Radar-guided missiles, in theory, allowed attacks from any aspect (front, side, or rear) and beyond visual range (BVR).Īir-to-air radars were capable of detecting and tracking targets at 15 nm or more. IR missiles allowed attacks within a 30-degree cone behind the target at ranges approaching the 2 nm effective visual search radius. The new weapons included both infrared (IR) and radarguided missiles, while the new sensors were largely air-to-air radars. Instead, they strove to achieve quick surprise attacks, break away, assess the situation, and attack again if possible.īy the mid-1960s, new aerial weapons and sensors appeared in conflicts in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. The difficulties and time required in attaining a good firing solution against a maneuvering target, combined with the decrease in SA due to the need to fully concentrate on the target, caused many of the great aces of World War II to shun maneuvering combat as a high-risk, low-payoff activity. Against an un-alerted opponent, the attacker simply had to ensure he was within range and had the target “in his sight.” Against an alerted opponent, achieving hits required the attacker not only to be in range, but also to maneuver in the same plane as the target and to allow sufficient lead to account for the distance the target would travel during the bullet’s time of flight. The effective range of aerial gunnery grew from about 50 meters (m) during World War I to about 500 m by the early 1960s, but pilots were still required to maneuver their aircraft in a small portion of the sky to ensure hits on an opponent. Aircraft can be seen farther away if the highly sensitive central vision is focused on them, but with central vision limited to a cone roughly 2 degrees wide, pilots searching for opposing aircraft without some sort of cue to limit their search are unlikely to detect them until the less acute peripheral vision is able to resolve them at about 2 nm. The physical limitations of human vision give it a relatively short effective range as an air-to-air sensor of about 2 nautical miles (nm). I thought you chaps might like to read excerpts here!įor about fifty years, pilots relied on the human eye as the primary air-to-air sensor and machine guns and automatic cannon as their primary weapons. I found this analysis and history to be more interesting than the propaganda spin going on in the Twittersphere. Someone had posted a graphic from this report and a reference link. I was rummaging around a few posts about Ukraine-Russian airwar and the wide range of opinions on relative effectiveness.
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