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
Technology today can fire missiles well beyond visual range. Add in various sensor drones and missile laden planes shooting long range missiles a nearby stealth fighter can target and fire missiles from a very far distance. Neither pilot might be anywhere near visual range.
History is littered with examples of misidentification of aircraft, and accidental shooting of civilian aircraft or allied aircraft. So future rules of engagement might still have a visual identification requirement.
It is very easy to pick examples where a modern military with 5th and maybe 6th generation aircraft, both manned and unmanned, are fighting a military with a limited Cold War era Air Force. An f35 targeting and a squadron of F 15s acting as bomb trucks and game over. But what if the enemy has similar stealth, long range missiles and sensors, drones electronic warfare, etc? Then you might find yourself back in a dogfighting situation
For the same reason soldiers still train for hand-to- hand combat. It’s not the primary means of fighting but shit can happen and you need to be prepared for it.
Missiles can hit targets beyond visual range. Theres no point in closing to make visual contact when your weapons can fire and forget.
Pilots still train to dogfight as a last ditch scenario and planes need to be agile enough to evade.
Here’s a video of a simulator running a fictional scenario with weapons having rumored specifications. This isn’t a real life scenario but give an idea of how these operations work.
A lot of these comments are pretty close to wrong. In a BVR fight with both parties aware of the other, pilots alternate between “committing” where you fly towards the enemy to deliver a missile, and “defending” where you dive to burn off missile energy by forcing it to turn and enter denser air. The turns in and out of the fight are usually high transonic, sustained and decently high-G. All of these characteristics make for a decent BFM fighter, especially if high off boresight short range IR missiles are equipped. These priorities are especially aligned for rate fighters like the F-16 and F-35, and less for the “one good turn” fighters, a large portion of which use delta wings.
The F-22 and F-35 are both great dog fighters. The negative headlines for the F-35 are from a test flight meant to provide data for the flight envelope management system which included mock dogfights against an F-16. The flight computers did not let the F-35 explore all corners of its flight envelope. More recent evaluations suggest it’s straight up superior to most 4.5 gen fighters even in simple BFM. In full BVR, simulated engagements almost do not have a role for anything but the F-35 (F-22 neglected because these are between NATO countries and we don’t export the F-22)
Source: graduate student in aerospace
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