Detailed Aerial Dogfighting Tactics?

Greetings,
I've got a PPL and love aviation. About 80% of everything I read is aviation related, the majority of which concerns air combat.

I've read/watched a lot of material from ace pilots and what they all have in common is the ability to judge the proper reaction to any enemy action. Take any 2 given aircraft withinin the same class (albatros vs SPAD; P47 vs Bf109; F86 vs Mig15.etc), and say that both pilots are perfect, neither would ever be able to shoot the other down.

From that, it merely becomes a mathematical equation based on the energy level of each aircraft and the strength/weaknesses of each plane. In otherwords, if you know the strength/weaknesses of your enemy and can judge the energy levels between you accurately a perfect pilot cannot be shot down (excluding sneak attacks/visibility), because you can cancel out any enemy action with the proper reaction.... This is known by all the great aces although they might explain it differently.

So take a few great aces and say you want to train 10,000 pilots to be aces. Your going to go up and mock combat with the students and teach them these mathematical equations/reactions they need to know to survive and become aces. If you hope to maintain consistency and build upon what the aces know, you'll begin to compile a document detailing the situation, enemy action and the proper reaction. From this you'll be able to write a curriculum to train your 10,000 pilots. Where does the Detailed Aerial Dogfighting Tactics exist at?

I've read on the web and bought books but they all seem to provide watered down information on the same ole stuff: rolling scissors, turn reversals.etc
Surely there is more detailed information concerning what to do when the enemy performs maneuver X or is at position Y for any given 2 aircraft....?

Have I lost anyone here? Is anyone with me? If so, does any such documentation exist and if

Do you play golf? If you do, do you read golf magazine? In it every month they have advice from a pro on some aspect of the game. If you took all the advice therein, you could not play the game because no two pros play the same.

It is much the same with air combat.

No two aces ever made exactly the same moves even in identical situations (other than to turn into an incoming missile!), so there is always room for nuances and even diametrically opposed actions that both have the same result. If you want standardized air combat training, the USAF, th RAF, the Russian Air Force, the Indian Air Force, and almost all air forces teach pretty much the same methodology ... and it for jet fighter combat. It has nothing to do with piston fighter except ina general sense because they don't have the same excess power levels with which to fight.

So the jets are free to choose among several actions whereas the pistons are probably constrained to only a few actions.

I don't think any of these air forces hand out the training notes to civilians, but we have some pilots in here training in air forces. Biff flew or still flies F-15's.

A good air combat course takes a long time, it isn't one paragraph or even 20. It assumes a basic knowledge and builds on that over several weeks of intensive training.

Good luck getting a straight answer from anyone with the knowledge. I'm sure there is a caveat about passing on classified information and even proprietary information to the general public.

Today, if you have to get into a rolling scissors, you have already lost the fight! Ask any F-35 driver who desperately needs to avoid that exact maneuver!

Something to start.
No Guts, No Glory: http://www.simhq.com/_air/PDF/NGNG.pdf


Wheels

Hey Brian,

You going to be there tomorrow? It's volunteer appreciation day and they're going to feed us free ...

- Greg

csteimel47591, that's a tough question to answer.

If you take those 10,000 people and train them in the same manner, there will be a few who rise above the rest because they have not only mastered their machine, but they have become a part of it.

An example: Erich Hartmann and Hans-Joachim_Marseille both took the same long courses along with countless other Luftwaffe pilots. They both mastered the Bf109, however, they both developed a mastery of their aircraft that was not taught in school. And both of their techniques were not only unconventional and extremely deadly to their opponents, but completely different from one another.

There's many other examples out there, but these two are probably the best.

You can teach a person to fly, but it's up to the individual to master the art.

Air Combat Maneuvering - index
I like the above web site. Index page allows you to go directly to a specific maneuver (Displacement Roll, Horizontal Scissors, High Yo-Yo etc.).

As long as you've got humans flying aircraft, and humans building and working on those aircraft, you're never going to have a set counter move for every move made by your opponent.

Human abilities vary, and any given human's abilities vary also. Even the level of maintenance on a aircraft can vary from one mission to another.
The weather changes, varies with altitude and location. Just the position of the sun can have a great effect, cloud cover.

X will never equal Y.

