Fighter jet launching air to air missile on Passenger Plane - Expected Damage?

[LSLGuy]

@Urbanredneck

Could a fighter fly just forward of it, come in close, and let the own jet engine burn away the cockpit like a massive blowtorch? I mean even on the runways airliners cant be right behind each other and thats only in idle.

Not really. Though as **Leo **says, some screenplay writer would love it.

You’d need to be within a very few feet (5 maybe) of the cockpit and properly aligned. It’s darn hard (read “practically impossible”) to fly formation with something directly behind you. Heck, for a lot of older fighters (and the F-35) you can’t even see directly behind you no matter how you contort in the cockpit.

A fighter engine in afterburner is a pretty good blowtorch. A fighter engine at cruise power isn’t that much hotter than the exhaust of an older airliner like from the 727 DC-9 era. Meantime, the fighter throttle setting must be whatever it takes to match the airliner’s speed. IOW, a fairly low one by fighter standards. So: no blowtorch just hot air. Hot air being ejected into a 500mph hurricane of -60F air. Which turbulent interaction will both cool and disperse it pretty quickly.

If you closely watch an airliner dragging a contrail you’ll see the visible trail forms a few feet behind the engines. But not too far back; it’s generally visible forward of the tail. The visible contrail is made of ice. IOW, the exhaust cooled from the ~300C temp it was as it exited the turbine all the way to 0C in the space of ~50 feet and ~0.1 seconds.

[AK84]

This does make for an interesting hijack though. I have read that a good transport pilot in any AF can by clever maneuvering escape from fighters, which usually don’t have more than a few minutes on station anyway. And many transport aircraft are militarised versions of commercial liners anyway?

How true is that.

[LSLGuy]

I’ve never read that and my take FWIW is “almost completely untrue”, *assuming *the fighters have already closed to weapons range.

The “maneuvering” a military jet transport, typical bomber, or airliner can do is minimal from a fighter’s or a missile’s perspective. A motivated transport pilot might force a miss on a strafing run or two, but won’t succeed the third time. As well, sound fighter tactics will ensure the fighter is never visible from the cockpit. Some military aircraft have scanners or gunners with some better view aft. But trying to have them verbally order timely maneuvers to the cockpit is unlikely to succeed more than once.

Something like a C-130 might have a better chance at success if it’s already at very low altitude. Much like fighting A-10s or helos, it goes so slowly that a fighter is either wallowing at his speed or flitting around at fighter-comfortable speeds like a bee buzzing a cow. The high relative speed makes it harder to get a cannon shot in the brief time between max and min range and increases the likelihood of the fighter goofing and hitting the ground.

What airliner-speed targets *do *have going for them is endurance at high subsonic speed. If somehow they know a fighter is headed for them and they turn tail and run, it may take longer for the fighter to close than they have fuel available. But that requires advance warning on the order of 100 miles and also the willingness to turn back. Depending on the heavy’s mission and other available defensive measures they may not be willing to run immediately.

AWACS is an example of somebody that will (they hope!) see fighters coming for them from a hundred-plus miles out. So they can turn and run at, say, Mach 0.8 while the fighter can only close at, say, Mach 1.5 for say 10 minutes before getting too low on fuel. 10 minutes at Mach 0.7 closure is about 70 miles. So if the AWACS (or whoever) finished turning around while the fighter is still 70+ miles away it’ll never catch up.

Obviously the range of whatever weapons the fighter has enters into it. In a co-airspeed tail chase most IR missiles are only good for another 5-ish miles. AMRAAM might be good for another 20-ish. The much longer ranges you often read about are based on the assumption the target and fighter are heading towards each other closing at 1000+ mph.

This conundrum was what lead to the 1950s development of SAMs and the received truism that “the bomber will always get through.” With the range of fighter interceptors and radars of the day it wasn’t practical to put enough fighters in the right spot in the sky to catch the bombers before it turned into a losing tail chase to the bomber’s drop point.

Very high speed bombers like Tu-160 or B-1A make the fighter’s problem much worse. More maneuverable bombers like Tu-160 or B-1B also make the problem worse.

At the same time, the advent of “supercruise” as the F-22 has and the F-35 supposedly has alters the balance the other way. If the fighter can sustain M1.2 or 1.4 for the best part of an hour, it can run down damn near anything from damn near any starting geometry.

