Objects in mirror are trying to kill you.
I would think if that were true they would’ve stop making fighters at some point. You’d just make a large missile carrier with a large fuel tank which would shoot down everything since maneuverability wasn’t a requirement.
Repeat to bump this part.
I’m having fun window shopping through LSLGuy’s catalog, No longer supported. So, with the bump in mind:
- Attitude gyros; inclinometers; turn and bank indicators; turn coordinators; that little horizon thing you see on the floaty ball (eightball–that what they call it)–or is that one of these suckers I just mentioned?; and that laser stripe painter added later on inside the SR 71.
Which one do I buy for my airplane, ranging from the lowest possible budget (just one?) or to plausible belt and suspenders big budget? (Within flight regime of airplane, naturally.) And why did those SR-71s get retrofitted with it–since such a device is not in the catalog, I’m assuming its functionality was a combo of a) whoops, we forgot to consider that?-- which seems colossally weird on such a thought out single purpose plane and mission; and b) none of those other instruments in that list were sufficient?, which also seems weird, but obviously I’m out of my league from word one. - Also: Directional gyros vs plain old wet and dry compasses.
http://www.defensetech.org/2016/03/11/pentagon-arsenal-plane-may-take-the-form-of-a-modified-b-52/
It seems they are investigating something like that.
In all, that’s a deep set of questions probably worthy of it’s own thread. It certainly has zero to do with the OP topic. But since you’re the OP I’ll humor you. 
In very short summary:
Which devices you want in an airplane depends on your mission. In WWI they flew with zero instruments. It worked. Barely.
First thing you need is an airspeed indicator. Without knowing speed you’re in danger of falling out of the sky or breaking the airplane every second you’re airborne.
Next is a compass. To deliberately go anywhere you need to have a way to tell which way you’re going. Otherwise North looks just like West. Implicit in uzing a compass is also having a map so you have some idea of which direction really does lead from *here *to there.
Magnetic (whiskey) compasses are fine. But work poorly in turns, climbs, descents, and when accelerating/decelerating. They’re also are unstable in turbulence. A gyrocompass AKA directional gyro is stable in all those regimes, but doesn’t know where North is. The two working together make a useful combo. So pretty much all aircraft have both. Fancy modern aircraft have an automatic system to keep them aligned. In simpler airplanes the pilot does it manually every few minutes.
As long as you never, on pain of near-instant death, enter a cloud that’s all you need to fly anywhere on Earth. Oh yeah; you also need a clock or wristwatch.
Once you want to fly in clouds your needs go up.
Long term (10s of minutes) you need an altimeter. Otherwise you won’t know whether you’re going to clear that cloud-shrouded mountain the map says is up ahead on the direction the compass says you’re going.
What you need in the short term (10s of seconds) is a way to stay right side up while inside a cloud. Absent that you *will *do an RFK Junior move within a couple minutes, tops.
The original invention to do that was the “turn and bank” indicator. Which itself was a simple combination of the separate “turn indicator” and the “clinometer”. A clinometer is misnamed in aviation. The one thing it NEVER tells you is your inclination, either bank left/right or nose up/down. But that’s what the device was called on ships and in the surveying trade, so that’s what it’s called in aviation.
It’s possible to maintain control in clouds using just a “turn and bank indicator” plus airspeed and altimeter. But it’s very mentally taxing. And it’s a lot like balancing on a tightrope. As long as you’re stable you’re fine. But if you get far out of whack, it takes heroic measures to get back to stable. So every turn carries with it the seeds of destruction. That was as good as “blind flight” got in the 1920s.
The “turn coordinator” is simply the same device as a “turn indicator” in a modern (1960s) marketing package. But IMO it’s an inherently misleading presentation and a giant step backwards in safety versus the traditional T&B. I’m a bit surprised they’re still made and sold.
The next invention is the attitude gyro = artificial horizon = attitude indicator = eightball. It presents an accurate picture of aircraft attitude (bank and pitch). Without the pilot needing to do lots of mental gymnastics to derive that understanding from the airspeed, altimeter, and turn indicator and their respective trends over time.
Every modern aircraft has these. Some are mechanical, others are computerized and displayed on screens. Strictly speaking once you have an attitude indicator the T&B becomes completely unnecessary. Small aircraft tend to have one attitude indicator and one T&B powered from different sources for redundancy. OTOH, airliners and bizjets tend to have three attitude indicators with separate power supplies and no T&B.
The SR’s laser thingy is just a belt-and-suspenders way to present the same information as an attitude indicator. I don’t *know *why they bothered. I can *guess *it was either some challenges with flying while wearing a restrictive spacesuit, or the need to fly more precisely which made seeing tiny deviations difficult on an 6 inch instrument that’d be obvious when the same deviations were spread across a 4 foot wide cockpit.
