"José Herculano" wrote:

Except for the fact that CIA ordered US ground crew in Iran to sabotage
Phoenix related gear in Tomcats' radars as soon as the shah fell from
power.

Iranian sources claim that only 12 were sabotaged, and those were later
fixed with parts out of that Iran-Contra deal.

Otherwise the AIM54 was never meant to be used against small and agile
targets like fighter bombers, which Iraq had. In contrast a cruise missile
or a bomb-laden Tu-95 cannot do the immelman, so they are easy to hit with
a big and necessarily sluggish missile from 70 nm.

Well, most of the kills were against MiGs... true it seems they were not
maneuvering much, but most BVR kills are like that.

snip

As with virtually everything else, Tamas is full of it. The AIM-54 was tested
against maneuvering fighter targets during its development and nailed a QF-86
drone pulling 6g (the missile pulled 16g to get it), as well as having several
successful tests against multiple fighter-sized targets (BQM-34, QT-33 or QF-9
drones, the latter augmented to MiG-21 RCS). Fighters weren't the primary
target it was designed around, but it's certainly capable of killing them,
especially with a BVR 'bolt from the blue' with a missile coming down from
above.

Guy