[Leo_Bloom]

It was just another flight for LSLGuy. Descending the ladder from the cockpit, helmet in hand, he patted his speed jeans, found the pack, and tapped out a smoke. As he walked to the debrief, he went over how he had earned his afternoon’s paycheck. Spanking gomers for Uncle Sam. Nineteen this time. Deep in thought, he nodded to the applauding crew chief, lit his cigarette from the blower of a passing F-16, and headed down the tarmac.

[Velocity]

@LSLGuy

Not really. Though as **Leo **says, some screenplay writer would love it.

You’d need to be within a very few feet (5 maybe) of the cockpit and properly aligned. It’s darn hard (read “practically impossible”) to fly formation with something directly behind you. Heck, for a lot of older fighters (and the F-35) you can’t even see directly behind you no matter how you contort in the cockpit.

A fighter engine in afterburner is a pretty good blowtorch. A fighter engine at cruise power isn’t that much hotter than the exhaust of an older airliner like from the 727 DC-9 era. Meantime, the fighter throttle setting must be whatever it takes to match the airliner’s speed. IOW, a fairly low one by fighter standards. So: no blowtorch just hot air. Hot air being ejected into a 500mph hurricane of -60F air. Which turbulent interaction will both cool and disperse it pretty quickly.

If you closely watch an airliner dragging a contrail you’ll see the visible trail forms a few feet behind the engines. But not too far back; it’s generally visible forward of the tail. The visible contrail is made of ice. IOW, the exhaust cooled from the ~300C temp it was as it exited the turbine all the way to 0C in the space of ~50 feet and ~0.1 seconds.

Interesting. Although maybe the turbulent wake itself could be used as a weapon; having the F-16 flying in front of the airliner and trying to use the engine’s exhaust blast and air-turbulence wake to make the hijacked airliner difficult to fly.

Or maybe fly in front of one of the airliner’s wings, or its vertical stabilizer, and use the engine exhaust/turbulence wake to cause airflow distortion.

[AK84]

@LSLGuy

I’ve never read that and my take FWIW is “almost completely untrue”, *assuming *the fighters have already closed to weapons range.

The “maneuvering” a military jet transport, typical bomber, or airliner can do is minimal from a fighter’s or a missile’s perspective. A motivated transport pilot might force a miss on a strafing run or two, but won’t succeed the third time. As well, sound fighter tactics will ensure the fighter is never visible from the cockpit. Some military aircraft have scanners or gunners with some better view aft. But trying to have them verbally order timely maneuvers to the cockpit is unlikely to succeed more than once.

Something like a C-130 might have a better chance at success if it’s already at very low altitude. Much like fighting A-10s or helos, it goes so slowly that a fighter is either wallowing at his speed or flitting around at fighter-comfortable speeds like a bee buzzing a cow. The high relative speed makes it harder to get a cannon shot in the brief time between max and min range and increases the likelihood of the fighter goofing and hitting the ground.

What airliner-speed targets *do *have going for them is endurance at high subsonic speed. If somehow they know a fighter is headed for them and they turn tail and run, it may take longer for the fighter to close than they have fuel available. But that requires advance warning on the order of 100 miles and also the willingness to turn back. Depending on the heavy’s mission and other available defensive measures they may not be willing to run immediately.

AWACS is an example of somebody that will (they hope!) see fighters coming for them from a hundred-plus miles out. So they can turn and run at, say, Mach 0.8 while the fighter can only close at, say, Mach 1.5 for say 10 minutes before getting too low on fuel. 10 minutes at Mach 0.7 closure is about 70 miles. So if the AWACS (or whoever) finished turning around while the fighter is still 70+ miles away it’ll never catch up.

Obviously the range of whatever weapons the fighter has enters into it. In a co-airspeed tail chase most IR missiles are only good for another 5-ish miles. AMRAAM might be good for another 20-ish. The much longer ranges you often read about are based on the assumption the target and fighter are heading towards each other closing at 1000+ mph.

This conundrum was what lead to the 1950s development of SAMs and the received truism that “the bomber will always get through.” With the range of fighter interceptors and radars of the day it wasn’t practical to put enough fighters in the right spot in the sky to catch the bombers before it turned into a losing tail chase to the bomber’s drop point.

Very high speed bombers like Tu-160 or B-1A make the fighter’s problem much worse. More maneuverable bombers like Tu-160 or B-1B also make the problem worse.

At the same time, the advent of “supercruise” as the F-22 has and the F-35 supposedly has alters the balance the other way. If the fighter can sustain M1.2 or 1.4 for the best part of an hour, it can run down damn near anything from damn near any starting geometry.

