Yes this in inspired by the recent 15th anniversary of 9/11 but isn’t all about it. Basically because of it a lot of podcasts and other shows have had 9/11 related discussions and I noticed that among normally non-conspiracy minded people there still exists the persistent belief that United 93 was shot down by an American fighter jet over Pennsylvania and covered-up.
My automatic rebuttal is that a missile fired by an American aircraft would have either caused the aircraft to explode mid-air, or would have destroyed an engine and possibly caused one of the wings to completely fall-out leaving a giant debris trail. Assuming the government didn’t cover up the debris (which would be incredibly hard considering how many civilians immediately showed-up on scene as well as an actual explosion mid-air would have caused debris to spread in a completely unavoidable manner) How accurate is this though?
Using past incidents as evidence is a bit hard, I can only find two confirmed incidents of “modern” passenger liners being shot down by fighter jets using air to air missiles, Korean Air Lines Flight 902 in 1978 and Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983, and both were hit by Soviet air to air missiles. 902 was hit in the engine and lost part of its wing and was forced to crash-land with only two fatalities. 007 was hit but apparently the missile was fired from a bad angle and didn’t damage the engines at all and detonated a fair distance away from the aircraft, enough to sever hydraulic cables but the pilots didn’t realize they had been hit by a missile and were attempting to regain control before it spiraled and hit the ocean taking with it all passengers aboard.
The core difference between these and Flight 93 was that both Korean aircraft were large 4 engine 747 aircraft while Flight 93 was a smaller two engine 757 aircraft, plus I would assume 2000’s era missiles would be much more powerful and accurate than late 70’s Soviet missiles. So considering that wouldn’t an American missile vaporize or at least destroy most of the aircraft upon detonation?
I’m no authority, but I would guess absolutely not. The warheads in air-to-air missiles are not that large. They don’t need to be. All aircraft, even military, are inherently fragile and all a missile has to do is cause enough damage to make them semi or totally uncontrollable (like Korean 007).
I know this is GQ but still, even if a US fighter did down 93 (which it obviously didn’t) why would they have any need to cover it up? It is absolutely known that after the second plane hit the second tower the President gave permission for them to down civilian airliners if necessary.
Air-to-air missiles mostly use fragmentation warheads. They don’t vaporize stuff; they make lots of holes in stuff, making the aircraft unable to fly. Gravity does the rest.
Also modern AAM aren’t necessarily more powerful then they were in the 70s. They just need to be able to do their job. If they’re more accurate then they can be less powerful, and smaller. So you can carry more of them.
I don’t think there are any others on that list that were conclusively caused by air-to-air missiles, though. Libyan Airlines 114 was shot down by the M61 cannons on an Israeli fighter jet, and while it seems plausible that Itavia 870 was brought down a missile, there’s never been a complete account of what happened; as far as I know, the bomb theory hasn’t really been ruled out. The rest of the shootdowns on that list were surface-to-air missiles, unless I missed one.
I would expect a heat-seeking missile to go for an engine; the resulting damage may or may not take off part of the wing.
I would expect a radar-guided missile to go for the center of the radar return, i.e. the fuselage, but I may be wrong on this; radar is weir stuff, and there may be stronger returns from other parts of the plane due to shape and surface characteristics.
MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine a couple of years ago, and broke up in mid-flight, scattering debris over a large area. The Buk missile system that shot it down appears to have been radar guided.
That missile is also considerably larger than a typical AAM; roughly a 70 kg warhead vs roughly 20 kg for an AMRAAM or 10 kg for a Sidewinder although they all use fragmentation effects.
This is (sadly?) a very inspiring story about heroism.
I heard about this scenario only from semi-fiction, Paul Greengrass’s extraordinary United 93, where a Col. (?–played by the actual Col? ) is speaking to someone and says something like “our pilot can ram the [hijacked] airplane, they’re trained to do that.”
I naively thought that was some kind of police-car chase maneouver, with damage to the military plane at most.
At least the pilot has the option to eject, although timing would be very tricky - probably not possible unless they did a sideswipe. (less guarantee of full damage)
Yes, I suppose. Does your mention of “sideswipe” say that this is a thought-through, trainable maneuver?
