I don’t think this is a spoiler since it appears in the movie preview and is only in the opening scene of the movie, completely unrelated to the main story.
Basically, an enemy helicopter launches a heat seeking missile at the helicopter the A-Team guys are in. In response, Murdoch kills the engine to let the copter fall rapidly without the heat signature to avoid the missiles, then re-starts the helicopter in a fall. I assume this wouldn’t work for a helicopter for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that you probably can’t re-start it in a freefall, but would this strategy have worked for a modern fighter plane, which I believe can do a restart?
The movie has them kill the engine about a second before the missile reaches them, which I assume is also not enough time for the engine to ‘cool’, but in a normal combat situation, if you are able to determine a heat seeker is approaching, but is still several seconds away, I would think killing the engines, dropping several thousand feet, then re-starting could be effective. Let’s assume you do not have any flares or other countermeasures available, which would obviously be your first choice in this case. Has this ever been tested?
The idea behind flares is that you creat really hot things for the missle to confuse with the plane. Even with the engines off its still gonna be the hottest spot in the sky.
Also IIRC heat seekers are quite a bit smarter than that and are unlikely to be so easily distracted. I would imagine it would be more like minutes of engine off time before they would not be valid targets.
I am not a helicopter pilot (or any other kind of pilot for that matter) but it is my understanding that you can re-start a helicopter engine in flight. As long as you still have control of the rotor, helicopters don’t just drop out of the sky. If the engine stalls you can go into what is called “autorotation”, and while you will drop a lot faster than an airplane would under the same circumstances, you can effectively glide down and land. You may even be able to get the engine to re-start on the way down.
Wikipedia’s page on autorotation:
How would killing the engine cause an abrupt change in direction? That may have been the producer or director’s intent, but in reality it’s just going to cause the helicopter to drop like a rock.
And even dropping like a rock is less abrupt then a power dive, which uses the engine to force the helicopter down, faster than gravity. So this scene is still factually inaccurate.
I dont know if it was their intent, but if the IR missile did not have a proximity fuse and was going for a skin kill, dropping a few hundred feet at the right moment would cause the heater to do an over shoot. They dont have the ability to turn around and re aquire the original target or the fuel for that matter.
I thought he was trying to scan the terrain to see if he could fashion a primitive lathe.
Although the dialogue was hard to follow in some scenes, I thought he identified the incoming as heat seekers just before he killed the engine, so I took it to mean he was trying to erase their signature, I laughed and laughed.
You can force an autorotation which would have the same effect as shutting off the engine. I would imagine this would be the best course of action against an incoming missile. Fire off some flares and just drop.* Military pilots are trained in evasive maneuvers but I doubt turning off the engine is one of them. You don’t want to be in combat with no engine.
I’m not helicopter pilot so don’t jump in a chopper and do that without a second opinion.
I think that would be bad. The spinning rotor on a helicopter forces a large column of air to blow downward. If you descend too fast, you settle into your own downdraft which forces you down faster. The only way to recover from that, as I understand it, is to get out of that column of air.
If you were actually using the main rotor to force yourself downwards, I suppose there wouldn’t be any descending air column. But you might have a problem with hinges and flex of the rotor blades. If they’re blowing air up, that will force the blades down, maybe enough for them to hit the boom of the tail rotor.
On top of that, add in whether the fuel system is designed to allow flight at negative G’s. If you’re forcing the helicopter to descend faster than gravity, anything not strapped down is going to float upwards (relative to the 'copter, of course). That includes the fuel in the fuel tank. If the fuel pickup is at the bottom of the tank, you’ll starve the engine and it’ll quit in a few seconds anyway.
There’s a huge variation in the types and quality of thermal seekers in heat seeking missiles.
The very earliest heat seekers from the 50’s had uncooled sensors which were very insensitive. The missile basically had to fly up the jet tail pipe for it to see anything. This is the only type of missile where turning your engine off would have a good chance of fooling a missile.
From the early 60s, they started using cooled sensors, that would probably have tracked the residual heat perfectly well if it was close enough
From the mid 70’s the sensors became sensitive enough to home in on the heat generated on the skin of an aircraft by air friction as it travels through the air.
From the 90’s, infra-red missiles started to use focal-plane arrays. Basically a sensor than instead of just seeing a hot blob, builds an actual thermal image like a TV picture which it then matches against it’s knowledge of what aircraft looks like, so it is pretty much impossible to decoy.
It strongly doubt any of the uncooled seeker missiles from the 50s are left in existence in any weapon inventory anywhere, and even the next generation cooled seeker missiles from 60s are probably getting pretty rare nowadays.
In short, anything made from 1975 to today could almost certainly track a helicopter whether it’s engine was on or off, and even a missile from the 1960s would have a chance of picking up enough heat to home in.
Hmm, did I see the same movie as everybody else? There were two heat seeking missiles. Turning the helicopter engine off made one or both of the missiles target each other, as their exhausts were now the hottest thing around.
Out of curiosity, when do the events take place and what kind of equipment is in the scene? The original A-team took place sometime in the 80s. They were vietnam vets who were still young enough to be adventurers. Is that still true for the movie or are they present day Iraq vets or something?
It’s implied they are vets from Desert Storm (1st Iraq War). I don’t know helicopters or missiles, but their helicopter in the opening scene looks to be a Vietnam era Bell helo, while the pursuit enemy helo is a more modern one. They do a steep climb, turn off the engines, and the missiles hit each other, which I assume would never happen, along with the barrel roll that I don’t believe that ancient helo can do.
You mean sorta like this? Video is of an airborne heli refueling; heli pilot is aggressively chasing the tanker’s refueling hose through some ups and downs, and his maneuvers ultimately cause his own rotor blades to dip down so far that he chops off his own fuel intake pipe. Fortunately the rotor blade is tougher than the fuel intake pipe.
