Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: aws@vax3.iti.org (Allen W. Sherzer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: dogfighting
Message-ID: <7252@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 8 Jun 89 01:01:46 GMT
References: <7022@cbnews.ATT.COM> <7128@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow
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Approved: military@att.att.com



From: aws@vax3.iti.org (Allen W. Sherzer)

Henry Spencer writes:
>From: military@att.att.com (Bill Thacker)
>>...maneuverability is not very good and hence is not a very good
>>dogfighter...
>
>For the uninitiated, it might be useful to add to this that dogfighting
>ability is greatly overrated.  The fact is that most victims of air combat
>are taken completely by surprise and there is no dogfight involved.  (The
>numbers are 80-90% depending on which source you believe.)  

True but if you are in the 10 to 20 percent, it is a nice capability to
have :-). There are still a lot of dog fights in war plus maneuverability
is good to have for SAM evasion.

Now this situation (80% of killed aircraft don't know they are under
attack) is the result of a loss of Situational Awareness (SA). Pilots
who are better at maintaining SA are better in battle than those who
can't. What happens is that during a mission (starting with the briefing)
the pilot's SA gets better and better. This reaches a peak just before
contact with the enemy. At that time the pilot is forced to focus on his
target and must ignore the battle around him. He therefore looses track
of the situation (except for his small part of it). This makes it easy to
sneak up on him and kill him.

Now the interesting question is what the future holds. Past attempts to
help the pilot maintain SA have included more sensors (like Radar Warning
Receivers) which have only made the job more complex. One pilot said to
me "I am drowning in data but starved for infomration". I read one study
which said that the average F-15 pilot can only use 15% of the sensors
available to him, more than that and they become overworked.

On the other hand, there are efforts like Pilot's Associate and Super-
cockpit which are attempting to provide better SA. Pilot's Associate is
attempting to use computers so that the integration of data is done by 
the aircraft instead instead of the pilot. This should allow the pilot
to understand the global situation much faster than before. Supercockpit
is attempting to take that information and present it to the pilot so it
can be understood faster.

Now if these efforst work out, future pilots will have their heads out
of the cockpit and be analyzing situations not dials. This should make
it a lot harder to senak up on a pilot at any time during a mission.
Does this mean that a "golden age of dogfighting" lies in the future?

  Allen
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|  Allen Sherzer                      |  To iterate is human,              |
|  aws@iti.org                        |  to recurse divine                 |
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