Thunder Strikes Back

Chapter 4 Lightning
During Goya and Jaafar's training at TACDE (the Indian Air Force's Air Combat Tactical School), they had several chances against the more advanced Mirage 2000-5, which is a difficult fighter. The first few air battles The powerful Su-30 did not take advantage of it, but gradually they discovered that the Phantom 2000 could not sustain the turning rate. Although its instant hovering ability was impressive, low-altitude hovering has never been the Mirage aircraft's strong point.Later, they summed up some experience, as long as the air combat is introduced into the low altitude, and the circling continues without turning on the afterburner, the senior instructors of TACDE will eventually lose.

However, the agility of the opponent in front of him was beyond Goya’s expectations. The series of circling and chasing by both sides was still going on, trying to occupy a favorable position. But the chase went all the way to a low altitude of several hundred meters, and there was no safe altitude for any aircraft to make a strong circle to point the nose at the opponent.The Su-3's vectoring nozzle can't take advantage of it for a while. Goya knows that too much fuel in the body and the 9 bulky semi-active radar-guided missiles under the wings have become a trouble for restraining himself from super maneuvering. You have to control the throttle lever at all times to prevent accidentally drilling in front of your opponent.

"It can't be consumed anymore, and he has to suffer a little bit."

The lieutenant's left hand pressed the helmet sight button on the throttle (why is it here?), he looked away from the head-up display, and at the same time reduced the G force to make a small turn, watching the opponent gradually seize on the right, passing the nine The vantage point at [-] o'clock, but this is just a conspiracy of the lieutenant, to ensure that the enemy plane cannot use a dive, from the blind spot of sight from below, and escape the aiming ring at the lower left corner of the helmet. Now the aiming ring is firmly aimed at the opponent, the lieutenant's hand On the launch button, after a few seconds, the lock will be completed, and he waited quietly for everything to happen.The cunning opponent seemed to be aware of it immediately, and pulled up with an abnormal vertical climb, resolutely giving up the easy-to-get advantage. The lieutenant followed closely, and the prey was already within easy reach.For a split second, the glare of the sun obscured the optical display on the helmet's sights, a deadly lost item.

"Damn pig!" Goya scolded, he didn't know whether the opponent's abnormal evasion action was a coincidence or a god-like determination.A tenth of a second before the lock-on mark appeared, the lieutenant pressed the launch button almost reflexively, and the last precious R73 flew off the pylon, making a huge off-axis turn and flying towards the target. The minimum turning radius that the missile can achieve, but obviously it will not hit.

Immediately, the opponent made a dive to increase the speed, and at the same time released a series of tracer bombs, bursting into pieces of white smoke and flames in the airspace. Before the R73 missile found and aimed the seeker at the target with a turn of more than 35G, it had missed the best angle to attack the tail of the aircraft. It missed the aircraft and flew out of the battlefield blindly.Goya lost his trump card, and his remaining R27 could not use the helmet to aim and launch, and it had no advantage in close combat.

At this moment, the enemy plane has left the weapon envelope far away.With a simple and neat tilting and side-sliding action, he quickly occupied Captain Goya's 7 o'clock direction. He almost knocked down the hillside, but the offensive and defensive situation finally changed positions.The Su-30's radar warning device has been silent all the time, and it has never found the radar beam biting itself. This is normal. Maybe the other party only wants to use infrared missiles.

"Get chaff and flares ready." The lieutenant shouted, this was the first time in his life that he was so startled.

Goya began to try to get rid of the tracking in the usual way, but his current situation is very bad, he does not have enough altitude, the speed is only a little over 400 kilometers, and it takes tens of seconds to accelerate, and the speed and altitude of the trailing enemy plane are even lower , but sadly, he can now fire.Goya's Su-30 had almost fallen into a no-escape zone, should the aircraft behind it try to open fire.But the strange thing is that the experienced Pakistani pilot has been slow to do it.

"What does he want to do?" Goya thought to himself, if it was a fighting exercise, such a situation could already sentence him to "death".He desperately pushed the throttle valve to the afterburner position, waited for more than 10 long seconds, and increased the speed as much as possible, but this was not something that could be accomplished overnight.He hoped that the opponent would show kindness and give him a few more seconds, so that he could have enough speed to do a high-G force evasion to dodge the missile at the tail. If he didn't have enough speed, the turn would definitely be soft.

Jaafar has been looking back left and right to observe the trailing opponent and the missiles under its wings (you can clearly see that there are indeed two shiny missiles under the opponent's wings).

