Typhoon "Shot Down"
Posted by David Axe at 9/21/2007 4:39 AM
Back in July I relayed reports of the first-ever "shoot-down" of an F-22 Raptor fighter, during a mock dogfight with a U.S. Air Force F-16. Our European friends -- Brits, Italians, Germans and Spaniards -- might have had a couple chuckles at the news, for their new fighter, the Typhoon, had never suffered a similar humiliation. (Or if it had, no one had reported it.)
No longer. It has come to light that during an exercise in Italy in May, a Hungarian Gripen light fighter -- a small, single-engined design generally considered only slightly better than an F-16 -- "shot down" an Italian Typhoon, according to a press release from the manufacturer, quoting a Hungarian pilot:“Other aircraft couldn’t see us -- not on radar, not visually -- and we had no jammers of our own with us. We got one Fox 2 kill on a F-16 who turned in between our two jets but never saw the second guy and it was a perfect shot. Our weapons and tactics were limited by Red Force rules, and in an exercise like this the Red Force is always supposed to die, but even without our AMRAAMs and data links we got eight or 10 kills, including a Typhoon. Often we had no AWACS or radar support of any kind, just our regular onboard sensors –- but flying like that, ‘free hunting’, we got three kills in one afternoon. It was a pretty good experience for our first time out.”
Should F-22 jocks worry? Maybe, according to the BBC, which claims that the "RAF's Eurofighters have flown highly successful missions against the F-22 during recent exercises in the U.S."
The lesson here? Sometimes a basic fighter, expertly flown, will win even against your latest high-tech jets, no matter how many tens of billions of dollars you sink into whiz-bangs.
(Thanks, DID!)
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Tags: hungary, italy, gripen, typhoon
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Airpower wrote:
Your lack of knowledge regarding the Gripen system is quaint, but embarrassing. Even an A-model jet – with its AMRAAMs, datalinks and PS-05/A radar – has the technology edge on every F-16 except perhaps a Block 60.
The Hungarians fly C/Ds and the most important point in this story is that they were limited to Red Air tactics, and therefore unable to exploit any of their technological or tactical advantages.
And they still did OK.
It’s a bit foolish to make too much of the loss of a Typhoon (or an F-22) in an exercise like this…and no details are given of just how this kill was achieved. The point of any exercise is to die. Sometimes.
However, anyone who dismisses a Gripen like it was some sort of MiG-21 is going to find themselves dying rather a lot.
Oh, and this wasn’t the first reported exercise kill of a Typhoon. Just the first you read about in a press release.
9/23/2007 12:39:15 PM
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