In air to air, or air to ground combat?
In the video game I was playing, (Ace Combat 4), I find my self using the machine gun a lot, I realize that it is only a video game, but I would like to know how often real fighter jet pilots use their machine gun.
Also in the Movie Top Gun, the machine guns were used a couple times, but not very often.
Thanks
One of the problems with trying to answer that is we don’t do a lot of traditional air to air combat anymore so there aren’t a lot of exmples. Think about it, where have we put fighters in combat where we didn’t already have air superiority or would quickly achieve it? Not much since Vietnam and technology has changed a lot since then. In fact one of the dominant fighters in that era, the F-4 Phantom, had no internal gun. There was a backlash and all fighters since then have guns. About the only concrete thing I can add is that when I went to F-14 weapons school in 1980 we were told that the infrared AIM-9 Sidewinder had a better kill record in its era than guns and all other air to air missles combined despite having the smallest warhead.
I’d think if you’re an A-10 jockey killing tanks and other vehicles - armored or unarmored, you’d probably use your Vulcans pretty extensively.
In the last few decades involving US Fighters, the dominant weapon is the reputation of American Fighters.
American Jets enter the theater of operations; other fighters leave. If they don’t, they die.
Ground fire accounts for more lost planes than any air weapons fire, during this century, and the last quarter of the previous century.
Tris
What about other coutries? Has there ever been a war between two countries that had decent Fighter Jets.
What about Gulf War 1, during that time they had MIGs that were supposed to be the best russian fighters at the time?
Or how about during war games?
During the Falklands War, the British Harriers gave Argentinian Mirages a proper seein’ to despite the fact that the Mirage is fancier and can fly much faster - it had largely to do with the Harrier’s unique mode of manueverability and (I suspect) the Argentinians’ lack of familiarity with such weird dogfighting methods.
… but that doesn’t answer the OP. :rolleyes:
Like UncleBeer suggested, the Big Shootas like the GAU-8 Avenger on the A-10 are intended solely for use against ground targets. The same is largely true of the wing-mounted gun pods and chin-mounted Gatling-style or chain guns on helicopter gunships, although they would theoretically be of use against enemy helicopters provided we hadn’t already shot down or impounded all the helicopters belonging to the openly hostile militaries of the world.
The problem is with the mobility of the targets in question: a fighter jet can move so fast as to literally fly between the shells fired from the 30mm chain gun slung under the nose of the Apache attack chopper.
Bullets don’t have any kind of homing capability, and both their velocity and trajectory suffer greatly from the effects of gravity. Unless the shells are fitted with some kind of proximity fuse (blows up when it gets close to something solid), there’s not much hope.*
Contrast this with, as Padeye (what a great name to have in on a discusion like this) suggested, the AIM-9, and you’re talking about a supersonic missile that can follow its target with dogged determination, increase thrust to compensate for the effects of gravity, and throw out some pretty wicked-looking metal rods when it detonates in the right place.
My recollection of the first Gulf War was that the dominant strategy of Iraqi pilots sent on combat missions was to fly to Iran and desert. 
Not so much desert, as become “interned” (what happens with combatants stranded in a nominally neutral country) until end-of-hostilities. Was thought to actually BE a strategy to save as many planes/pilots as possible.
The only other major air-air combat since Nam is Israel/Egypt/Syria in 73 and Israel/Syria during the Lebanon campaign in the 80s, with the usual lopsided results, even though Syria had relatively current-model MiGs in the last one.
The cannon on most modern Air-Air fighters have a relatively small ammo capacity (and it’s usually one 20-to-30mm, as opposed to the six 50-cals on a WW2 plane) – but they also have extremely good targetting computers so you can keep it to a very short burst exactly when the system lights up and says “shoot now!”. And though most dogfighting happens well within subsonic range, the “shoot now!” icon will likely be on just a fraction of a second at a time. So they’re more like weapons of opportunity or last resort – or you can use them if you, say, spot some slow-moving enemy aircraft that cannot shoot back but should be destroyed (refueling tanker, paratroop transport, helicopter gunship) and for some reason cannot or will not spare a missile for it.
With multirole fighters such as the F/A 18, you can use it as a strafing gun in the ground-attack role, against “soft” targets – but that’s if you feel it’s safe to go in that close.
So we’re basically talking computer-assisted fancy deflection shooting for an actual dogfight using guns instead of missiles? The only chance you might get to use them would be against a bad pilot who can’t even split-S?
Besides the already-mentioned Falklands campaign, I meant. In which BTW more recent writings tend to indicate that there was not so much taking advantage of trust-vectoring-in-flight by the RN, as just that the Sea Harriers were plain more conventionally maneuverable in close quarters. It also helped having more state-of-the-art targeting/weapons systems, such as Blue Fox radar, etc. (the Argentine Mirage-IIIs were, well, already past their time), and that the Argie pilots (Air Force and Naval Av.), though brave, motivated and committed, just did not have the tactics and had not the same intensity of training as Brits who had been all along preparing to fight in a NATO war. Even then it was an iffy deal: the Sea Harrier, designed as a passing-for-a-fighter variant of a short range “bomb-truck”, was untested in combat (and there weren’t enough of them so they had to also use RAF Harriers) while Mirages had acquitted themselves honorably in Israeli hands.
