November 6, 200817 yr From Aviation Week USAF Pilot Critiques Red Flag Action Nov 5, 2008 David A. Fulghum and Graham Warwick Indian pilots flying Su-30MKIs are extremely professional, but they're still learning how to best fight with their new aircraft. That opinion comes from an unidentified, senior F-15 pilot taped while briefing senior retired U.S. Air Force officers about the most recent Red Flag exercise. The video was made available online at YouTube.com. The French pilots flying the new Dassault Rafale appeared to be there to collect electronic intelligence on the Indian aircraft, contends the USAF pilot, who wears an Air Force Weapons School graduate patch. The French were originally going to bring the older Mirage 2000-5 until they discovered the Indians were bringing their new Su-30MKIs, the pilot says. They then switched and brought their Rafales with more sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment. Once at Red Flag, "90 percent of the time they followed the Indians so when they took a shot or got shot" they would take a quick shot of their own and then leave," he said. "They never came to any merges," which starts the dogfighting portion of any air-to-air combat. He asserts that French pilots followed the same procedure during Desert Storm and Peace Keeping exercises. When U.S. aircrews were flying operations, the French would fly local sorties while "sucking up all the trons" to see how U.S. electronics, like radars, worked, according to the pilot. He praised the Indians as extremely professional and said they had no training rule violations. However, they "killed a lot of friendlies" because they were tied to a Russian-made data link system that didn't allow them to see the picture of the battlefield available to everyone else. The lack of combat identification of the other aircraft caused confusion. But the U.S. apparently isn't ignorant of the Su-30MKI's radar either. The Su-30 electronically scanned radar is not as accurate as the U.S.-built active electronically scanned radar carried by the F-22 and some F-15s. Also, "it paints less, sees less" and is not as discriminating. He praised the F-22 as the next great dogfighter. But he faulted the fact that it carries too few missiles and contends that the on-board cannon could be a life-saver, particularly against aircraft like the MiG-21 Bison flown by the Indians. It has a small radar cross section, as well as an Israeli-made F-16 radar and jammer. The latter makes them "almost invisible to legacy F-15C and F-16 radars" until the aerial merge or until it fires one of its Archer, active radar missiles, the U.S. pilot says. Against the much larger RCS Su-30MKI, the F-16s and F-15s won consistently during the first three days of air-to-air combat, he continues. However, that was the result of trying to immediately go into a post-stall, thrust-vectored turn when attacked. The turn then creates massive drag and the aircraft starts sinking and losing altitude. "It starts dropping so fast you don't have to go vertical [first]. The low-speed tail slide allowed the U.S. aircraft to dive from above and "get one chance to come down to shoot," the pilot says. "You go to guns and drill his brains out." The Su-30 is jamming your missiles so...you go to guns and drill his brains out." U.S. pilots conclude that the Su-30MKI is "not [an F-22] Raptor," he further says. "That was good for us to find out." But when the Indian pilots really learn to fight their new aircraft - "they were too anxious to go to the post-stall maneuver," he says-- the USAF pilot predicts that they would regularly defeat the F-16C Block 50 and the F-15C with conventional radar. A final weakness in the Su-30MKI was its engine's vulnerability to foreign object damage which required them to space takeoffs a minute apart and slowed mission launches.
November 6, 200817 yr Author From Aviation Week's ARES Blog Red Flag Exposé Posted by David A. Fulghum at 11/5/2008 3:22 PM CST French pilots flying the new Dassault Rafale appeared to be collecting electronic intelligence on India’s even newer Su-30MKI aircraft during a September Red Flag exercise at Nellis AFB, Nev., contends a USAF pilot briefing retired U.S. generals. The French were originally going to bring the older Mirage 2000-5 until they discovered the Indians were bringing their new Su-30MKIs, he said. They then switched and brought their Rafales with more sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment. Aviation Week has a full article for AWIN subscribers on the pilot's observations (Update: We've posted it to our homepage here.) The video was made available online at YouTube.com, and our friend Stephen Trimble at The Dew Line has blogged about it there as well. YouTube vid 1 YouTube vid 2 Foreign air force officials admit that they anticipate intelligence-gathering will go on at an event like Red Flag. India’s Su-30MKI carries the Bars radar developed by the Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design (NIIP), which also designed the Irbis passive electronically scanned array radar for the Su-27SM2 (Su-35). NIIP also is working on the radar suite for Sukhoi’s fifth-generation fighter design, the T-50, to meet the Russian air force’s PAK-FA requirement. Indian pilots told Aviation Week that they were operating the radar only in the training mode, which limited its range and spectrum of capabilities. Once at Red Flag, “90% of the time [the French] followed the Indians so when they took a shot or got shot” they would take a quick shot of their own and then leave,” he said. “They never came to any merges” which starts the dog fighting portion of any air-to-air combat. He contended that French pilots followed the same procedure during Desert Storm and Peace Keeping exercises. When U.S. aircrews were flying operations, the French would fly local sorties while “sucking up all the trons” to see how U.S. radars worked, he said. But the U.S. apparently isn’t ignorant of the Su-30MKI’s radar either. The Su-30 electronically scanned radar is not as accurate as the U.S. built active electronically scanned radar carried by the F-22 and some F-15s, he said. Also, “it paints less, sees less” and is not as discriminating.
