Kevin Brooks wrote:
"The Enlightenment" wrote in message
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"Keith Willshaw" wrote in message
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"Pepperoni" wrote in message
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This seems extremely unlikley
to cause a break in radar lock.

It would not show up on MTI or give a doppler return. If done close
enough to ground it might prevent an acquisition due to ground
clutter.


Oddly enough, even the Russian test pilots said that they really saw no
combat utility for the Cobra maneuver.

Brooks

I remember reading about this one in AW&ST about this. This was,
interestingly enough, a strategy developed by some US Air Force people
who were researching potential threats. They came up with some sort of
a strategy where a SU-27 or derivative uses some Cobra-like maneuver to
drop the aircraft's velocity below the threshold set for the Doppler
radar to discriminate between ground and moving aerial targets. How you
would maintain that is fuzzy to me, but it seems that you'd have to
maintain some flight path that keeps you at a constant, or slightly
decreasing, radial distance from the aircraft trying to detect you.
Assuming that you do this within AMRAAMSKI range, you could launch a
missile to defeat the US aircraft without being tracked accurately
enough by the US aircraft to destroy you. From the US point of view,
the SU-27 appears on your screen, then disappears.

The supporters of this theory claimed that it was further indication
that the F-15 was becoming obsolete in the face of new threats, and an
aircraft that provides little warning to provoke an SU-27 to adopt this
strategy (F/A-22) was (and is) required. They had managed to run a
number of (two-dome, I believe) simulations where they could kill F-15s
with regularity in a SU-27-like simulated threat. The detractors claim
that this was an unlikely manuever in any realistic combat situation,
and would be very difficult for people with less training than the US
Air Force to carry out.

To me, it also seems that such a strategy requires better situational
awareness than most SU-27 operators could muster.