Here’s video of two fighter jets colliding at high speed with massive damage. Both pilots ejected safely.
In theory one could try to gently bump the Boeing as the Spitfires did to V-1s.
But consider that a V-1 is about 1/2 the size and weight of a Spitfire. Whereas a 757 is about 7-10x the size & weight of an F-16. We’re looking at trying something needing 15-20x as much force to achieve the same disturbance.
It’s also the case the V-1s autopilot was very rudimentary. Not so in the 757. Assuming the 757 autopilot was flying the airplane it can recover from the kinds of mild disturbances a pushing fighter could plausibly create. As in a just a few degrees of bank.
The bigger issue is that we have a tactic that *will *work: ram their tail and or forward fuselage at a hefty closure rate ripping the 757 to pieces.
Since we only have two fighters and they knew there were no backups coming, they’d be disinclined to potentially waste one on a bumping maneuver that might prove ineffective but still damage the F-16 enough to crash it.
In general airplanes are real strong in only the ways they need to be and real fragile in all other ways. Shortly before I arrived at my squadron they lost an F-16 in a collision between two aircraft in the same formation. During a routine straight and level return to base the wingman became distracted and slowly slid up and under the leader. He bumped his vertical tail against the underside of lead’s fuselage. His airplane became instantly uncontrollable and he ejected successfully a few seconds later. Lead had some paint scrapes on his belly.
As I said in the post **AK84 **linked to, your job is to get the job done. Period. They’d have rammed the 757 without ejecting beforehand. Or run out of fuel trying.
Seriously?!? In the entire U.S. we had no armed fighters ready to respond to a threat? That is terrifying. So a Russian bomber suddenly shows up in our airspace and our best response is to ram the thing?
In 2001 Russian bombers were busy rusting on a runway in Rostov. It was not like a decade earlier or hence.
We’re not talking about the entire United States. We’re talking about areas that has planes fueled an in range.
You’ve never heard of radar?
Budget cuts are a bitch. We stopped having interceptors on alert all over the country back in the 1970s. We decommissioned the SAM sites protecting our cities almost as soon as they were deployed. That was back in the 1960s. Too expensive.
The thought pre 9/11 was that any Russian bomber would have be seen hours before it got here. And forces would be readied in plenty of time to deal with it.
We do now have some armed interceptors on alert scattered around the country. Presumably NY and DC are two areas protected. But they’re to stop rogue airliners on short notice, not Russian bombers on long notice.
I know I’m *much *happier knowing that some equipment failures plus miscommunications could get me and my passengers killed by the DoD. Unlike before 9/11 when I was safe from that particular SNAFU.
This has been well covered, but there was one point made that, historically, needs an asterisk - the design of a plane to continue straight and level unless disrupted has a few exceptions:
- Aerobatics - those are specifically designed to NOT want to fly straight and level - when you are deliberately trying to tie the plane in knots, stability is the enemy.
- Fighters - a conventional dogfight was an aerobatic event with lethal intent.
I don’t know about interceptors - I can imagine them in either configuration
I bet I can answer this one. These were National Guard aircraft. I suspect the munitions for these aircraft were kept in a locked bunker some distance from the airfield, and it may have required a civilian contractor on duty to even open the vault they were in. No doubt there was a way to get the key or combo and retrieve the munitions, but that might taken an hour.
I wonder if it would be faster to load a missile on each jet or put a few rounds into the cannon’s drum magazine. Probably quicker to load a missile.
See post #39 above.
Sure. I’m saying from my military knowledge, even active duty bases don’t have live ammo in their vehicles or in the weapons of soldiers. Generally speaking, there’s an Ammo Control Point or some other similar facility, and except when authorized, all the ammo is kept in there. For an Army base, it was a series of underground bunkers, with a staff of civilian contractors at a front desk who were the book-keepers. For a training mission, you’d have to have authorization, you’d go bring up a truck and pull the ammo you needed for the mission, and you’d take the truck straight to the range. You’d want to fire every last round generally to get rid of the stuff, and you bring nothing back to the barracks or leave any in your vehicles.
I’d guess the air force is the same way. Especially Air National Guard. What I’m trying to say is, there wouldn’t have been a jet on the flight line with ammo in it that you could go commandeer instead. It probably wasn’t a 5 minute task to go grab a few cannon rounds and stuff them into the jet. I mean, that’s all it would have taken, some crew chief runs out with a backpack and stuffs a few 30mm rounds into the magazine. I would assume you can shoot down an airliner with just a handful of carefully placed shots.
