Without knowing the conditions of the test you reference, your observation is totally meaningless. Totally.
What was the threat environment? Was it permissive, or was jamming in effect? If there was jamming, what kind was it - radar, GPS, communications? Was there any GCI involved, and if so, was it symmetrical or not? Were the jets operating as singles, sections, or divisions? What were the balance of forces and compliment of armament for each force? Were ground based threats included? What kind of area surveillance if any was employed, and by which side(s)? What countermeasures (if any) were employed by the attacking/defending aircraft? What countermeasures (if any) were employed on-deck?
This has nothing to do with "rigging" the test - and all you have done is to point out that an F-22 can out maneuver an F-15...big deal.
Maybe, IF you can get close...and you probably won't. And stealth has very little to do with that.
Which is a pretty asinine statement ! Why would the Argentinians have had F-15's ? And * if * they had F-15's the British wouldn't have been so belligerent about the whole deal now would they ? Instead the Argentinians had a hodgepodge assortment of aircraft and the British felt pretty confidant with a small force of Harriers.
For cripes sake I wasn't given a tour of operations at Nellis while they were conducting the exercise. It was a show on the Discovery Channel about the F-22. It looked to me like a 2 vs.4 scenario. 2 F-22's vs. 4 F-15's.
They never even got close to a merge ... the F-22's targeted the F-15's from a distance and ' killed ' the Eagles before they even knew what hit them.
In an interview on the ground after the engagement the F-15 drivers talked about how they didn't even know where the F-22's were. THEY COULDN'T SEE THEM.
For the F-22's is was like shooting fish in a barrel.
I don't think "confidence" came into it. The British used Harriers because their government (as usual) refused to pay for anything more modern or capable. Had the yanks not supplied Sidewinder "L" to the British at the very last minute and refused to supply it to Argentina the end result could well have been a massacre.
I very much doubt the Argies would have made any better use of the F-15 than they did Mirages. It would have been used in near-suicide strikes against British shipping at zero altitude for which the F-15 was hardly optimised. You also seem to forget that Argentine pilots are not nearly as well trained or experienced as British pilots.
I'm told the best were Yugoslavian, made for export to a very high standard. When Russia went capitalist, they sued Yugoslavia for design infringement.
Someone want to explain to me how * Argentina * and * F-15 * got into this discussion ?
How in the world would Argentina have been able to afford F-15's ? They were using second hand A-4 Skyhawks plucked from the boneyard in Tucson, AZ for cripes sake.
Who has been able to afford F-15's ? Huh ? Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel ( the latter we probably gave them to ).
I don't believe the VSTOL fleet concept was *ever* relevant. I have been around Harriers long enough to know that although vertical tak-poff looks good at air shows, it is absolutely useless for operations. STOVL is a different kettle of fish, however. The short take-off roll, combined with a ski-jump allows a decent payload to be carried. The STOVL concept still has a lot of relevance in a fleet role.
Sadly, the only operational aircraft that currently operate in this role - Harriers - are obsolete. In my opinion Harriers were only ever marginally suitable for operations in the first place. The Harrier is effectively a test-bed with military equipment strapped on to the outside. If anything ever goes wrong with it, some item of armament equipment (usually gun pods, centreline pylon and ehection seat) has to be removed to afford access. That's not a good design for a military aircraft.
The Harrier airframe was/is not a good fighter. It bleeds off energy far too quickly. During the 1980s, RAF tactics in Germany were to put up a four-ship package of Harrier GR3s. Three of the aircraft would carry a warload suitable for the mission. The fourth was known as the "Stinger". This jet would carry a single Winder on one outboard pylon with a Phimat chaff pod on the other. The Stinger would be placed in a random position in the formation. His job was to "protect" the others, but he was really only there as deterrence - any attacking aircraft could never be sure which jet had the Winder.
The Stinger was always flown by an experienced pilot and the intention was not for him to actually engage any threatening aircraft, but for him to put himself into a threatening posture whenever an enemy fighter approached one of his formation. This required a lot of discipline and so the job was given to the more older, more experienced jockeys. This was explained to me once by a very experienced Squadron Leader. "The Jet isn't a fighter," he said. "But you can't tell these kids that. Give 'em a Winder and strap a bang seat to their arse and they all think they're bloody Maverick. God forbid it should ever come to the real thing, 'cos they'll try mixing it with a Mig and they'll die. I wouldn't even mix it with a bloody Alpha Jet."
I asked him about VIFFing - Vectoring In Forward Flight, where the pilot vectors the nozzles to allow the jet to stand still in the skies. He said "Viffing is only good for airshows." His argument was that in air combat the way to survive is to keep your energy high. If you have low energy you should always unload the aircraft (dive at a shallow angle which reduces the load on the wings and allows speed to be regained) and disengage. He said that viffing instantly gave the aircraft *zero* energy. It may get you out of a tight spot with a single attacking fighter, but they always hunt in pairs. After the viff, you would be stationary and his wingman would waltz right in and kill you. He was of the opinion that the wingman wouldn't even need to use any weapons for the kill - a fast pass in afterburner would produce enough turbulence to knock the Harrier off its exhaust column. There was also a concern that viffing at high speed might actually tear some of the older jets apart.
