I was using SU-25 today and from 13 km away from the battlefield, I shut off my engine, becoming basically a kite. I monitored my engine temp and it was below 70 degrees celcius. I dove down for some time, spamming flare.
Enemy strela missed his first couple shots from the distance but he finally shot me. My question is, how can a strela lock to my cold-as-ice plane that spams flares? I repeat, my engine was probably shut off for more than 1 minute at that point. It wasn’t last minute engine shut off.
The Strela is capable of using both IR and passive photocontrast (I believe it’s called?) detection. Meaning that when not using the IR guidance the missile tracks the aircraft’s contrast to the background and not it’s IR signature.
Doesn’t the Strela feature the alternative image based seeker? IR signature doesn’t matter it’s going after your position in the image iirc, you’d have to go away from the clear sky
Strela use IR and Photo contrast (TV/Optical) lock, and Photo contrast lock will ignore flare so it’s impossible to flare nor does it need a heat source
As both @ArisXPG and @イリアス (Edit: and @Make_a_wish_kid ) have said, he was most likely using contrast mode, but additionally front lock is not dependent solely on engine heat, the friction of the air over the airframe at high speed can cause enough heat for a cooled IR seeker to lock onto.
As far as I know the Strela, Type 93 and Type 81C have contrast seekers other stuff dose not, but I also do not have stuff like the IRIS-T to confirm it.
