on point for us to weight ratio nobody was making it fifty thousand pound thrust engines and so they had a goal at 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 are armed on airplane was too quick to carry and so to me one versus two engines is pure and simple matter what the mission ends but equipments and our months you expect the airplane to to carry twin tails a top-20 engine has become the fighter design norm at McDonnell Douglas as Irv Burroughs who made the first test flight in the f-15 explained twin tails have evolved and you can see the same in the Russian airplane 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 aft in the fuselage in other words we go essentially to build exactly which is more effective than having one single huge tail it also allows us to position the vortex that's 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 xx we're 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 centreline thrust and an engine out situation loss of one engine doesn't give you an a symmetric 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 12 year 14 is primarily an interceptor the f-15 is an air superiority fighter and those words may be a little misleading what that means 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 like serious risk and that's really subtly different missions what the f-14 does the f-15 carries a significant amount of ordnance it has excellent acceleration rate of climb it moves very well at medium speed 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 young wolf in fact that hardly 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 fact try to engage several enemies simultaneously and if necessary can close in tight and use the gun the 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 enough to 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 no stockist isis aluminum boat Alenia similar to your andrey greatly impressed by the simplicity and efficiency of the f-15 desired 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 Pugachev 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 seminoff talks about the design and mission of this airplane the first fly by wire Soviet fighter ever shown to the public with the utility bottomless pits are the systems we designed a special engine protection system here which prevent any foreign object from the ground from the roof of the aircraft or from the aircraft which is in front of this one to fight with the engine and to prevent it from a load line it is an aircraft designed to intercept aerial target in order to achieve this goal we the latest achievement in aerodynamics namely without stable control system and we believe that the capacity of the aircraft to cover the distance of four thousand kilometers and to stay in there for five hours is a very good operational feature either with an indication of any target the aircraft feeds up to their interceptor speed and rushes to the intersection therefore the aircraft can operate in to multiple interception and loitering for long period this way we can compare the routes to 27 airplane to phantom f-4 since it is known that f4 opens a new year innovation for the fighter having about 5,000 fuel onboard su-27 has got about 10 tons of fuel aboard we paid a lot of attention to the simplicity of aircraft operations with a considerable angle of attack margin and they're marching against aircraft rolling or diving and well the idea behind the design was also to make the aircraft as simple as possible for any pilot duty and secondly to make the aircraft forgive the political mistakes the aircraft 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 work conflict the area with air well round with the good ground support can very quickly be turned into an area with a poor ground support making all these centers to keep the mission of the airplane that is to be able operate it without support without support to be able to detect and including certificates to follow it to intercept it and depending on the task either to make a plan in the selected area or if it's a more tragic accident to destroy it it used to be Air Force colonel barosky whose area of expertise is aircraft agility says that from what he sees he'd feel comfortable applying 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 to 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 airshow 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 they are tactics people are working very hard to develop tactics to cause them to exploit there is a 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 they have excellent power those are two very strong attributes that make the pony web series 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 the incoming course is relatively well known and the 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 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 on board than American airplanes Russian airplanes tend to operate closer to home so that's not necessarily inappropriate aerial refueling makes a big difference it can just come off the tanker you have the possibility of entering into an engagement for full fuel tanks but remember that when you get into that engagement engagements is probably not going to last so long that you exhaust your fuel unless you're already low on fuel Millar ski sees the Navy's other principle carrier-based fighter the f-18 as an extremely versatile airplane the airplane rolls well it has good high-level 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 in flight control systems is for multimode flight control system the active and 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 young you're aiming a missile pointing is more important in the track you're blind delivering a bomb the practical idea is important and those kinds of changes can be within the flight control system 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 about the same size as the f-18 and about the same vintage by the way late 70s I believe mid to late 70s a high thrust-to-weight probably a little bit higher than the f-18 I believe it's probably more further 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 airplanes if they're not pure flybar 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 aerodynamic of it I suspect it's a higher top end top speed I believe it is two point three than the f-18 so it does have that advantage on the other hand it's as I described in the 227 the very archaic but even more so than the su-27 they're back in the air for days relatively cockpit technology on those two airplane it clearly doesn't have the air-to-ground capability with the f-18s I say clearly because we've never seen any evidence of that sort of capability an airplane and they typically