I have seen comments over and over saying traditional dogfights are over, but don’t most pilot training programs still emphasize dogfight training? The F-35 is also still very much an agile plane. If dogfights are in the past, why are modern stealth fighters not just large missile/bomb/drone trucks built to emphasize payload?
In: Engineering
There are multiple reasons behind this, unfortunately. One of the simplest is related to the saying “generals are always fighting the last war”. In the last big war where two major powers were throwing aircraft at each other (WW2) dogfighting was important. So, we train pilots to be able to do the thing that we know based on historical precedent to be important. Another reason is that even if a scenario is unlikely, you still want your pilots to be prepared for every eventuality since they are sitting on something like a billion dollars of military hardware. I would also expect that this is partly down to the fact that a lot of the truly modern warfare is highly automated, so there isn’t necessarily much to teach pilots about there (not nothing, of course, but the human involvement is minimized).
Latest Answers