cperlebe@encad.Wichita.NCR.COM (Chris Perleberg) (01/20/89)
> Along the same lines, he may eject "chaff" bundles. Chaff is >usually metal coated plastic strips designed to provide a radar >reflection. How effective is chaff at decoying radar missiles? Does a bundle have a 10% chance of throwing a missile off? 20%? More? For that matter, how effective are flares against IR missiles? AAM's cost a lot of money, and now that most aircraft are built with internal dispensers (I think, anyway), is firing AAMs a waste of money?
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (01/23/89)
>... For that matter, how >effective are flares against IR missiles? Less all the time. The trouble is that a flare is, of necessity, small. To produce the same radiation output as a much larger area of hot metal or gas, it has to be very hot. This gives it a rather different spectral distribution of output than the real target; for example, it emits a lot more visible light. Infrared seekers are starting to use detectors that look at more than one frequency, so that spectral distribution can be used to tell flares from real targets. They will probably start to use imaging seekers soon, too, which again makes it much more difficult for a flare to imitate an aircraft convincingly. >AAM's cost a lot of money, and >now that most aircraft are built with internal dispensers... Countermeasures dispensers are still much less common than one would like, although the situation is starting to change. Most current air forces are still nowhere near as well equipped with countermeasures as, say, RAF Bomber Command was in 1945. Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu