vasu raya wrote:tsarkar, if terrain hugging flights are such unreliable means, we should be seeing many cruise missiles crashing into obstructions in terrain, never heard about CFIT of a cruise missile while en-route, given there is route selection during mission planning.
If you relied on materials better than glossy brochures published by companies marketing super duper solutions or cool programs on Discovery Channel for your knowledge, you would have come across this.
For your hearing, of 75 Tomahawk missiles were fired in Operation Infinite Reach in Afghanistan, six fell en-route. That's a whopping 8%.
Here is MIT Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/40 ... t-part-ii/
In 1998, when the Clinton administration launched 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden’s bases in response to al Qaeda’s bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, six of the missiles misfired and landed across the border in Pakistan. It has long been suspected that these unexploded missiles were studied by Pakistani and Chinese scientists.
Here is LA times
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/30/news/mn-18024 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Demolition experts in Pakistan's army on Saturday destroyed a second unexploded U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile that fell in southwestern Pakistan after being fired at Afghanistan last week, the official APP news agency reported. It quoted official sources as saying the missile, one of several fired Aug. 20 on suspected Islamic terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, was found in the remote Hoshab sub-district of the Mekran coastal area, off the Arabian Sea.
Please note the location - midway between the Arabian Sea & Afghanistan. So its not a launch failure nor a final terminal targeting failure.
These missiles were lost in the super duper infallible TERCOM Terrain Contour Matching cruise phase.
Like I said earlier, terrain following technology today is at best effective for a miniscule percentage of the entire spectrum of fighter or transport flying operations.