Most of the modern developments seem to be toward removing the human factor from aerial warfare, ( BVR, fly-by-wire, etc.) but there's always going to be uncertainties as long as humans are in any way involved .

Also, if the greatest air ace that ever flew is looking right and a moron is on his left and fires a lucky burst, greatest air ace on the planet dies in a hail of bullets. It happened all the time in WW2. A lot of the greatest aces also had a tremendous amount of luck. Many of them, especially the high scoring Germans, were shot down multiple times. Many times, the only thing that kept them from being killed was sheer, dumb luck.

I hope this isn't taken in the wrong way by anyone but I'm pretty much convinced by this stage that the real world drilling is aimed at one thing, really, that being, instilling the right instincts. I know on its face that may sound rather simplistic, and I know there are pilots, here, too, and I'm willing to defer, but I'll tell you, it's really just a composite of all I think I heard and learned. A mathematical equation, well, yeah, I don't know, maybe, but I never heard of it. Drill, drill, drill, fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You stick by them, you get good at them, they become second-nature. You get into combat, the enemy doesn't do what it's "supposed" to, your instincts tell you how to handle it. I don't know, maybe I'm just stressing the patently-obvious. The fighter pilots, the ones I had the honor with, they'd all tell you, they aren't even thinking when they're in combat. I know that may sound counter-intuitive, but really, combat was no place for reflective thought. These pilots were in a zone, they were winging it. That's the impression yours truly got, anyway. For what it may be worth.

Csteimel,

Thanks for joining us here and I will try to answer some of your questions. First, boiling everything down to a mathmatical equation would work if only people were able to repeat something perfectly every time (watch the olympics to see it at one of it's highest forms). If we were that perfect there would be no olympics as the winner would be known in advance, and the same goes with air combat. Also the pure 1 versus 1 dogfight (now known as BFM or Basic Fighter Maneuvers) most likely won't happen in real combat. In reality if you anchor (get into a turning engagement with an adversary) you open a LARGE window of opportunity for his wingman to get an unobserved entry into your fight and nail you.

No one pilot or airplane is perfect, and as previously mentioned some will get more out of training than others, and some will do better in combat as well. The one able to do the best uses his weapon (the aircraft and it's armaments) better than his adversary (who oh by the way is trying to do the same thing). Yes, there are break turns, rolling scissors, ditches, jinks, reversals, rolls, all done with the power in a variety of settings. Each is a tool that the pilot uses to gain a position of advantage from which he will employ his weapons. In the case you mention above (F-86 vice Mig-15) the Saber drivers didn't get to train against the Migs, only do combat against them. They also didn't have the maneuvering energy diagrams either (I don't think they were even invented then) to predict what an aircraft can do. Your equation doesn't work unless a pilot has not only perfect knowledge and experience with his aircraft, but the same over his adversaries. Last time I checked the Russians weren't giving out the gouge on their latest stuff.

In reality what happens is training cycles (dog fighting, aka BFM, 2 versus 1, 2 versus X, 4 versus X, 8+ versus X, Red Flags) etc. to give a guy as much experience as possible before putting him into live combat. When I did Red Flag the mentality was if a guy could survive his first five combat sorties he would probably go the distance, and that is what Flag was designed for. Get him his first "five" experience in what is / was one of the finest training environments ever.

As a young guy I learned all I could about the Mig-29 (the most prolific threat aircraft I would likely face). I could quote the numbers in my sleep, spout it's strengths and weaknesses in a variety of arenas, ID all it's weapons, etc. Then, 9 years after my first Eagle sortie I got to fight them. Not suprisingly the stuff I learned was pretty darn accurate. I had many sorties against what was probably the best Mig-29 drivers in the world (Luftwaffe), and had I ever fought that aircraft for real I would have been very confident in my tactics and training.

The best thing a fighter pilot can do to prepare for combat is to train, and train against as many different aircraft as possible. When fighter aircraft become pilotless, then their maneuvers will be in the form of a drop down menu, executed as perfectly as a computer can, with the perfect timing of a computer, shooting weapons at the first possible nano-second and all you can do is hope your engineers did better than theirs.

Cheers,
Biff

The Dicta Boelcke was written almost a century ago, and so far as I can see everything since has been a variation on that.