A few years ago, I heard a story about a policeman in the Scottish Highlands, out with his radar gun awaiting speeding motorists. Apparantly a low flying fighter plane went past (they do practise in the Highlands) and he decided to see if his radar gun would tell him how fast it was going. When he pointed his radar gun at the plane it read it as a radar lock and the automatic systems would have provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clock the speed of an air-to-surface missile had the aircraft been armed at the time.
So, anyone know if this is for real, or UL? Google failed me on this one. Or could someone tell me how likely it is anyway?
I know of no missle that would fire without human intervention. The system would have to be armed and actually locked and ‘launched’ by the pilot. It is possible the pilot would have recieved some alert on his RWR, but even if the aircraft had live munitions (very doubtful) it would not have launched anything to him.
Besides, radar homing A-G missles are quite specialized and not normally carried unless they are going into an area where air defense is known/suspected.
True enough. Even had the story been true the policeman would have been quite safe. However, I think the flare and chaff pods on a fighter can be set to auto (under the pilot’s control to enable that or not). The most you would get would be some chaff dumping out the back of the plane had this radar lock thing actually happened (and even then I think the auto mode for those launchers is usually set to off unless the pilot knows he is in hostile territory…not to mention that they pods may not have been loaded either).
Simply detecting a radar signal is not the same as detecting a “lock” from a fire control radar. As others have said there is no system so automated as to fire weapons without input from the pilot but not every radar signal is classified as a threat that should be fired on.