The Harrier's best survival methods were low-level concealment and avoidance. This was practiced all the time. Three times a year we used to go to "Deci" in Sardinia. Once was for Armament Practice Camp (APC) which allowed extensive bombing and gunnery practice on the Capo Frasca range. The other two times were for ACMI - air combat training on the Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation range. The intention here was to let the kids loose with a Harrier that had been stripped down to its lightest configuration (no guns), fitted with a acquisition Winder and ACMI pod and put them up against F-15s. After four days of continually getting creamed by real fighters, they learned that there was no way they would ever survive such an encounter. They could then learn the real tactics of fighter avoidance. At the start of the ACMI they considered a "kill" by one of their side as a successful sortie. At the end of the detachment they considered a sortie where none of their own was killed to be successful.
As for the Harrier's relevance in the Falklands, it was simply the only aircraft that was available. The Harrier GR3s did a very good job because they were carrying out the role for which they were designed, close air support. The Sea Harriers also did a good job which was down to using correct tactics. As I've mentioned before, they were employed as interceptors, not fighters. The SHAR pilots were under strict orders *not* to get involved in dogfights. In the event the Argentine pilots weren't interested in mixing it either, as they were at the limits of their endurance. However, if a couple of the A-4 pilots *had* decided to have a go, I think that the SHAR pilots would have found themselves in trouble very quickly indeed.
Don't believe everything you read. The Harriers used in the Falklands were
*not* reliable. The strange thing about a Harrier is that once you get it flying, if you keep it flying it stays serviceable. Once they put their wheels on the deck, if you get the thing airborne again within half an hour, you can keep running that cycle all day and the jet will stay serviceable. However, let the jet settle and it all goes pear shaped. The GR3s were flying two missions a day and so they suffered some immense reliability problems. After the Falklands War there was a major modification programme instituted throughout the RAF Harrier fleet. Known as "Phase 6" it was in part an attempt to address the reliability problems of the aircraft. By the time GR3s were withdrawn in the early 90s, they had become far more reliable than they had been ten years before, but they still had the highest maintenance manhour rate of any combat aircraft in the RAF.
My sources tell me that Typhoon is currently approaching similar manhour rates as the Harrier GR3 - almost 25% higher than that of the Jaguar which it replaced. So much for progress..
I have that book somewhere, I'll have to see if I can find it.
I wouldn't agree with the stated number of six gun kills. Certainly not for air-to-air kills. Mind you, the RAF GR3s caused all sorts of havoc against aircraft on the ground using their guns. Plenty of lessons learned there as well - and just as quickly forgotten!
The 30mm ammunition came in belts of 60 rounds. The ammo boxes in the Harriers were designed to hold 90 rounds. During normal training, we just used to use a single belt of 60 rounds in each gun. The warload was 120 rounds per gun, mostly because it was easy to make up by simply connecting together two 60 round belts. Trials had shown that the ammo box and feed chutes could *just about* handle 120 rounds. The first few missions suffered gun stoppages every single time, due to belt drag. We worked out that vibration in flight caused the ammunition to settle in the tanks and lock together, so causing the stoppage. Once we reverted to the designed warload of 90 rounds per gun, all the stoppages stopped. Lesson learned!
Three years later and I got posted back onto a Harrier squadron. Many of the lessons learned in the Falklands had been ignored and standard practice was to use 120 rounds as a warload, even though we all knew that the gun would almost certainly suffer a stoppage.
Further research has shown that the gun kills were on a Pucara on 21 May. One A-4Q was shot down by guns on the same day, with a second damaged by guns. The pilot of the second A-4 attempted to recover to Stanley but could not lower his landing gear so he ejected.
The third gun kill was against a C-130 which had been hit but not downed by a Sidewinder.
Two of those gun kills were against aircraft that were no threat to the SHARs (Pucara/C-130). It is possible that the A-4 gun attacks were made only because the SHARs had expended their Sidewinders.
That's really all that needed to be said on the subject Enzo. 1982 was along time ago. Maybe if the British had kept the Ark Royal and conventional fixed-wing aircraft operations, the Falklands war might have gone a bit better for them. How this all ties in with the JSF I really don't know.
Care to elaborate ?
I personally could care less if the UK buys the JSF ... or Joint Combat Aircraft as they are calling it.
In the back of the book " Air war in the Falklands 1982 "- Osprey Combat ... there is a list of air losses by the Argentine air forces. Some are listed as being downed by Harriers ... but no cause is given. Many of these I take to mean that they could have been damaged by cannon fire and later crashed for a variety of reasons.
The point being that the Harriers were in close enough for cannon fire on numerous occasions.
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