F18 dogfighting

i bet the long range phoenix shots would be a pretty easy kinematic
defeat by a knowledgeable bandit.

I won't say that the AIM-54 is a wonder weapon, however please consider:

That thing is coming at you at about Mach 4;
It is descending as it does so;
It is in a ballistic flight, which means no tell-tale smoke or contrails;
For such a terminal flight, it is a tiny thing, almost impossible to acquire
visually;
It can pull 18G at the end - granted, for a very limited time;
It has a huge fragmentation warhead which translates into a good-sized kill
zone.

Beatable, yes, easy, not by a very long shot.
_____________
José Herculano

the first thing we need to remember here is that the unclassified specs
tell us very little about
missile performance. e.g. what is the burn time - how well can it hack
a beam manouver or
chaff and jamming - what kind of spike are you getting of a tomact
shooting this thing - what
sort of end game maneuver can it handle. - how much range do you kill
with an early
drag or beam. I'm not saying it is a bad missile - i'm sure Woody would
agree that depending
on your shot doctrine, an AMRAAM aware opponent can trash shots quite
easily if he
understands how the AMRAAM works. I'm just saying that with a "smart"
bandit (if there are
any left) he may be able to drag out and defeat these long range shots
and be able to beam
and get to the merge. Guys can sometimes do that to an AMRAAM shooting
Hornet in training
so I'm sure it could happen to a Phoenix shooter too. I'm not sure but
I would guess that the
missile is more designed for long range shots against less manouverable
bombers.