I’m watching Behind Enemy Lines for the first time. There was this long drawn out “Cat 'n Mouse” scene between his plane and a couple SAMs. Seriously, was this an accurate representation of a SAM’s capability???
I understand they have guidance systems which keep them on target (heat sensors, or lasers, or radio or whatever-- these seemed to be Heat Seeking), but does this give them the ability to turn around, bank, do loop-the-loops, etc??
These missiles were going forever! I’d think they would need some larger fins or wings and maybe some throttle control to accomplish some of the feats I just saw.
I figured any decent cowboy maneuver from a pilot would be enough to evade a heat-seeking missile. Or, at the very least, IF a pilot was able to cause a miss then the missile would not be able to completely turn around and go back after him. So once the missle flew past the plane, it would just fly til it was out of fuel or something.
Which brings me to my next question. How much fuel is in one of those things. Could it really fly around and chase a jet for five minutes like that?
I haven’t seen a missile chase a plane like that since the old G.I. Joe cartoons. And any avid fan of GI Joe knows that all you have to do to avoid a missile is fly full-speed toward a mountain and pull up at the last second!
Anybody have the straightdope on SAMs??
I thought that the element of surprise and quantity of SAMs is what causes a succesful HIT – not the skillful aerobatics of two SUPER SAMs.
Also, does an F-15 really only have one set of chaff/flare counter measueres? He deployed these once and gave up on it. Was he out, or did he decide the effort was futile since these SUPER SAMs were obviously immune to such primitive trickery?
People with more knowledge can provide more specific answers, but no, there are no long and involved chases like that, but on the other hand, their first-time around lethality is pretty high if you don’t have some advanced countermeasures like US jets do. The missiles are far more manuverable than the plane. Combined with a closing speed of hella fast, pilots might turn sideways to a missile to make things harder, but they don’t watch that missile come in and then fake it out with some tricky manuvering. When you physically see it coming you’ve got maybe a half-second to a second to react. Hope, pray, and clean out your Underoos when you get home.
The US Stinger shoulder fired missile can turn at a rate that puts a force of 20 G’s on the weapon, a pilot MAY withstand 10-12 G’s before blacking out, and the plane breaks up somewhere in the 15-17 G range. It isn’t as easy as it sounds to break lock on a decent heat-seeker.
Each missile has a “visual cone” within which it can “see” the target. It sees either the IR radiation (heat), the radar returns bouncing back from the target, or for more sophisticated missiles, it can see the shadow of the target against the background UV radiation. Once the taget departs that “visual cone”, and the missile loses lock, it either self destructs, or goes into a search pattern if so programmed. They do not turn around.
The US Patriot missile can fly powered for maybe up to 150km, maybe max 3 and a half minutes. But it goes Mach 5. The HAWK is Mach 2.4, and the Stinger is also supersonic The Soviet SA-2 goes Mach 4 plus, the SA-6 goes Mach 2.8, and so on. These missiles don’t slow down, and the F/A-18’s can’t manuever like that at those speeds.
No , the missile would have run out of fuel long before it actually shot down that F-18
Most of the time , the missile is actually the stupid part of the system, the smart parts are on the ground , at most the missile may have either an Infra-Red seeker or a proximity radar for terminal guidance.
While all SAM units can be fired independently , normally they are attached to an air defense region or division.
The majority of the fuel is used to get it to the correct altitude, so while a missile may be able to sustain a higher G-load than a manned aircraft , most of the time , the missile is flying just on terminal velocity.
You may wish to wait for Airman Doors to show up, to give you the skinny on the stinger , the public access part anyways
Further nitpcik: The missile in the movie was at least partially radar guided. A heatseaker missile will not set off warning lights because it does not actively aquire and track the target.
I’m not a pilot, but I did used to have a bit of an obsession with military jets, which is about half as good. So any information I provide is merely my understanding.
It’s true that missiles are much MUCH faster than airplanes, up to 5-6 times faster, maybe more. Assuming your plane is moving at Mach 1, and your missile is moving at Mach 3, regardless of which direction you are moving, it’s closing “hella fast.” Lets say it has to move 2 miles to get to you, and at Mach 3, thats going to take roughly 7 seconds. Now, if you are moving at it, its going to take about 5 seconds (shorter because the plane got closer). If the plane in question is moving AWAY from the missile though, it’s going to take around 10 seconds. During which time, the plane has moved another half mile or so away. The missile is slowing down, the plane is speeding up (afterburners are probably on unless its known to be a heatseaker) and the missile has to go further. It is possible for the plane to get away because it is powered for the entire flight.
We should also assume the plane in question is a small jet, and not a large bus. The key factor is the plane can turn on a dime compared to a missile. While the missile does indeed experience many more G’s durring its turns (sometimes more than 20), it is moving MUCH MUCH faster, so a turn of the same radius produces many times more G’s. Im not math person, and wouldnt be able to give you exact figures, but common sense will let you deduce that. As well, a missile may not always be visible, but it is possible to know where it is comming from and when it will hit.