Because then the lines spoken in the movie were only half-untrue–that somewhere in the USAF “they’re trained,” but in the reality of 9/11 that pilot profiled, at least, sounded like a new graduate winging it (I’m so sorry for the pun, especially here, but it just came out that way).
She (the pilot) mentions that they had considered ejecting but did not want to risk failing to ram the plane by doing so, and so had decided against it. Ultimately, of course, they didn’t have to.
Early generation uncooled Lead-Sulphide IR seeker missiles, for example the original AIM-9B version of Sidewinder used in 1950’s-60’s, would basically only ‘see’ hot engine metal against the IR background, so that’s all it could aim at. That’s also why such weapons could mainly only attack a/c from behind.
Cryogenic Indium Antimonide seekers such as on AIM-9M model likely to have been used in 2001 see across a wider IR spectrum and have peek sensitivity at a longer wavelength, which is why they can attack a/c from head on, homing on skin frictional heating, gas plume, and sun reflection IR energy. It’s harder to say where they’d hit, or where their proximity fuse would initiate, if fired at an airliner even from behind. They might still go for an engine, or at least detonate near one following one of the gas plumes, depending.
More recent IR AAM’s such as the AIM-9X have imaging seekers and aim for the centroid of the IR image and would not be attracted particularly to an engine, but those wouldn’t have been used in 2001.
USAF AAMs in use in 2001 would render an airliner unflyable pretty much guaranteed. A big hunk would break off and the rest would cartwheel down to the ground probably further breaking up on the way.
It’s possible instead you’d get a raging fire someplace amidships in an otherwise structurally intact aircraft. A real crew would then be doing their damnedest to get the thing on the ground ASAP while dealing with all the malfunctions. A couple of hijackers in the cockpit would simply sit there in stunned sensory overload while the aircraft rolled onto its back and plummeted earthward shedding parts and trailing fire all the way.
We’d not be “vaporizing” anything. As well the difference between a 757 and a 747 for these purposes is nil. Remember that these missiles are designed to take out enemy bomber and transport aircraft, not just fighters.
As with the some prior big aircraft shoot-down attempts, it’s always possible for any given missile to clean miss or to sorta-miss far enough away that the warhead effects just barely impact the target. So you might get either no result or only a “flesh wound”.
But unlike in wartime fighter-to-fighter combat, the fighters in this hijacking case will just be hanging there waiting to see the result of the first shot. If it’s a clean miss, fire another one. To be sure the supply of missiles is not infinite. But no combat loadout consists of just one for a flight of two fighters.
And once again the ability of hijackers to cope with even a simple hydraulic leak is real limited. A real crew would reconfigure a few things and press on. Hijackers might lose control right then and there.
Nothing vaporizes. This is the misguided thinking that got the original WTC bombers caught. They thought the van with the bomb in it would be so utterly destroyed, the guy went back for his deposit claiming the vehicle had been stolen… but vin numbers survived as did enough pieces to identify the make, despite blowing a 3-storey crater in the parking garage. What would happen, is that the aircraft would disassemble into assorted smaller fragments assisted by the 500mph headwind. Depending on altitude of disassembly, the parts would be scattered over a larger area. With the Malaysian flight over Ukraine, despite a much bigger (SAM) warhead, huge chunks were found including pieces obviously peppered from the outside with warhead shrapnel. (IIRC that was a proximity shrapnel warhead?)
This is something that has always bugged me in fiction and movies: A small missile - such as a Sidewinder - being launched at a big airliner, and the whole airliner goes up in a big fireball and vaporizes immediately.
Incidentally, as I understand it, the Stinger missiles on the White House don’t do much to stop airliners due to the airliner’s huge momentum and mass, but they *might *just cause the aircraft enough damage to make it miss the White House by direct impact. There would still be huge fire and other damage, but the jet might at the last moment hit the grass lawn or something else instead of the building.
I recall reading in Newsweek about how a Chinese fighter pilot once flew his fighter so close, in front of an American EP-3 spy plane, that it caused engine exhaust scorch marks on the American plane’s windshield.
So I wonder, what if a fighter simply flew extremely close in front of a hijacked airliner for, say, 10 seconds, and melted the airliner’s windshield with its hot engine exhaust?