What can I say, I feel like indulging my inner James Bond fantasies a little.
Anyway, like the title says: would it be possible for me to successfully fire a FIM-92 “Stinger” shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile at an airborne target, while I myself am in freefall (at say…10,000 feet, falling at 120 mph. I think that’s about right)?
I imagine some straps or something would be required to keep from losing the missile, at the very least. So, what other horrible technical problems are going to come up?
Everything that is likely to be a target for a stinger missile is going to be in flight. Horizontal, with some vertical component. You, on the other hand will be falling, with almost no horizontal component. Aiming might be challenging. Not to say impossible, but you will have to be quick, and very stable with respect to the target to get tone.
If you’re in the right position relative to your target, the relative speed of the target wouldn’t be much of a problem for aiming.
But wouldn’t the aim also be additionally messed up when the missile first leaves the launcher? I imagine it doesn’t often get fired into such heavy winds. Maybe it can overcome that, but I don’t know.
Stingers get fired from helicopters, so I doubt that airflow would be much of an issue.
However, I doubt that someone in freefall with a 1.5m tube weighing 16kg could achieve anything like a stable attitude to aim the thing.
If the target is sufficiently far away then aiming isn’t going to be that much of a problem. More of a problem is going to be the wind. The missile is going to exit the tube straight into a blast of air. I reckon it will lose lock almost immediately. Unless the target is straight down or straight up :).
Well, is there any sort of spring inside the tube to help it get started? And there must be something that holds it in place before firing; does that release so smoothly that the rocket doesn’t pull you forward a little bit as the motor starts?
The missile, in simple terms, uses a blast not unlike a shotgun shell going off to propel it out of the launch tube. The explosion is over before the rear of the missile is clear. It then coasts for a few meters before the flight motor kicks in. The rear end of the tube has a blow out window, so the recoil is virtually nil.
This coast phase may your problem with the scenario, the windspeed on the missile would be much higher than that on a missile fired from a helo. If you could indeed get lock (can be a challenge for folks standing on solid ground) before firing, you “uncage” the seeker head so its field of view gains some freedom of movement about the main axis, but if the missile gets turned off the line of sight by more than that max “look away” angle, you lose lock and the missile goes searching for a target.
Yes, you could fire one. No, you probably won’t hit the target. I served as a Stinger officer in the Marines.
I just asked a retired Army instructor who used to teach the class for a slightly older version of the stinger… the one before they added the IFF feature.
He said it’s theoretically possible, but highly unlikely you’d succeed.
I really doubt you’d be able to go through the aiming and firing process while staying oriented in the direction of the plane. Stable free-fall takes work that you wouldn’t be able to do.
No, James would be duking it out in some military cargo plane that was smuggling something nasty for some corrupt dictator. He’d strap the parachute on, grab the Stinger, then jump off the tailgate backwards and fire the missile into the airplane as he fell clear of the explosion.
And that is what used to be wrong with the james Bond movies.
To add to UncleBill’s explanation of how the FIM-92 ‘Stinger’ MANPADS works, you also have to have your cheek in contact with the conduction bar on the optic sight (which flips up from the housing), one hand has to be on the foregrip actuation (“UNCAGING”) switch, and the right hand on the pistol grip with the thumb on the firing lever. Here is a picture of a Stinger being prepared for firing. Here is the procedure for readying, arming, tracking, and firing with the Stinger MANPADS. I believe (although not mentioned in the tech manual) that the missile will only fire up to a certain elevation (to prevent the round from falling back onto the shooter before the solid rocket propulsion motor ignites), so you’d have to be in something like a vertical body position to fire the weapon. Anyone familiar with skydiving will immediately realize that it would be impossible for a single diver to maintain this position in freefall due to the imbalance of forces; you’d end up spinning around in an uncontrolled fashion. This might be possible with two or more divers helping to stabilize the firing diver, but I find it unlikely that you’d be able to maintain a lock.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but even James Bond couldn’t pull this one off.
I always unfolded the IFF antenna (not shown in linked photo of older model) with my right hand, clearly in violation of that Army FM (good thing I wasn’t in the Army). Just a quick upward slap. The upper elevation as I recall was more about not burning the backs of your legs to a crisp with the launch motor than any internal safety mechanism. But it has been almost 18 years.
I the Gulf War, Episode One, we had a dog cage truck (HMMWV with specially designed steel racks for carrying missile boxes) with six missiles get mortared. Blew the team right through the windshield, they were slightly deaf for a bit. I was responsible for going to the site and ensuring no classified gear or data was left about, and told to destroy any remaining useful bits, like the warhead and flight motor fuel. We got to see a lot of the inner workings of the system, all burnt up and stuff. Got to shoot the warheads with M-16A2s. Fun times.
