naird wrote:Thanks Karan for the lucid explanation. Some questions -
1. I understand the chaff may disorient the radar and may give feeling of downed a/c , but then radar should immediately reacquire the target & so should the controllers. F16 might have turned their nose away from engagement and thereby lost the awareness of Su 30 , but controllers would have known immediately and would have told F16's. Essentially PAF would have immediately known that Su 30 that they engaged and thought to be down - is still there ! Seems to be the case of not loosing situational awareness but running scared of their lives
The problem is the BVR missiles were fired in either TWS or RWS mode and the PAF did not stick around for the entire game, they thought they guided missiles (salvos to increase Pk) mid-course guided them till "necessary" and did what NLI at Kargil did, showed a clean pair of heels and ran.
The radar mech. ranges a target, which can be chaff as well. The missiles are then fired in inertial mode, with the range data indicating whether they are in ops range or not and when to turn active. The target can still maneuver out of the radars scan area, especially when masked by chaff itself.
The radar comes back, its computer then reads the next signal as a continuation of the first etc.
So, a chaff "line" / "cloud" can end up appearing on the MFD screen and the pilot breaks off thinking he has done what he came for, whereas in reality the opponent has maneuvered out of the radar scan area.
Simply put, they called victory too early.
Interestingly enough, Tufail's entire blog article originally describing these details has been edited.
The ISPR clearly monitors BRF well, so I wouldnt be surprised if the details re-appear with some more masala to act all authoritative. I recall after several of us mocked the JF-17 vs Mirage 2000 details heavily, the ISPR has invested heavily in a counter narrative building the JF-17 up to be a super fighter, with even the PAF Chief involved. That is how much they track what we say and manage perception.
But we still have the PAFs claims left before the edits occurred which led to good chortles among several IAF veterans one of whom penned the below.
https://indiainterrupted.wordpress.com/ ... aftermath/
Air Cmde Tufail’s account of the engagement between the forces makes for entertaining reading. But if he is to be believed, then the PAF has based its entire claim to a Su-30 kill on the range at which the blip was picked up, and how it eventually disappeared.The words ‘the blip vanished from the screens after a couple of tight orbits by the aircraft’ are most interesting. Nine out of ten line fighter pilots would agree that this is how a chaff (mass of thin cut metal foil dispensed by aircraft to give a decoy radar target) cloud appears on radar, more or less stationary, and descending with time, eventually disappearing as it dissipates. This is an admission that Sqn Ldr Hassan Siddiqui, of the ‘elite’ Combat Commanders School actually fired off a $ 400,000 AIM-120 C-5 AMRAAM at a few dollars worth of chaff that was, without a doubt, dispensed by IAF fighters as expected in BVR combat. This failure to discern a ‘chaff cloud’ from a bona fide aircraft by an ‘elite’ pilot should be cause for worry. Not to mention that the state of Pakistan cannot afford this kind of extravagance, with multiple such futile launches observed the day.
2. Playing devils advocate - if chaffs were to disorient radars for long period of time then same can be said of in Wing Co's F16 kill also. AFAIK Wing Co did give confirmation on missile lock and after that there was no communication from him. The next action was presented to us from the Phalcon intercepts showing fighter signatures on radar. What if the chaffs or other counter measures disoriented our radars and gave a feeling that F16 was downed. What am i missing ?
Abhinandan confirmed in his debriefing he had shot down the aircraft. There was no reason for the PAF F-16 pilot to deploy chaff & flares as Abhi did not radar lock on him per reports but just went for a visual attack (completely passive, undetectable) and locked his HMS after maneuvering behind him & then the R73E, and launched. The PAF F-16 wouldn't be launching flares for the intermittent pings by AF surveillance radars if there were no fighters around (chaff is a very carefully hoarded quantity to be used while combat maneuvering).
And in our case, we had multiple radars scanning the area and networked by IACCS.