will talk about the sort of thing they can do so and they haven't it's a single plane airplane except for their trainers same as the early f-18 and has some of the very same characteristics to look at of the f-18 some physical characteristics of the same be 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 - 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 madrid city enemy rubato so Masamune we may 29 was designed a tool to change the previous generation to switch from previous generation of Soviet frontline fighters such as the mig-21 and mig-23 - we are the frontal aviation and so of course we used all the experience gained on the previous programs and we especially strengthened believe its agility and its capabilities in a close dogfight and we think that the combination of rust weight ratio initial collaborate maneuverability the maximum speed at low altitudes and well Minoo bilities whole I think that this combination of the mig-29 supposes the same features of any aircraft existing in the world now maybe she's a medium he concedes the difficulties however I tell me the plucky Lozada by xu 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 area consumption for high-class engines and also wherever well bubble canopy that's also increases drag but we used it to ensure policies ability and limitations in electronics technology clearly bother Belyakov Syriac alludes to pipe to achieve the technological parity with the western design we had a hard job to do because our electronic industry lags behind judging from the Western standards so we should give 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 efficient and of course it increases the cost of the overall program because the cost of the program usually usually very closely follows the weight of the errors look 10 years a detailed review of the mig-29 shows how it's designed its moles created by Soviet doctrine and history Soviet aviation expert dick Ward explains so many of the Soviet design criteria for the 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 that designed the most rugged landing gear Inlet designs are based on foreign object damage plus it has bypassed inlets to be able to run the inlet air for the inches commitment over the top of the aircraft and 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 the Canadian f-18 escort pilot and the 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 McGill both wait well Bob wait actually performed the whole flight by himself from takeoff to them 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 I have not very good English and Bob doesn't speak Russian at all but you see we were both a professional pilot and have excellent knowledge of what you wanted so we had no problems during the flight I think what I expected was less quality in the mig-29 and 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 of 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 that especially at short range because of the sophisticated technology incorporated in the 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 the systems like the f-18 is that they displayed too much information to you you require experience to know when to prioritize or how to prioritize that information coming in to you so 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 experienced 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 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 cloud there's light lasted about 40 minutes [Music] well it was a very agile aircraft the combination of the the power and the majority of the flight control system was was very good it's a manual system that he reacts much similar to a to a fly-by-wire system well it would be the tail slide other maneuvers where we went to 30 degrees and who have attacked zero air speeds where you had flight control ability throughout the manoeuvre told me that it's the lateral the lateral stability of this airplane or the ability to control is very slow speeds is excellent and it's a very high before it's fast aircraft we didn't get beyond we never we could not get supersonic but the the low-speed characteristic 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 wheel entered afterburner and once we went to military power and again as we're coming down and going to the priest engine power there was no faulting or no stopping an engine whatsoever it wasn't even a call 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 faulted 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 and 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 slow cramped 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 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 Stoll demonstrator would in flight for adversity makes that possible what thrust-vectoring were able to use thrust-vectoring to pitch the airplane make the stabilator again available to make the airplane roll and the airplane at relatively high speeds both of the high G loadings which is really the heart of the air combat envelope will have a much better capability to rolls all simultaneously pulling G that allows you to change the plane of the fight and changing the plane of the fight allows you if you can operate 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 look at the conventional warfare environment of the 90s and realize it 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 Ave Alma Salva saw the French company introduced the showstopping Rafael in 1986 as an initial prototype of what is to become a fighter attack land and carrier based airplane for friends 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 in 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 fighters are an Air Force service assigned to the 44 50th tactical group and based at Tonopah Nevada it's 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 dick Moravsky suggest 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 and 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 Soviet suggests 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 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 two 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 [Music] Oh you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Phil Cipher

Views: 851,418

Keywords: Aviation Week Video, Time Life Video, Air Power, Soviet Union, United States, F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, F/A-18 Hornet, Su-27 Flanker, MiG-29 Fulcrum, Aviation Week and Space Technology, 1990, Cold War, McDonnell Douglas, Grummam, General Dynamice, Mikoyan and Gurevich, Sukhoi, Design Bureau, Aerospace Corporation, Air Superioriry, U.S./Soviet Fighter Matchup

Id: k9_UTwcXN3M

Length: 56min 54sec (3414 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2017