LSLguy, if you had 5 30mm rounds, where would you aim them? Can you even set the gun on a jet like that to single shot?
As has been said, most airplanes (not fighters) are designed to be stable and try to return to level flight.
Note the next large passenger jet that you see. The wings get higher towards the end. Especially in flight. So, as a wing dips down, it begins to provide more lift as it is flatter to the surface of the earth/gravity than the one that tilts up.
That’s perhaps a poor explanation, but as I understand, is one of the ways that many planes will try to continue on it’s course without other input (pilot, weather, malfunctions).
My understanding is that fighter jets are designed to be unstable so that basic physics don’t try to override the pilots input.
That’s why the tail is the weak point. There’s a mechanism in there that depends on cables and hydraulics. Shove the nose of a fighter into it, and you’ll crunch it up and damage it. Hit it hard enough, and the mechanism will be bent and frozen in a particular position. Airliner is more or less unrecoverable. Either the rudder or the elevator would have been enough to send the aircraft out of control.
Ammo handling in USAF is similar to Army. It’s a multi-hour administrative process to draw cannon ammo or to have the munitions guys assemble a live missile from the major subsections: airframe, warhead, guidance, and coolant. Then they have to be trucked by secured convoy from the ammo dump area to the flight line.
The F-16 air to air cannon is the 20mm M61 Vulcan - Wikipedia, not 30mm. Which does not have a single shot mode. Here’s a recent thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=819298 that has some more info on M61s.
Given very little ammo my thought would be to make several practice passes at the cockpit and at the vertical tail and decide which one you were able to track best. You’re only going to get one live shot and it’d better count. If I knew the people flying the aircraft were hijackers and not pilots an engine might be another choice. But that’s getting into the “Hollywood detective shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand” territory. Center of mass is a wonderful thing; that way at least you’re maximizing your odds of getting a hit.
I wasn’t able to find a pic of the M-61 loading device. Here’s a pic of the loading device for the GAU-8 30mm cannon on the A-10: https://information2share.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/gau-8-07.jpg . The M-61 loading device is similar except the chutes are about half as wide. That thing couples to the aircraft and then an electric motor drives hydraulics that drive both the feed track in the chutes you see plus the ammo carrier system inside the aircraft. There’s no way a crew chief with a 5 gallon bucket of rounds can insert them by hand into the aircraft’s ammo carrier system.
You didn’t ask, but AIM-9s are loaded manually. They’re delivered to the aircraft on a low flatbed trailer with 1 to IIRC 8 missiles. Each is picked up by 2 strong guys and slid onto the launch rail then latched into position and the missile’s umbilical is connected to the aircraft.
AIM-120 AMRAAM are too heavy for that treatment and are loaded with a specialized forklift-like thingy. As are the various even heavier air to surface missiles and bombs.
So even if the administrative process could be curtailed, “this is the general. Bring weapons, go to the ammo bunker, and GET ME MY AMMO!”, it sounds like a serious problem to actually get something onto the plane as quickly as possible. What do you think would be quicker - an AIM-9 or cannon? The cannon sounds like it’s a finicky process with special equipment - I’ve seen this videoshowing rearming an Apache. Basically you need a wrench and a certain finesse, it’s not simple. While a missile sounds quick to load - 2 guys just pick that thing up and slide it on, connect the data cable and pull the safety pin, right? Oh, and make sure to lock whatever mechanism keeps it on the aircraft. But assembling one from parts doesn’t sound quick.
So in the Tom Clancy novels where a similar thing happens, it takes just one AIM-9 to a single engine to down the plane. Do you think that is accurate, or would the missile fail to break enough stuff in the wing to actually prevent it from continuing to fly on the other engine? I assume you can’t make the missile chase the center mass of the aircraft, or can you…
Obviously paperwork can be short-circuited in an emergency. But the mechanical & logistical steps take the time they take. Nobody was going to get an unarmed jet armed in time to intercept Flight 93 unless there was already ammo in the drum.
We used to fly practice air to air missions with live practice ammo in the drum. That is to say inert steel projectiles on top of a live cartridge with live propellant and primer. That was the same ammo we used for strafe practice. If we were flying a non-strafe mission the gun safety pin was installed inside the gun bay so it couldn’t / wouldn’t fire even with the trigger depressed and the pin was inside the aircraft and not out of the breeze throughout the flight.
