Originally Posted by
melmothtw
Similarly, will be interesting to see how Qatar will be able to crew as many as 168 new combat aircraft (not to mention new helicopters, etc) with a citizen population of about 300,000.
Do you expect their readiness rate to be 100%.
They may only need 100 crews.
Originally Posted by
Bob Viking
Whilst we obviously don’t discuss tactics and the intimate details of modern weapons systems on this forum, I fear your statement that a helicopter can avoid an attacking FJ with ease may be a tad outdated. Whilst that may once have been true I’m not so sure that is still the case. I feel sure that a helicopter that is engaged outside of their visual scan by a FJ equipped with a weapon of similar abilities to an ASRAAM is probably not going to live to tell the tale.
Yes, there are situations that helicopters can do well versus FJ but there are also situations where they do not.
I may be off base in mentioning the lack of difficulty (a quarter of a century ago) that a couple of F-15's had in knocking a couple of Blackhawks out of the air ... the Blackhawks were obviously unalerted and not in a combat state of mind. There is the adage from Von Richtoffen and others about "whomever sees the other first tends to win the air-to-air engagement" which I think applies here. Given the advances in low light cameras, visual sensors, various high tech targeting pods, IR sensors, etcetera (I will only speak generically here) the "I see you first" weapons engagement of a target that doesn't know that it's been spotted tends to favor the FJ in many cases.
Caveat: I've been out of the business for a few years, so take all of that with a grain of salt.