Attack Geometry

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Sharpe

Attack Geometry

Post by Sharpe »

During the BFJT#1 flight pilots will be expected to demonstrate knowledge of ‘attack geometry’. While predominately a feature of Basic Fighter Maneuverers (BFM), it is also beneficial to understand for the purposes of closing with and/or re-joining a flight/element lead. The information below is taken from a combination of the ‘Flying Operations F16 Combat Aircraft Fundamentals’ document and Wikipedia (which in turn was predominantly drawn from Robert L. Shaw’s ‘Fighter Combat: Tactics and Manoeuvring’ (1985)).

There are three available attack pursuit courses: lead, lag, and pure. The attacker's nose position or his lift vector will determine the pursuit course being flown.

If the attacker is in the defender's plane of turn, the position of the attacker's nose determines the pursuit course. With his nose pointed in front of the defender (such as in the case of a gunshot), he is in lead pursuit. If he points behind the defender, he is in lag pursuit. If he points at his adversary, he is in pure pursuit.
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Lead Pursuit
The primary purpose for lead pursuit is to provide closure, even when chasing a faster opponent. The high Angle Off Tail (AOT) presented during lead pursuit allows the attacker to quickly decrease the forward, lateral, and vertical separation between aircraft, simply by traveling a shorter path. However, lead pursuit causes the AOT to increase at a rapid rate. This causes the closure rate to increase as well.

Pure Pursuit
Like lead pursuit, pure pursuit is used to provide closure. However, closure is not as rapid, nor is the rate of increase in AOT.

Lag Pursuit
Lag pursuit is used to stop or reverse closure rate and to decrease AOT, while allowing or increasing forward separation (also called nose/tail separation, or nose-to-tail).

Hot and Cold Side Lag Pursuit
‘Hot side’ lag occurs when there is a large amount of forward separation between aircraft, showing the top side of a ‘target’ aircraft. This puts the ‘pursuing’ aircraft in the targets rear view.
‘Cold side’ lag occurs when there is little nose-to-tail separation, leaving the belly of the defending fighter in view. This puts the pursuing aircraft in the target aircrafts blind spot.
While in BFM cold side pursuit is a good thing, it is not ideal for formation flying and should be avoided where possible.

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