Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rice!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!cbnews!henry@zoo.toronto.edu
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Sparrow Missile (was Re: Libyan aircraft)
Message-ID: <3359@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 23 Jan 89 02:30:21 GMT
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>... For that matter, how 
>effective are flares against IR missiles?

Less all the time.  The trouble is that a flare is, of necessity, small.
To produce the same radiation output as a much larger area of hot metal
or gas, it has to be very hot.  This gives it a rather different spectral
distribution of output than the real target; for example, it emits a lot
more visible light.  Infrared seekers are starting to use detectors that
look at more than one frequency, so that spectral distribution can be
used to tell flares from real targets.  They will probably start to use
imaging seekers soon, too, which again makes it much more difficult for
a flare to imitate an aircraft convincingly.

>AAM's cost a lot of money, and
>now that most aircraft are built with internal dispensers...

Countermeasures dispensers are still much less common than one would like,
although the situation is starting to change.  Most current air forces are
still nowhere near as well equipped with countermeasures as, say, RAF
Bomber Command was in 1945.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu