Fighter aglity

摘要

Who can forget the immortal Top Gun quote: "I feel the need, the need for speed"? However, I'm sorry to tell you that this iconic movie grossly misrepresents the finer art of air combat, where employing Maverick's questionable tactics would end up with you on the dreaded "alternates board". And the high-agility airshow routines beloved of today's fighter manufacturers are almost as misleading as Hollywood's take on aerial combat. Firstly, we should separate the two rather distinct phases of an air-to-air engagement. The first is the beyond-visual-range (BVR) portion, where aircraft engage in a supersonic game of 3D chess, and the second (which is the one that Top Gun and air displays try to emulate) is the close-in fight or the basic fighter manoeuvres (BFM) phase. While I will touch on each in turn, for those who want a more academic schooling, I thoroughly recommend the book that was handed to me as I began my F/A-18 exchange tour: Fighter Combat: Tactics and Manoeuvring by Robert L Shaw. Here you will learn about turn rate versus radius, and two-circle and one-circle fights - no self-respecting TOPGUN instructor would be seen without a copy on their shelf.