Thanks. It was a Tom Clancy novel (I know, I know) and in it our pilot (a 707 IIRC) estimated that the plane would only have a few minutes on station to shoot them before they had return to base (the 707 had a defecting Soviet official onboard and was already over international waters) and he estimated (ex-military flyer) by altering his flight path he can even cause the interceptors to miss altogether. He decides against it since that might provoke the VVS and gambles (correctly) it will take the Sov authority longer to decide to authroise action than the interceptors endurance.

[swampspruce]

@Leo_Bloom

It was just another flight for LSLGuy. Descending the ladder from the cockpit, helmet in hand, he patted his speed jeans, found the pack, and tapped out a smoke. As he walked to the debrief, he went over how he had earned his afternoon’s paycheck. Spanking gomers for Uncle Sam. Nineteen this time. Deep in thought, he nodded to the applauding crew chief, lit his cigarette from the blower of a passing F-16, and headed down the tarmac.

Is it wrong I’m picturing Carrie Elwes or Charlie Sheen in the role of LSLGuy?
Thanks for the giggle!

[LSLGuy]

@Velocity

Interesting. Although maybe the turbulent wake itself could be used as a weapon; having the F-16 flying in front of the airliner and trying to use the engine’s exhaust blast and air-turbulence wake to make the hijacked airliner difficult to fly.

Or maybe fly in front of one of the airliner’s wings, or its vertical stabilizer, and use the engine exhaust/turbulence wake to cause airflow distortion.

The wake coming off an airplane at any given speed is proportional roughly to G * gross weight. So if a fighter pulls in front of an airliner weighing 10x as much and just sits there, the fighter’s wake is about 1/10th the airliner’s The airliner tail is already used to being thrashed all day every day by the wing and fuselage wake. Plus turbulence. Not gonna matter much.

Also, what’s our goal here? If we want to kill the airliner, then shoot it. Shoot! Shoot! That’s what the bullets are for you twit! (Bonus points for the first poster with the correct cite :D) If you can’t shoot it then maybe you can scare / startle them into losing control with some close passes. That seems to have been the MO of the Chinese fighters who intercepted that EP-3: Hainan Island incident - Wikipedia

Also notice the result. The sturdy zoomy fighter clipped the wingtip, prop and radome of the lumbering airliner-derivative patrol plane. The patrol plane suffered relatively minor damage and a pretty severe flight upset that took real aviator derring-do to recover. The fighter came apart like a cheap watch & was destroyed, while its pilot was immediately killed. Moral of the story: Close passes to scare the transport may backfire spectacularly.

If all else fails, you’re down to ramming. Or going home and letting somebody else handle the problem, with the target maybe getting away. Depends on how important this particular target is.

[snfaulkner]

@LSLGuy

… If we want to kill the airliner, then shoot it. Shoot! Shoot! That’s what the bullets are for you twit! (Bonus points for the first poster with the correct cite :D)…

Dr. Strangelove, of course! Mandrake is trying to get batguano, if that is his real name, to shoot the lock of the coke machine to get change to call President Murkin Muffley and relay the recall codes.

[LSLGuy]

9 minutes flat; nicely done!

One of my favorite movies of all time. My brother once said that throughout your life you’ll never find a situation where there’s not a suitable quote from Dr. Strangelove. I kinda think he’s right.

[snfaulkner]

Your brother is a wise man. At least for that tidbit.

[Leo_Bloom]

The coins gushing out in the face (one almost hears a trombone “whaa-whaa” laugh track add) was bitterly fought by Kubrick, and insisted upon by the studio.

Too slapstick, or something. Or so I read. I also read that the (an) original final scene, and filmed, was a pie-throwing scene in the war room. Go figure.

[LSLGuy]

The Coke face-squirt on poor Keenan Wynn was indeed the weakest 5 seconds of the entire film. Totally cliché and beneath the dignity of a world class dark satire.

Meanwhile at the end of a long day I’m enjoying some fine grain alcohol and rain water here. It comes bottled that way straight from Islay. I assure you my bodily fluids are just fine. No sapping or impurifying here.

[snfaulkner]

I’m a bit of what you might call a water man, Jack.

[md2000]

@Leo_Bloom

The coins gushing out in the face (one almost hears a trombone “whaa-whaa” laugh track add) was bitterly fought by Kubrick, and insisted upon by the studio.

Too slapstick, or something. Or so I read. I also read that the (an) original final scene, and filmed, was a pie-throwing scene in the war room. Go figure.