Now for the pilots reaction. Once again, just a junkies understanding, not a pilots. The pilot has two options in general. Option ‘A’ he is going to turn to put the missile behind him and reduce the closure rate as discussed above. If he can get far enough away, the missiles speed will slowly drop off and the plane will get away, missiles only have a couple seconds of fuel, and then they run off of the momentum. Option ‘B’ the pilot will put the missile 90 degrees off his wing (if he can find it) and wait for it to get in close. Drop off lots of c/m and turn INTO the missile. Due to the missiles extreme speed, it cannot turn fast enough to correct for this and it shoots behind the plane and the pilot lives another day. This is generally a last resort as where there is one missile, there are usually two. I hope that was clear…
About the only rule they followed in the movie was to drop altitude. Trading altitude for speed is critical when trying to decrease the closure rate of a missile. Of course, why he was flying in a DMZ is something wars are started over. He would have been lucky to make it out of the brig in a couple years.
As for element of surprise. The pilot is ALWAYS surprised to be shot at by a SAM, after all, no pilot in his right mind is going to fly right into a know sam location without taking extreme measures to avoid detection (flying really low is a good one, but burns fuel). In general, a pilot will go to great lengths to avoid having a SAM shot at him.
Also, with regards to flying at a mountain and pulling up, there is a similar thing you can do with a heatseaking missile. If the pilot flys at the sun, and cuts his engine as much as he can, it is possible that the heatseaker will actually aquire the sun as its target (its big and warm) and the plane will get away. Think giant countermeasure. IIRC, newer heatseaking missiles have fixed this issue.
Yeah I remember thinking that scen was stupid, I mean, why not just make it a few SAMs if they wanted to drag out the scene for a bit? The missile basically has one chance at a hit, the aircraft needs to make one successful evading manoeuvre and that’s it. The missile is long gone.
That would have made it believable, he flew something like 20 miles trying to get away from the sam, so have more than one missile launcher firing more than one or two missiles ,and have him evade almost all of em , till the money shot gets him.
Im not saying they WONT do it, Im just saying they are not going to make themselves easy targets. You are correct though, my phrasing could have been much better. The point is a pilot does everything he can do to avoid being painted. I also should have excluding sorties focused around destroying said SAM sights. Man I got to stop using those universal affirmative or negatives…
Once again, sorry…
I don’t know, do you really think that a pilot could easily spot an inbound missle at two miles? I don’t think so, but I might be wrong. All I’m saying is that it definitely doesn’t happen on the type of visual ranges depicted in the movie.
There’s not all that much to tell. It’s a heat-seeker with counter-countermeasure capability, meaning that if you don’t get stuff out RIGHT NOW you’re wasting your time trying to decoy it. That’s the Stinger’s biggest advantage.
All shoulder-fired SAMs use up their propellant in the boost phase and therefore cannot actually chase you down the way they did in the movie. They also rely on proximity fuses since they are capable of radical maneuvers but cannot pursue afterwards because they don’t have the energy. Close enough is better than an outright miss.
Further, the larger the missile is the more fuel it has but the less maneuverable it is. The first generation Soviet SAM, the SA-2, was so huge that if it missed you could forget about it because it was simply unable to turn and maintain enough kinetic energy to get you. Most heat-seekers are small, most radar-guided missiles are large (although there are exceptions).
Anyway, that scene was pure Hollywood, unless someone came up with some new remarkable innovation that we don’t know about. If that’s the case than I’m coming home in a bag the next time I get sent to a war, because my aircraft can barely get away from a kid with a baseball.
By the way, folks, I am the Stinger guy. Battery B, 2nd LAAD Bn, MACG-28, 2nd MAW, MCAS, Cherry Point, NC, and Battery B, 4th LAAD Bn, MACG-48, 4th MAW, NAS Marietta, GA. Firing Platoon Commander and Firing Battery Executive Officer in both batteries.
The Stinger has a launch motor much like a shotgun shell, it is burned out before the tail of the missile leaves the launch tube. There is a slight coast phase (to get the missile out far enough so it won’t burn the gunner), then the flight motor kicks in. The flight motor burns basically up to impact, and there is no proximity fuse, only impact, penetration, and self destruct. It CAN adjust in-flight to compensate for target manuevering, and has a terminal closure movement at the last moment.
Less than 30 seconds, roughly speaking. It is supersonic, but doesn’t start off that way, so lets just used the speed of sound at 775mph on a nice day as an average speed. Stated range is about 8km, or 5 miles. 775mph is 13 miles per minute, giving us 23 seconds flight time, mathematically.
The SAM in the movie was not shoulder fired, so it would be expected to have a greater range, longer flight time, etcetera…
