the west german pilots certainly not
The United States was superior to the Soviet Union in long-range missiles, but this was not the fault of the aircraft or the developer (KB MiG). If you put these planes in approximately the same conditions in terms of armament, they will show approximately the same results. So I cannot agree with the opinion that the MIG-29 is a terrible aircraft.
What do you mean west German pilots there was no West Germany when the dogfights happened.
there still has to be made the destinction between NATO pilots and the former east german pilots
because the east germans were “trained” to strictly follow the commands from the ground in an intercepting mission
or doing whatever
Wouldn’t the knowledge have just been passed on by former East German pilots
there wasnt much knowledge tho becasue the soviet doctrine at the time was to strictly follow the commands from the ground
there wasnt that much training focused on BFM because they werent really supposed to do it
Wouldn’t they still have to be good at flying the MiG-29 to execute those commands effectively?
they would have been good at flying interception missions, but thats about it
i think we can agree that flying an intercept is wastly different from a dogfight
Hardly an opinion, aren’t most of the MiG-29’s kills shooting down defecting aircraft anyways?
Good point. You’d think they would’ve at least received some training on the HMD though
probably or at least it was described in the flight manual and imo it dosent seem to need that much training to use the HMS as it is quite intuitive
from what i have seen their BFM training seems be basically a flow chart
while looking through an east german Mig-23 manual i found a section about dogfighting and it basically boiled down to the following:
if your opnenent has less thrust than you do this, if not do this
(so a bunch of predetrimened cases, which is bad if the pilot has to fight an aircraft he dosent know)
it was with pictures and everything
they also assumed that the enemy reacts in a certain way, if he dosent that would be bad as well
1 Like
Interesting. Do you know anything about training the MiG-29 pilots went through in the years after reunification leading up to the mock dogfights
not much i know that the Luftwaffe did lots of testing with the Mig-29, so i think that they more or less had to came up with their own training methots based on what was common in NATO already
2 Likes
They (iraqis and serbs) certainly weren’t trained enough to match the same amount of hours the average usaf pilot have. What happened to such countries is exactly what’s happening rn with a certain country that’s facing a more powerful country while using outdated versions of western fighters + limited training from their owners.
The rafale being destroyed by j10s also doesn’t mean it’s trash…
4 Likes
Some in this thread believe that an aircraft operates on its own during combat, but that’s not the case. A well-planned operation always takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of the equipment. Before a fighter enters the airspace of the targeted state, attacks may be carried out on enemy air defenses and airfields, electronic warfare aircraft will be in the sky, and so on. And they will be opposed by hastily scrambled fighters.
2 Likes
Except it is relevant because either the Rafales shot down didn’t carry Meteors, which is extremely stupid when facing PL-15s, or they did carry Meteors in which case it is a pilot fault since Meteors have a greater range than PL-15s. In no way that shows a weakness from the Rafale (don’t get me wrong, it does have some but here they aren’t the cause).
the problem is that meteors can only be effectively used when already faster than mach 0.9 because of the nature of ram-jet engines you also need to lauch them at high altitudes
so it was probably a strategical error to have the Rafales stationed so close to the Pakistanian boarder because they were unable to get up to speed and altitude for the Meteor in time if they had them
1 Like
Oh true I completely missed that point
Yeah that makes sense
I could be wrong but If i’m not mistaken the chinese tend to give a lot more stuff to their “non official allies” compared to western nations when supplying non nato members. I highly believe it was the case with the j10 vs Rafale fiasco. The rafale was probably gimped af
I dunno, what would be gimped about Indian Rafales? They were fitted with more capabilities than the F.3R iirc