"He's speeding in, down to 5 o'clock," Jaafar yelled, thinking the Pakistani pilot must be short-circuited.

The opponent began to cut in with more power, which was another strange move. He was barely making a leading turn. This is usually an action before using the machine gun, and the purpose is to make the fired shells have a certain amount of lead.

"There must be something wrong with his missile." Goya suddenly had a flash of inspiration and immediately guessed the reason. The guy must have pressed the launch button, but the missile did not leave the launch pad.So he tried to shoot down a Su-30 with a cannon, "It's so fucking whimsical."

The lieutenant reversed the joystick and began to evade in a serpentine shape to destroy the opponent's aiming, and it took a while to escape the opponent's machine gun range.Soon, driven by two powerful engines, the height of the Su-30 increased to 900 meters, and the speed was close to 700 kilometers per hour.The distance between the two planes began to increase significantly, and Jaafar visually estimated that it had exceeded 2 kilometers. The opponent never pursued with full afterburner, and the lieutenant was confident that he had escaped the range of the machine gun.When he looked back, the plane behind had given up the chase, and suddenly reversed and slipped away towards the mountains to the west.

"He ran away?" Jaafar couldn't believe his eyes, he watched the other party fly away in a downward spiral.

"He's out of gas. That must be the case." Goya said, now he recovered from the shock, but regained the confidence to fight back, checked the main flight instruments a little, and turned quickly.Within minutes, he went from prey to hunter again.He thought, this time, the help from the gods in the dark is a big help, but there is nothing to be ashamed of, wars have always been based on the results.

The thing is obvious, the low-altitude sneak attack, coupled with a series of low-altitude maneuvers, caused the unknown Pakistani fighter to run out of fuel, and his faulty weapon was a good opportunity to kill him in one go.

This is an aircraft that Lieutenant Jaafar has never seen before. It has simple and clean lines and spouts the light gray commonly used by the Air Force. This is not any legal phantom aircraft.Lieutenant Goya decided to continue the pursuit without hesitation across the border. He had a premonition that if the pilot was kept alive, it would be a trouble for the Indian Air Force in the future.

"Look, it looks like an F-16 from the rear," Jaafar exclaimed in surprise.

"No, it's a... I think it's a 'Thunderbolt'." Goya suddenly remembered.The Air Force has never forced pilots to memorize the enemy aircraft identification table, because the attitude of the aircraft in the air is always different from what is drawn on paper, and the fighter jets owned by the Pakistani Air Force have always been such a few types, and they are not worried about not being able to identify them. , but today was an exception, the lieutenant saw a new type of enemy plane that had never been on the front line before.

"Why is it more difficult than F16?" Goya sighed.At this time, his radar aperture has caught the fleeing opponent, and the fire control system is switching from scanning to tracking, and will soon be able to launch missiles. "Is it possible that I have the chance to win?" Goya couldn't believe it for a while. , because the enemy plane flew without panic or acceleration, it seems that his RWS did not give him much warning that he was about to die.

At the critical moment, Goya couldn’t take his eyes off the head-up display, so he could only rely on Jaafar to remind him from time to time. After crossing the border, the radar warning device (RWS) would show the radar wave scans of some enemies in different directions from time to time. Some of them were long-range anti-aircraft missiles, but Goya reckoned that the low-altitude position where his Su-30 was now was probably still outside their attack envelope, and he must not let go of such an opportunity.

"We can't go too far into their borders," Lieutenant Jafar reminded.

"Where are we now?"

"It's five kilometers past the border, almost due west."

"Give me a few more minutes, and I'll knock him down."

The lieutenant slowly lowered the plane to a dangerous height. He could choose to launch the R27 missile by looking down, but he knew that if he fired it like this, the hit rate of this missile would not be too high, because the missile would be reflected by the ground. interference.In the end, his altitude once again dropped to less than 600 meters (the latitude of this area is very high relative to the altitude, and the altitude measured by the radio refers to the actual ground, not the sea level.) He put himself on the same plane as the enemy plane.The enemy plane in front appeared and disappeared from time to time, flying close to Shanping, as if deliberately not exerting all its strength to get rid of it.

"Why doesn't he speed up?"

"Maybe it's just because he's running out of fuel? If he wants to play tricks, it shouldn't be like this?" Goya said in his heart, but he was actually very disturbed.

The display of the weapon's permission to fire has appeared.The lieutenant chose a volley of two R2s to fire at the opponent, and then pressed the fire button.The fighter jet shook slightly, and the two missiles left the pylon one after another with a time difference of one and a half seconds.
(End of this chapter)