For a mission where we intended to shoot the gun the pin was reversed and inserted from the outside of the gun bay with the streamer trailing in the breeze. That way the gun was safe on the ground. Then the pin was pulled at the arming area just before takeoff to make the gun live then reinserted in the de-arming area just after landing to safe it again. The whole time the gun is live on the ground you’re aiming the airplane at a safe part of the base; just like with a pistol or rifle at the shooting range: you don’t wave the muzzle past anything you’re not willing to shoot.
Had those ANG aircraft been armed that way, converting them from rammers to shooters would have taken 30 seconds, not 90 minutes. The inert shells wouldn’t be as effective as the normal HE. But 2 jets times (typically) a couple hundred rounds apiece would have more than gotten the job done. Without having to risk losing 1 or 2 Vipers and pilots doing suicidal ramming.
I’d bet a single AIM-9 would more than kill an airliner with wing-mounted engines. The missile is going to seek the centroid of the heat source as it’s programmed; we don’t have any ability to fine-tune that. The engineers thought of the differing needs for transports vs. fighters and have put enough brains into the fuze and oomph into the warhead to get the job done. Given a non-maneuvering target and no countermeasures this is not a challenging shot.
I’d expect the warhead to go off as it passes under or over the wing ripping up the engine thoroughly and starting a massive fuel leak which will be on fire very soon. Couple that with severing some hydraulics and electrics and whoever is driving the big jet suddenly has his hands full. Maybe a big hunk of flap gets ripped off or bent into a weird shape so it starts acting like an aileron or speedbrake / spoiler panel. Soon enough there’s not enough control authority left to keep it upright. Game. Set. Match.
If the missile gets a real close pass there might be enough oomph to damage the wing’s spar enough that airloads fail the wing right then and there and it folds right near the engine. But IMO that’d be unlikely. You do see that happen to fighters pulling serious Gs when they get hit; a wing folds and instantly it’s tumbling like a pigeon full of birdshot. Which is about what happened.
See, what I was thinking was a passenger airliner’s wings are huge and have very tough wing spars. High speed shrapnel might not break them. And yes, while a piece might stick into the airstream, it might also break off and leave the jet still controllable and with enough lift. You don’t need the hydraulics on that wing to remain airborne and I would assume the hydraulic oil supplies are using different circuits, so that other wing and the tail would still be functional, as well as the other engine. I would hope the fire suppression and isolation would save the airliner, since engines can explode on their own without help from a missile.
The terrorist’s goal isn’t even to land safely, either, just sorta wallow in the air long enough to get to a heavily populated area and then crash into something that looks like it has a lot of infidels in it.
So if you had exactly 1 AIM-9, what do you reckon your chances of downing the aircraft so that it’s a crater in the ground within, say, 5 minutes?
In the Tom Clancy scenario, it was a single AIM-9 fired from an Apache (the airliner was orbiting and using a massive radar, making it easy to detect passively) from below. It was a full 747, converted for military use, and would have been piloted by expert military pilots. I remember thinking that a large, quad engined airliner would hopefully not just fall out of the sky if one engine takes a shotgun blast of fragments from a small warhead.
Considering that two passenger airliners had impacted the World Trade Center and one crashed at the Pentagon, there were credible fears of where the last one would hit. White House? US Capital Building?
So yeah, it was “take down that jet now by whatever means necessary, up to and including your own suicide by ramming into it.”
The Bridge Officer’s Test on Star Trek: Next Generation. Episode “Thine Own Self”. The only way to save the ship was to order LaForge to do something that would result in his death. Same in the actual military. You have to be able to order your soldiers to do things that you know will result in their deaths. In this case, yes, the person is being ordered to their death and the death of innocent hostages, in order to prevent a larger disaster.
Keep in mind that there’s a reason that this shouldn’t be the goal.
You want the plane to go down where you want it to go down, to minimize the loss of life on the ground–not to just go down eventually at some point before it reaches the target.
You’re going to want to control as many factors as possible, including where it lands, which means getting the plane out of the air quickly.
That last number has a lot to do with the inherent reliability of missiles. I’ve not seen any good unclassified numbers on that. If the warhead goes off near the engine he’s almost certainly down.