With all that stuff you can fly in clouds and live to tell the tale. To be useful for getting places you need to augment all this with some way of knowing where you are and where you want to go. That old map won’t help when you can’t see the ground.
These position-fixing and navigation systems vary from 1920s radio beacons on the ground and paper maps to modern GPS and inertial systems with worldwide databases of airports and terrain and regulatory info. There are several generations of tech in between. Including, ref the SR, star-tracker systems. Most aircraft carry at least two, and sometimes three generations of nav tech on board for redundancy.
So what’s this cockpit instrument? The photo caption says “das-flugzeugcockpit-whaerende-eienr-enormen-erschuetterung.”
Like this? The Douglas F6D Missileer was pretty much that – a flying missile battery for fleet air defense. Shoot down incoming attackers before they could sink your task force with air-to-surface missiles. You launch from your carrier and loiter around the immediate vicinity looking for bad guys to lob long-range AAMs at.
It didn’t work out. Even with the most advanced long-range air-to-air missiles of the era (a direct predecessor for the legendary long-range AIM-54 Phoenix missile), it turns out that an anti-ship missile can always be launched from beyond the effective range of a defensive air-to-air missile, so the bad guys can ripple salvo his vampires* and run away before you can stop him. So the defensive missile truck was replaced with a very large but fairly fast fighter you may have heard of, so that the combat air patrol can sprint out to where the bad guys are and engage them before they can shoot. 'Cuz an F6D can do many things, but “sprint” ain’t one of them.
TL;DR: the Navy tried your idea. It didn’t work out for very important real-world reasons.
*“vampire”: Hostile antiship missile (ASM).
This sort of concept has resurfaced in recent years. Not an ‘arsenal plane’ type concept as above which generally focuses on air to ground weapons, but a big air to air missile carrying a/c without any pretense to fighter-like maneuverability.
For example an Aviation Week (sorry no link) May 11-24 2015 article outlined a Japanese Air Self Defence Force study by Kawasaki of an air to air missile carrier at least as large as that company’s P-1 patrol plane for deployment by the 2030’s. The article mentions that the US think tank RAND studied a concept a few years ago of a B-1 carrying Patriot or Standard Missile SAM derivatives.
As was mentioned on other recent thread, Beyond Visual Range missile combat wasn’t really common in the relatively significant air wars since radar guided air-to-air missiles from radar equipped fighters theoretically gave this capability (Vietnam, Arab-Israeli wars, Falklands, 1991 war) and while relatively more common in fewer engagements since…those were pretty few. But there’s no universal law saying that missiles launched from non-maneuverable a/c, which would pretty much have to do so from long range, can never play an important role in air combat.
The F6D was going to be, in fact, an air-to-air missile battery plane, not an airborne “arsenal ship”. (That role belongs to heavy bombers nowadays, as guided-bomb/guided-missile dump trucks; for instance, a loitering B-52full of JDAMs with all target acquisition and cuing done by a drone or GPS guidance.)
I suppose it’s always tempting to pretend that dogfighting doesn’t matter any more, until you discover the other guys think it does matter and can find ways to sneak inside your long-range missile coverage. If all you have is a long-range sniper rifle, you’ll be at a disadvantage if someone actually gets into knife range.
Do you have the right link there? I see no caption. I see a cheap set from what’s probably a 1940s stage play meant to evoke an aircraft cockpit.
Agree hugely with your last paragraph. As you might expect I would.
Ref the whole air to air missile arsenal truck you and **Corry El **are discussing I read something fascinating in the most recent Aviation Week & Space technology issue, Dec 5 2016.
An SM-6 surface to air missile was fired by a USN Aegis system at a target the Aegis could not see. The target was detected by a USMC F-35 a long distance away and the fire request relayed via network to the Aegis. The F-35’s on-board radar provided ongoing control and target info to the missile in flight. The missile eventually acquired the test target and took over its own nav to the successful intercept.
This is the promise of networked warfare. No missile-carrying aircraft can ever match the magazine depth of a naval ship. Or for that matter land-based SAM batteries. Once every set of eyes can communicate with every weapon on every platform, lots of entirely new ideas make sense. Even if they vaguely resemble old ideas that didn’t work.
The Missileer was obsolete before it was born because it was so slow. At the same time the pitiful range and reliability of missiles and radars of the era meant it wasn’t going to be very effective. But it was a necessary stepping stone on the way to what did work.
Hmm. I guess I heard about that experiment, but forgot. This does change the calculus, to some extent; a battery ship to pop out fast long-range missiles and lots of “eyes” at the edge of the defense area to spot threats and cue the missile. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “eyes” sounds like a job for drone swarms, although in current practice it’d be a manned Combat Air Patrol.
But a surface-based missile is pretty much guaranteed to be capable of longer range and potentially higher intercept speeds, because it can be big.
Interesting times.
