Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: johnson@gregsun.cs.umd.edu (Greg Johnson )
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Dogfighting
Message-ID: <7779@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 27 Jun 89 02:38:38 GMT
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From: johnson@gregsun.cs.umd.edu (Greg Johnson )
In article <7671@cbnews.ATT.COM> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>
>"VIFFing" is Vectoring In Forward Flight.  It was invented some years
>earlier, by the USMC Harrier pilots I believe.
>
>                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
>                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu

There have been some research efforts in recent years on jet fighters with
high maneuverability.  HIMAT and the X-31 come to mind.  The X-31 uses thrust
vectoring around the nozzle at the rear of the airplane to maneuver in
post-stall flight.  I read an intriguing article in a popular science magazine
about the X-31.  It can evidently do amazing, bizarre things.  It seems that
it can enter a stall and then turn around using thrust vectoring.  Detaching
air flow seems to be a wonderful way to increase maneuverability.

Some questions:

What sorts of air combat encounters are such airplanes optimized for?
Close-in gun engagements?  If so, how frequent are such encounters?
The experts were for a while predicting the demise of in-close
dogfighting; has opinion swung in the other direction?  As I understand
it, the F-4 was originally deployed in Viet Nam as a missiles-only
platform, but poor results and pleas from pilots resulted in modifications
to include guns for in-close fighting.  Missiles and radar have improved
substantially since the Viet Nam era, but rules for visual confirmation of
targets before firing have come into the picture.  So where does all this
leave us?  What does the future of aerial combat look like, and how does
high maneuverability fit in?  To make this set of questions impossibly
general, how will intelligent cockpits change the nature of ACM?

- Greg Johnson
  johnson@mimsy.umd.edu

  When you turn an ordinary page of code into just a handful of instructions
  for speed, expand the comments to keep the number of source lines constant.
      - Mike Morgan, taken from Jon Bentley's More Programming Pearls
- Greg Johnson
  johnson@mimsy.umd.edu
  
  When you turn an ordinary page of code into just a handful of instructions
  for speed, expand the comments to keep the number of source lines constant.
      - Mike Morgan, taken from Jon Bentley's More Programming Pearls