I just finished watching Top Gun (1986). The climax features dog fights between American and Soviet pilots. Furthermore, there is a story told verbally within the film about the lead character’s father perishing in a dog fight in Vietnam. This led me to the following questions:
(per the title of this thread) Have there been any dog fights between American fighters and those of any other country in the years 1986 - today?
Have there been any dogfights between fighter planes of ANY two countries in that period?
what about Vietnam? If the Maverick’s dad died fighting other fighter planes… whose? Did the Communist Vietnamese have fighter planes? what’s the story here?
A few years ago, a U.S Navy Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Su-22 that had just dropped bombs on allied coalition forces. It was the first shoot down by an American fighter of an enemy fighter since 1999, when an American F-15 downed two Serbian MiGs in the Kosovo war.
In the Gulf War, an American EF-111 Spark Raven used cunning maneuvering to force a pursuing Iraqi Mirage to fly into the ground. Another American F-15 also inadvertently caused an Iraqi MiG to crash too.
Wow. How did i never hear of this? I was serving in the persian gulf in Jan '89. I guess I was just too tired to care about anything other than food and sleep.
Dunno, but I remember hearing about that on the evening news when I was 14, so it’s not like it went unreported.
Dogfights are generally the last resort, with pilots preferring longer-ranged missiles like AMRAAM to shoot down their enemies without having to get into dogfights. But that was also the case in the Top Gun era- Navy F-14 Tomcats in that era were intended to fire the AIM-54 Phoenix long-range air-to-air missile at ranges up to 100 nautical miles, or the AIM-7 Sparrow missiles with a shorter, but still relatively long range of about 38 nautical miles.
Short range missiles like the AIM-9 Sidewinder were intended for dogfighting, and had relatively short ranges of about 10-15 miles in that era, and minimum ranges of about half a mile. Inside that, the fighters’ 20mm gatling guns would be used.
Even in that case it’s unclear of the India-Pakistan incident was a “dogfight,” in the sense of a battle where the aircraft used close maneuvering to attempt to gain an advantage on one another, as opposed to BVR missle fire or rapid “boom and zoom” fire.
An even better way of thinking about it is that dogfights are the air warfare equivalent of knife fighting, or at best, fighting with a pistol. Nobody in their right mind chooses that- they go for a rifle or a shotgun, which in air warfare is using the longer-ranged missiles.
It’s just that in Top Gun, they more or less had to contrive scenarios where they would be having lots of fun to watch dogfights- like dogfight training, and ROEs in the end fight that put them really close to each other before they could engage.
F-14 Tomcats aren’t dogfighting fighters; they’re actually very fast, long ranged missile trucks with a very powerful radar. Their primary mission was to fly CAP and/or be interceptors for other aircraft attacking a carrier air group, hence the extremely powerful and long-ranged radar, high top speed and large missile (AIM-54 Phoenix/AIM-7 Sparrow) capacity. But that’s what the Navy had, so that’s what they used in the movie.
The F-16 IS a dogfighter, or at least it was designed to be one, even if later variants are less of a pure air to air combat fighter than the originals.
No, the North Vietnamese Air Force had its own Vietnamese fighter pilots. The Russians trained them to fly fighters and many of them got very good at it.
My uncle died in a dog fight very, very early in Viet Nam. His name is high on the very first panel of the Viet Nam Wall memorial. He was a US AF Col. training the South Vietnamese Air Force.
AMRAAM was used at BVR range. The shots was taken because the escorting pilot la didn’t like what their opponent was doing, getting too close to an attacking aircraft.
Even the air to ground parts were at long range, using the H4 SOW (range 120 km) and REK bombs (range <20 km).
There was a lot of dogfighting in Vietnam. IIRC, initially the expectation was that air to air battles would take place at supersonic speeds over long distances using missiles. A lot of interceptors of that era initially didn’t even come with a cannon. But they soon found that because the rules of engagement required being able to actually see your target and various other factors, aircraft were getting into the traditional close it dogfights at subsonic speeds.
I believe that the actual US Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program (AKA Top Gun) was created because American losses in the air were unacceptably high due to lack of dogfighting skill.
I understand why in the movie, they were dogfighting during all the training scenes. I don’t recall if there was an in-movie explanation for why in the real world combat, Maverick and company didn’t just fire off their AIM-54 Phoenix missiles from a hundred miles away. Other than it would make for a boring finale.
I watched a recent film of the selection and training of British pilots who were going to fly the F-35B/C Lightning II on HMS Queen Elizabeth.
While a lot of it concentrated on flying at very low levels and practising take-off and landings, they also spent a lot of time in simulated air-to-air combat as well as attacking ground targets.
This implies to me that either air-to-air is still a required skill for a modern fighter pilot, or that the exercise is useful to demonstrate the high level of performance that is required.
I am not sure why you would think I have the “Top Gun” script memorized from over 30 years ago. That said:
VIPER (V.O.)
During the Korean War, the Navy kill ratio was twelve-to-one. We shot down twelve of their jets for every one of ours. In Vietnam, this ratio fell to three-to-one. Our pilots depended on missles. They lost their dogfighting skills.
Top Gun was created to teach ACM. Air Combat Maneuvering…Dogfighting. Richthofen, Guynemer, Rickenbacker, Galland, Rudel, Bong would envy us. We do just what they did, but we do it beyond the speed of sound.
There’s so many times we’ve crashed and burned, Seems like the colonel would finally learn Our Russian jets don’t make good submarines. We fly out to protect our nation, And use seat bottoms for flotation. The water’s warm, and we’re good swimmers too.
So kiss me and smile for me, Call my folks in Tripoli, Tell them that Khadafi made me go. I’m a Libyan on a jet plane, I don’t know if I’ll be back again. Muammar, I hate to go.
I remember that, and it echos my earlier statement. That doesn’t explain why when Ice, Maverick, Hollywood and the rest of the CAP were fighting the Libyans or whoever, they didn’t engage with the long range Pheonix missiles first, then go into dogfight mode with Sparrows, Sidewinders and guns. Other than it would make a boring film.