Originally Posted by
ErgoMonkey
So for the 'insiders' , what does such a airshow/extreme manoeuvre mean?, up close (gun) as originally posted I fail to see what the advantage is, very few fighters adopt thrust vectoring, this and the F22 being the only operational (unless I missing some) , coupled with the fact the Typhoon (allegedly) came out on top in close combat with the F22 in China Lake circa 05.
Ergo,
I don’t know where to pitch this because your profile doesn’t say much about you – so I do apologise if this comes over as ‘sucking eggs’!
From an operators point of view, against this adversary, you’d have ‘extreme difficulty’ (intentional understatement!) in some situations.
A visual fight can go in all sorts of directions – many of them would favour an aircraft such as the SU 30. If it’s ‘who can go the slowest’ (downrange travel), ‘who can turn with the smallest radius’ and ‘who can point his nose’, then this chap is on to a winner against a dissimilar aircraft. Even though he may not actually be able to get a weapon off, to have an aircraft ‘point’ at you during a fight is a distinctly toe curling thing and can ‘force’ you to make a mistake and/or give up any advantage you may have gained.
It’s important to remember that that’s only half the story – he needs to have the situational awareness and a suitable man-machine interface to effectively employ his weapons (not the subject under discussion here – but worthy of note I think).
There is a penalty for this kind of manoeuvrability in regimes other than that which the video shows. Unstable aircraft come into their own in regimes that are not readily ‘displayable’ at air shows but are nonetheless operationally highly desirable.
Lastly, if anyone is talking openly to you about ‘stuff’ that has gone on at China Lake (etc) then I would confidently say they are just doing it to impress you and they are most certainly not ‘in the know’.
Ray :-)