November 7, 200817 yr Author From Flight International DATE: 06/11/08 SOURCE: Flightglobal.com VIDEO: US Red Flag pilot candidly assesses Su-30MKI’s limits, Rafale’s dirty tricks By Stephen Trimble US Air Force pilots flying Boeing F-15s “dominated” and “amazed” Indian Air Force Sukhoi Su-30MKI pilots in a recent exercise, but still expect that legacy F-15s and Lockheed Martin F-16s will swiftly lose their competitive edge to the Russian export fighters. Those remarks came in an explicitly candid assessment by an unidentified USAF pilot posted on 4 November on the YouTube online video sharing service. “Now what I’m scared of is Congress is going to hear that and go – ‘Great, we don’t need to buy any more airplanes. No, no, no, no,'” the pilot tells an audience that includes retired air force leaders. He adds that “it’s only a matter of time” before the IAF Su-30 pilots learn how to overcome the manoeuvre used so successfully against them at the international Red Flag exercise. The F-15 pilots used their simulated combat experience against the thrust vectoring capability of the Lockheed Martin F-22 to exploit a vulnerability of the Su-30 in a hard turn, the pilot said.“So we start to pull in on him, and then all of a sudden you start to see the [su-30’s aft-] end kick down and he starts doing vectored thrust,” the pilot says. “But now he starts falling out of the sky. He’s falling out of the sky so fast that you don’t even have to go up,” the pilot adds. “You just have to pull back on the stick a little bit, pull the throttle, go to guns and come in and drill his brains out.” Even so, the professionalism and skill of the IAF pilots at Red Flag gained the respect of the USAF pilots. However, French Air Force pilots, who deployed to the same event with the Dassault Rafale fighter, apparently engaged in non-friendly activities.“They never really came to any merges,” the pilot explains. “What they were really doing was, they had all their sensors on sniffing and seeing how our radars worked. And that’s really all they were doing out here. They came out here and they watched the whole flight, with their newest airplane and their newest electronic receiving units, and sucked up all the ‘trons in the air.” The pilot also says the IAF’s MiG-21 Bison aircraft, modified with Israeli radar, active radar missiles and electronic jammers, are nearly “invisible” to the F-15 and F-16’s current mechanically-scanned arrays, allowing the Indian pilots to sneak past the USAF radar screen and engage the F-15s and F-16s in dogfights. “The MiG-21 had the ability to get in the scissors with you at 110kts at 60 degrees nose high and go from 10,000 to 20,000 feet,” he said. The Su-30MKI deployment to Mountain Home AFB, Idaho, for the exercise was complicated by the low-reliability of the Russian made engines, the pilot adds. “One of the things the Indians were very disappointed in, was when they FOD’d an engine out, the Russians make them send the engine back to Russia, and then they’ll send them a new one,” the pilot says. “So, not the perfect situation for them being here in the United States with those engines.” The pilot did not identify himself in the videos, but there were several clues to his status. He wore a fighter pilot’s G-suit, and he referred to a patch on his shoulder that indicated he was a member of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis AFB. He also referred to Nellis as “here”, indicting this was the location where his lecture took place.
November 7, 200817 yr Author From Flight International The pilot also says the IAF’s MiG-21 Bison aircraft, modified with Israeli radar, active radar missiles and electronic jammers, are nearly “invisible” to the F-15 and F-16’s current mechanically-scanned arrays, allowing the Indian pilots to sneak past the USAF radar screen and engage the F-15s and F-16s in dogfights. Take note, all you folks who are irked when a little jet like the MiG-21 sneaks up on you in HCE. From Flight International However, French Air Force pilots, who deployed to the same event with the Dassault Rafale fighter, apparently engaged in non-friendly activities.“They never really came to any merges,” the pilot explains. “What they were really doing was, they had all their sensors on sniffing and seeing how our radars worked. And that’s really all they were doing out here. They came out here and they watched the whole flight, with their newest airplane and their newest electronic receiving units, and sucked up all the ‘trons in the air.” The latest issue of Air Forces Monthly has an article about recent Rafale operations aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and how both sides were very careful not to reveal too much about their true capabilities, though they were operating side by side aboard the same carrier. But we're all allies, right?
November 8, 200817 yr From reading all this what I draw from it is that with a little more training and time to acclimate to the new aircraft, the IAF could hold their own against any air force in the world.
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