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Originally Posted by martinss01
i think you got those two passages backwards. the "every single time" one was in relation to the 30 taking out the f-15C in the boeing test. of which both aircraft were being flown by US pilots (also important to note in addition to your very valid points).
against the german's, the mig 29's simply won more than they lost within visual range.
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I didn't get the passages backwards just the quotes. I should have said "almost every time". From my understanding of both that engagement and another one with a Marine VMFA that trained with the East Germans, in the first engagements the US pilots were getting beat because they were being engaged with shots they didn't expect because of the off boresite advantage held by the 29's...but once they got used to the capabilities of the Russian birds they started waxing them.
The only real physical aerodynamic advantage the Migs had was in slow speed continous turns which you want to avoid anyways. The 16's & 18's both had more power and could dictate when to enter an engagement.
Keep in mind that all of these training exercises have pre-defined paramaters and are used for teaching how to handle specific scenarios. That doesn't mean those scenarios are ones that most likely to occur, they're the worst case that are the hardest to survive.
The US has also acquired more than a few Mig-29 & SU-27s over the past 30 years and have flown them at Tenopah. The first engagement secrets they once enjoyed are long gone.
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[i]sure, we win bvr and we tend to loose a significant amount of our advantage in dogfights. but my question to you is this. how many actual bvr kills have been racked up over the last 20 years? with rules of engagement, im guessing very few if not none. anything that gives our guys an advantage is worth its weight in gold. [i]
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Most of them have been BVR.
Out of the 36 kills by F-15s during Desert Storm, 26 were from Sparrows & only 9 were from Sidewinders (the last was when an Eagle flew a Mig-29 into the ground). The AIM-7 also had twice the PK as the AIM-9.
Both of the Saudi kills against Migs were AIM-7 shots. The two US Navy F/A-18 kills were Sidewinder AIM-9 shots but were still at a range of about 7 miles.
The first ever (US) F-16 A2A was during the "no fly zone" era in southern Iraq and was also a BVR shot by an AMRAAM on a Mig-25. Another Iraqi plane fell to an F-16 launched AMRAAM a few days later.
All of the F-15 kills vs Serbian Mig-29s were AMRAAM shots.