It appears that the shootdown of the Syrian Fitter earlier in the year has an interesting story behind it. The Super Hornet that lined up the shot fired a state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line AIM-9X Sidewinder at the target and it missed. The interesting part is, the missile has been tested against countermeasure rejection with American flares, which apparently emit an IR frequency that is completely different from Russian ones. Even more interesting, this has been a problem before.
Back in the 80s, a Russian flare dispenser was captured off a crashed Frogfoot, taken back to the US for testing, and put up against the AIM-9P, the latest and best version of the Sidewinder. The result was the same, the missile was tuned to avoid rejection of American flares, not Russian ones.
This is going to be interesting how they fix this.
Technology cannot fix the device resting between the console and ejection seat.
EDIT: I read the article, I disagree. AIM-9Xs don’t work the way AIM-9Ps (or really AIM-9Bs through AIM-9Ms do). It has an IIR seeker (think the AGM-65D, but way better). If it was decoyed, it was because the Fitter used a a specific kind of flare that burns in such a way that it doesn’t decoy the missile so much as obfuscate the jet. Think a smoke grenade: it blinds the observer to everything happening behind a localized area. The jet can duck behind these flares, change their plane of motion, and escape. It’s tricky to do, and it requires the geometry of the engagement to be just so. We know about these types of countermeasures, we use them too. If the defending jet can use them properly, there’s not much you can do (except wait for him to use his energy, and then shoot at him again).
The article also assumes a timeline of events. I disagree with that timeline. However it’s not my place to elaborate further.
There are a lot of “interesting” things going on behind this shootdown, the aim-9x missing being one of them. There are a lot of reasons why it missed but near blind hit the core reason on the head. You can have the best tech in the world but if the meat brain pulling the trigger doesn’t put it into a situation it can succeed in then it’s probly not going to function properly.
Well, they did avoid the latest and greatest tech mcguffin from the USA with 30 year old tech, so that’s nice. On the other hand, both sides are probably trying to come up with new ways to bamboozle eachother the next time the tech meets high in the sky.