Do you think some sort of automatically aiming, long-range gun turret could bring the use of cannon back to the fore of air-to-air combat? For example something that can track heat or motion and will automatically lock onto a target without needing to be aligned by the pilot?
It may be worth it simply due to the cost of a few rounds of 30mm compared to an expensive, finely engineered missile…
One of the problems with guns vs missles is that at least for now a 20mm bullet is a dumb, ballistic projectile. It takes a finite amount of time to reach a target and the target may have manueverd by then. Missles will correct, bullets won’t.
The real time gunsight in planes like the F-14 use data from the intertial measurement unit and various pitot and attiude probes to give an accurate estimate of where bullets will go. That combined with range from radar the HUD can display where the bullets will hit that were fired one time-of-flight ago. If the target isn’t manuevering violently it should be where the target is now but this isn’t always the case.
IIRC the drum in the M-61 in the F-14 held about 600 rounds. Normal setting was fire a 50 round burst. The Vulcan is a motor driven Gatling type rather than a true automatic machine gun so it takes time to get up to speed and time to slow down so there are many unfired rounds every time the trigger is pulled. Bottom line is there is enough ammo to at best fire six bursts. The ammunition is on a cintinuous belt so fired cases and unfired rounds go back into the drum rather than being ejected.
A-A gunnery practice was done with a plane towing a fabric banner. Bullets were coated with paint so that different pilots could be scored on the same banner.
It is true that is the intended use. However, one was used to down an Iraqi helicopter during the first gulf war.
http://www.afa.org/magazine/perspectives/desert_storm/0692total_print.html
I’ve read that the Israelis were fond of closing and using their F-15’s internal cannon on enemy aircraft during the invasion of Lebannon.
While modern fighter do not carry much ammo in relation to their firing rate, a single hit by a cannon shell is often fatal to an aircraft.
At this point in time, Air Forces that have airborne radar such as the AWACS system are unlikely to find themselves in a close confrontation. Air Forces that do not have as good of situational awareness are more likely to have a surprise close encounter. It is still possible however. During an encounter with a Mig 29 over Kosovo, an American F-15 pilot’s first missile missed the target. The head on engagement in a small area of operations meant a very fast closing speed. If his second missile had missed, the combat may well have been decided by cannon. However, the second missile did not miss. the odds of a cannon air to air engagement are increasingly low as missile technology improves.
The following illustrates the need for internal guns on fighter aircraft.
A bit of correction regarding F-4 and internal guns is required. The earliest F-4 models did not have internal guns- this was in the early to mid sixties. And the crew were at a distinct disadvatage because of it.
To partially solve this problem, an external 20 mm gun pod was developed, and was normally hung on the centerline station.
Subsequent models of the F-4 certainly did have an internal 20 mm gatling gun located in the nose. So that by the late 60’s, I worked on few aircraft (none?) that lacked a nose gun.
I know, as I had a shop that worked on them all the time…I was an Air Force Munitions officer.
Virtually all fighter aircraft have been designed with an internal gun since that time.
I can’t recall an American fighter shootdown of an aircraft by anything other than missiles in recent years, hostile or friendly. You can get to them from so much farther away with missiles, so the pilots don’t wait. They get a radar or heat lock and they launch. That has resulted in some friendly fire shootdowns as well.
That’s not to say that gun shootdowns are any more certain of hitting the right target. The last one I’m aware of was the South American incident where the – oh, who was it – Paraguayan? Brazilian? – airforce shot down a missionary group thinking they were drug smugglers. IIRC there were CIA advisors in some surveillance plane reccommending against the attack, or at least that was the spin that Washington was putting out.
I’ll throw in a couple of WAGs for free: the cannon will make a comeback. As another generation of fighters with stealth elements come online, pilots mat dind themselves unable to achieve a radar or infrared missile lock, so they will need to point and shoot. And the other WAG is that pikots are on their way out, as drones replace them in delivering PGMs.
I may be wrong , but one of shoot downs of the libyan migs by American naval A/C was by cannon fire ,after a miss by a sidewinder.
Unless the pilots are under Rules of Engagement that require visual Identification of the Target , which by the way puts it well into Gun Range.
Declan
There were 2 such incidents in 1981 and 1989. They were all missile kills.
Well, yes, but I can’t recall how long it’s been since they’ve operated under such restrictive rules, at least over foreign territory. I wouln’t be surprise, however, if there are ROEs that restrictive over domestic airspace since 9/11.
IIRC the television sensor in the F-14 allowed the crew to read side numbers at up to ten miles, well out of gun range.
That, and the Sidewinders which the US decided to make available in time for the second half of the conflict.
Some info on the A-10’s cannon.