Libya 81, the tomcat fired a 9L, which also missed and the tom had to go to guns for the kill, so I would imagine that an aware pilot would be able to make a violent maneuver to make the missile break lock and detonate. So the Syrian pilot at least had that going for him, and if it was any other airforce, other than Israeli, he would have been raising a few cold ones back at base.
LSL
Since this is sort of a zombie thread, thought I would partially hijack it. The Navy , as part of Top gun has that iconic phrase the hard deck, artificial altitude that you don’t go lower in a mock engagement. Does or did the airforce have its own phrase for that.
[quote=“Bear_Nenno, post:14, topic:784337”]
Here’s mine.
[/QUOTE]How about at the end of this documentary?
Yup. Officially the “engagement floor”. Commonly called the “hard deck”.
Air-to-air missiles use up all their fuel in the first few seconds of flight, and maneuver with the existing kinetic energy from there. So “going ballistic,” despite the common idiomatic meaning (cf “literally” meaning “figuratively”) is a good thing – in the proper sense, it means the missile’s run out of kinetic energy to chase you, and is just falling. You throw a baseball or shoot a gun, that’s a ballistic trajectory.