I thought the Missileer+Eagle missile was designed to kill missile carrying bombers at long ranges before they could launch their missiles. A different situation from occurred in air combat in Vietnam, but not necessarily one which would never occur.
Even today, for the USAF, in the air to air role it has many possible environments and tactical situations. You have Air Defence of North America (nowadays once again a major concern) against Bears, Backfires and Blackjacks where killing the aircraft as far away from the homeland as possible is the main concern and to deal with any cruise missiles they might have launched.
You have air superiority missions to destroy the enemies airforce, here you could conceivably find yourself fighting at all ranges. Air Defence over your own forces, where you would probably want to only fight WVR, just incase what you thought was a Su-25 turns out to be an A10.
Agree that drone swarms are the next step for the leading edge of the detection network. Some of whom may be aerial kamikazes AKA long loiter “smart” missiles bordering on mines. Back at the killing end we’ll be seeing HPM batteries replacing SHORAD SAM systems. Maaaybe lasers, but I’m betting on HPM.
Conversely I think missiles still have a long life ahead of them for long range use.
Laser/HPM have the massive advantage of zero time of flight and a deep, cheap magazine. But suffer hugely from horizon problems unless airborne themselves, the tyranny of the inverse square law, and for lasers specifically, atmospheric propagation problems.
Right now power conversion efficiency leads to insurmountable problems with power supply and with cooling that make aerial combat laser systems impractical. HPM’s not much better. But they’re working on improving those factors too.
Interesting times indeed.
Right, I was referring to ‘arsenal plane’ bomber/transport concepts as air to ground, not to the F6D which was an air to air concept. The latter is the concept revived most seriously so far by the JASDF, with an even bigger plane (among other things because it wouldn’t have to land on an aircraft carrier).
On the second point, as I laid out in posts on this and another recent thread that’s the history of BVR air to air, that it doesn’t fully pan out and was a small minority of air to air kills til at least the 1991 war where it wasn’t a big % (though a big more than before). However like I said last post, there’s no law of nature saying that could never change, nor presumably would non-maneuvering ‘missile trucks’ necessarily ever be the only air to air assets.
And more in the middle of the spectrum, compared to an absolute non-dog fighting a/c like a Kawasaki P-1, it’s not necessarily a ‘tempting fallacy’ to think raw aerodynamic performance might become less important in fighters. Another emerging possibility is a/c able to practically shoot down attacking missiles, or the grey area between hard and soft kill in laser infrared countermeasures systems able to physically damage IR missile seekers. Equipping a/c with such systems could be worth sacrificing some aerodynamic performance, might also be another capability of missile truck type non-maneuverable a/c. And the other obvious trade off in that regard is Very Low Observable. You can make a very high aerodynamic performance VLO fighter (eg. the F-22). But it’s not crystal clear the optimum compromise of those conflicting requirements if you want a slightly less extremely expensive fighter, to keep more relatively more VLO and sacrifice relatively more dogfight capability (the F-35 perhaps) or sacrifice relatively more VLO for more aerodynamic performance (the Russian T-50 perhaps). Of course if money and numbers were no object you’d never compromise on any fighter capability.
But again there’s no deductive logic by which the shortcomings in longer range air to air systems of the past will never be overcome, nor again in the other direction is it certain a/c will always have to avoid missiles or their launch envelopes, or spoof them rather than directly counteracting them. The past is a guide. Certain basic principles remain even from WWI. But technology has significantly changed the nature of fighter combat and can again.
While I expected that it would eventually happen, I was surprised that a tactic similar to the one you mention already seems to be mainstream in the Israel army;
I had vaguely heard about Delta Force deploying Hellfire missiles a few kilometers back, sneaking up on a target and then using a laser designator to call in their own missile artillery. Israel seems to have been doing that since the 80s on a wider scale:
It would be surprising if Israel didn’t often use the tactic of deploying the Pereh 20km behind front lines and having infantry/drones/light vehicles sneak in and call in missile strikes.
Just like the infantry can thus take out enemies without the enemy ever knowing it was there until it’s too late, a stealthy fighter or a stand-off EW plane can use its AESA to detect targets, call in many missiles and provide guidance without the targets ever knowing the plane was there.
I suppose submarines could do something analogous if they can communicate stealthily, either as spotters (with surface vessels doing the launching) or launchers (with planes as spotters).
How useful can satellites be in that role? How effective are counters to them?
First off, I apologize for doing what I sometimes find annoying in other threads: posting a goofy/facetious cite to a video, which requires a jump out, without even a context of previous goofing around to justify it. It just was the most empty attempt at a cockpit Ive ever seen, with a weirdly modernist/ironic (as they say now) nod to verisimilitude, something any self-respecting teacher of a 1st-grade class play would be proud.
That having been said, it’s not from a play, but a quite popular/infamous movie, the making of which another movie was made quite recently.
Hint: flying saucers and Dracula.