Pie fight? I remember watching “Casino Royale” on TV about 1982 and by the time we reached the grand finale, one of the college age guys said “this is supposed to be funny??”. It was a different time and place when slapstick was supposed to be funny, the US Cavalry parachuting in on horses to a bugle call… At least Kubrick avoided the worst. (My go-to for good lines is also Sellers’ “The Party”. Howdy, pardner…)
IIRC, one reason given for shooting down KAL 007 was that the Russian approached from behind and below, which hid a lot of the obvious civilian airliner markings; but would be the perfect place to shoot a plane down with the cannon on the fighter. Sitting duck.

[Francis_Vaughan]

@LSLGuy

Meanwhile at the end of a long day I’m enjoying some fine grain alcohol and rain water here. It comes bottled that way straight from Islay. I assure you my bodily fluids are just fine. No sapping or impurifying here.

Total left field nitpick. If it is a proper Islay single malt, it isn’t a grain alcohol. That term tends to be reserved for whiskys (or indeed whiskeys) that are made with only a small amount of malted grain (only enough to have enough capability of converting all the present starch to sugar and no more) and mostly straight unmalted grain. Your lightweight quaffing whiskys are usually mostly grain, but a real whisky, one worthy of the name, is pure malt whisky. And preferably unblended (aka single malt.)

Very partial to a wee goldie from Islay myself.

[Machine_Elf]

@md2000

IIRC, one reason given for shooting down KAL 007 was that the Russian approached from behind and below, which hid a lot of the obvious civilian airliner markings; but would be the perfect place to shoot a plane down with the cannon on the fighter. Sitting duck.

May have been an official Soviet explanation at the time, but the Soviet fighter pilot later recounted otherwise:

@Wikipedia

In a 1991 interview with Izvestia, Major Genadi Osipovich, pilot of the Su-15 interceptor that shot the 747 down, spoke about his recollections of the events leading up to the shootdown. Contrary to official Soviet statements at the time, he recalled telling ground controllers that there were “blinking lights”. He continued, saying that “I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use.” He furthermore did not provide a detailed description of the aircraft to his ground controllers: “I did not tell the ground that it was a Boeing-type plane; they did not ask me.”[

[LSLGuy]

@Francis_Vaughan

Total left field nitpick. If it is a proper Islay single malt, it isn’t a grain alcohol. That term tends to be reserved for whiskys (or indeed whiskeys) that are made with only a small amount of malted grain (only enough to have enough capability of converting all the present starch to sugar and no more) and mostly straight unmalted grain. Your lightweight quaffing whiskys are usually mostly grain, but a real whisky, one worthy of the name, is pure malt whisky. And preferably unblended (aka single malt.)

Very partial to a wee goldie from Islay myself.

Thanks for the terminology details; I wasn’t aware of the distinction. Lagavulin 16 is indeed a pure malt. And pure heaven. With Laphroiag a close second. Why yes, I do like my peat.

[Urbanredneck]

@LSLGuy

The wake coming off an airplane at any given speed is proportional roughly to G * gross weight. So if a fighter pulls in front of an airliner weighing 10x as much and just sits there, the fighter’s wake is about 1/10th the airliner’s The airliner tail is already used to being thrashed all day every day by the wing and fuselage wake. Plus turbulence. Not gonna matter much.

Also, what’s our goal here? If we want to kill the airliner, then shoot it. Shoot! Shoot! That’s what the bullets are for you twit! (Bonus points for the first poster with the correct cite :D) If you can’t shoot it then maybe you can scare / startle them into losing control with some close passes. That seems to have been the MO of the Chinese fighters who intercepted that EP-3: Hainan Island incident - Wikipedia

Also notice the result. The sturdy zoomy fighter clipped the wingtip, prop and radome of the lumbering airliner-derivative patrol plane. The patrol plane suffered relatively minor damage and a pretty severe flight upset that took real aviator derring-do to recover. The fighter came apart like a cheap watch & was destroyed, while its pilot was immediately killed. Moral of the story: Close passes to scare the transport may backfire spectacularly.

If all else fails, you’re down to ramming. Or going home and letting somebody else handle the problem, with the target maybe getting away. Depends on how important this particular target is.

I still think an F-15 dancing around right in front of the airliner going around, back and forth, up and down, zig zags, going all around the plane would scare the crap out of any pilots. Hopefully enough to make them at least miss their primary target.

[Northern_Piper]

@LSLGuy

The visible contrail is made of ice.

Oh sure, that’s what they want us to believe.