Video takes you within the cockpit of one of many former Israeli F-16s which might be flying as Crimson Air throughout workout routines within the USA.
The Canadian firm High Aces is without doubt one of the corporations that was awarded contracts below the Fight Air Forces (CAF)/Contracted Air Assist (CAS) program to enhance the coaching of the U.S. Air Pressure’s Formal Coaching Items (FTU) and enhance the variety of new pilots educated. To take action, the corporate employs former Israeli F-16A Netz (Hawk), as they’re domestically identified, which had been retired from the Israeli Air Pressure on the finish of 2016 and had been delivered in the US in 2021.
A video simply revealed on YouTube reveals one of Top Aces’ many Red Air missions from contained in the cockpit, courtesy of Justin “Hasard” Lee, a U.S. Air Pressure Reserve F-35 pilot and former F-16 pilot. In the course of the video, he flew within the again seat of an F-16B which was simulating, along with a single-seat F-16A, a few Su-30 Flanker fighters armed with AA-10 Alamo semi-active radar homing missiles and AA-11 Archer IR-guided missiles (within the video you possibly can clearly hear the pilot calling Fox 1 and Fox 2 through the engagement).
That is performed with High Aces’ proprietary Superior Aggressor Mission System (AAMS), which permits the F-16 to duplicate any near-peer adversary fighter plane. Along with the AAMS, the F-16s are equipped with AESA radars, Scorpion Helmet Mounted Shows, datalinks, digital countermeasures and so forth. The weapons are solely simulated, and the F-16s are all the time seen flying in a clear configuration.
The Offensive Counter Air (OCA) mission of the video noticed two two-ship F-16 flights engaging in Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat towards Blue Air plane, pushing nicely within the Inside Visible Vary (WVR) fight for a “dogfight”. The pilot does an incredible job at explaining step-by-step what they’re doing and why, exhibiting the significance of the Aggressors throughout coaching.
“Blue Air’s job is to have the ability to adapt to regardless of the bandits do, to allow them to kill all of them and defend their goal”, says Chris Couluris, the High Aces’ pilot flying with Hasard. “Our job is to use any errors they make, so we should be adequate to establish errors after which exploit them by taking photographs”.
The Aggressors’ job, nonetheless, is not only simple as killing all Blue Air plane, it’s fairly the other. Actually, as Couluris provides, “the target is to establish the errors so that they [Blue Air pilots] don’t overlook them, and so they don’t overlook them by punishing them in knowledgeable method”. Right here the psychology comes into play: “In the event that they get shot, they go to the penalty field and so they miss out on the battle. That’s disappointment, it’s somewhat embarrassing and that’s okay as a result of, once they have that emotion, they received’t overlook it and so they received’t let it occur once more”.
Which means that, if a Blue Air jet is shot down, the pilots clearly did some large errors that will likely be extensively mentioned within the debriefing after the mission. If the Red Air jet is shot down, then the pilots appropriately utilized all their coaching and achieved the mission’s goals. This is the reason the Aggressors’ job is usually synthetized as “win by dropping”.
Stefano D’Urso is a contract journalist and contributor to TheAviationist based mostly in Lecce, Italy. A graduate in Industral Engineering he is additionally finding out to attain a Grasp Diploma in Aerospace Engineering. Digital Warfare, Loitering Munitions and OSINT methods utilized to the world of navy operations and present conflicts are amongst his areas of experience.
