Friendly Fire patriot/f-15

last night i was looking into MJ12 and I came across this image weirdly enough. I looked at it for a long time, and I dont claim to know a lot about missiels, but it looks a lot like a US patriot ground to air missile. I'm amazed how clearly you can see the missile. I learnt those things travel at mach 5. And itd still be going that speed because you can see the smoke and teh last second course change.



The pilots jsut ejecting.

I have tried all morning to find teh site I was on, but my history was deleted somehow. It never shows anything anyway.

Any thoughts on this?


[edit on 19/2/2006 by Sovtek]

Thats a very interesting find sovtek, but i'm gonna have to look into the missle type, because to me that looks like a smaller SAM, not patriot.

Bloody cool pic though, just hope the pilot escaped ok!

Why does it have to be SAM instead of some Air to Air missile? Just a thought

Looks fake to me, is the pilot supposed to be ejecting ?

If so why would he eject just before he's been hit.

Originally posted by rogue1
Looks fake to me, is the pilot supposed to be ejecting ?

If so why would he eject just before he's been hit.

because if he ejects afterwards then hes already dead. If a missile blows up in the middle of a fuel tank containing 11600 pounds of fuel then theres going to be one hell of an explosion.

Sovtek do you know what altitude the f-15 is at in the picture?

Justin

My problem with it is that he would have known long before this point he was locked on, and that a missile had fired, and he wouldn't be flying straight and level waiting to eject just before the missile hits (ala GI Joe). There's absolutely no point in him ejecting at this point, because as was said "He's dead anyway." The fireball is going to engulf him before he even gets clear of the plane.

Originally posted by justin_barton3
because if he ejects afterwards then hes already dead. If a missile blows up in the middle of a fuel tank containing 11600 pounds of fuel then theres going to be one hell of an explosion.

For a start the missile is coming from underneath the plane, so he can't see it. His only indication would be that an enemy radar had locked on to him or none at all if it's an IF missile. So he wouldn't know where the missile is or even if a missile had been fired at all.
Secondly, pilots don't eject from an undamaged planes when they think a missile is going to hit them

Use a bit of common sense or read up on the subject some more

He would have a missile warning system even if it was an IR missile, and if it was radar guided then his RWR would be going nuts telling him he was locked up and a missile was in the air.

Originally posted by Zaphod58
He would have a missile warning system even if it was an IR missile, and if it was radar guided then his RWR would be going nuts telling him he was locked up and a missile was in the air.

Ahh so .... ? He still doesn't know the position of the missile, so how could he possible know when to eject. As I said before a pilot never ejects because he might get hit, he ejects because his plane is hit.
Besides a missile moving at mach 3 moves about 1km a second, so he would have had to decided to eject when the missile was still several km's away.

Just doesn't make sense.

I agree that it doesn't make sense, and it's probably faked. Just clearing up that he wouldn't have any warning if it was an IR missile.

I think that picture is a fake because the F-15 would have to be really really low for that missile to come in straight up like that. Most SAM’s come in at an angle or from behind depending on the altitude of the aircraft. The F-15 seems to me to be flying in level, again, not something you would expect if an aircraft was locked on by a SAM.

To be honest I think someone just took a test picture of an F-15 testing its ejection seats and pasted or smudged a “missile” underneath it.

I measured the size of the “missile” by pixillation and compared it to the F-15 and by my measurement its too big to be a Patriot missile. The missile in question is at least 20 feet in length while the patriot is about 17 feet. This also rules out that its an A2A missile, first its way too big to be an A2A missile and no F-15 has ever been lost in A2A combat.

The only Russian SAM’s that have that length and the timeline in which this could have happened are the SA-6 and SA-10.

Also, there have only been three F-15’s lost in action, all three were E versions. Two were lost in 91 and one in 03. One F-15E was shot down in 91 the other crashed due to navigational problems, the one in 03 was shot down. If I remember correctly only one F-15 pilot survived in 91 out of the two losses, and there were no survivors in the 03 incident.

[edit on 19-2-2006 by WestPoint23]

I initially thought it was fake to, but missile launch warning receivers have been know to fail. And are you so sure that the pilot would die? I was reading something in Pop Sci about ejection seats, and those things travel so fast that they can just about get you out of anything at any time. At least the ACERS II/III can. But I am slightly skeptical as to why the pilot ejected so late.

Of course, how do you know that he wasn't maneuvering? It's not like a pilots going to eject half-way though a 6G split-S. A photo only captures a picture at one point in time. Wish it were video.

But WestPoint23, you have a very good point. If only three have been lost in operational combat, where the hell was this taken? An illegal excursion into NK?

But this 20 feet to 17 feet argument isn't very strong. As sovtek stated, patriot missiles travel at Mach 5, so of course there's going to be motion blur, perhaps 3 foot of it.

Keep in mind only two F-15’s have ever been shot down.

So I was just thinking, unless this was some type of arranged test which it can’t be because they don’t use real people for tests how would one snap that picture at that precise time so close to the aircraft unless they had high grade pre set cameras?

There are only two possibilities, one it’s a fake, or two it’s a photo of a test with dummies instead of pilots. Personally I think it’s a fake but it could be a test photo, it certainly isn’t an actual photo of an F-15 being shot down.


[edit on 19-2-2006 by WestPoint23]

It's strange that only 2 Eagles have ever been shot down(I'm glad only 2 have been, I wouldn't want to see more get downed, god knows we don't need more men getting tore up) when it is acknowledged by the Air Force that aircraft such as the MiG-29, Su-27(advanced variants), Eurofighter, Rafale, etc... are superior to it. Makes me wonder what the Eagle has really been up against these past few decades.(Me thinks MiG-21s)

Shattered OUT...

They've gone up against Mig-29s, 25s, SU-27s, and a lot of other things. Just because they CAN beat an F-15 doesn't mean that they WILL beat an F-15 every time.

Originally posted by Zaphod58
They've gone up against Mig-29s, 25s, SU-27s, and a lot of other things. Just because they CAN beat an F-15 doesn't mean that they WILL beat an F-15 every time.

Su-27s??!
You sure about that ?
When did that happen?
The only Su-27s to have seen combat IMO were the ERitrean ones..

No, you're right my mistake. It was SU-25s, Mig-29s, 25s, 21s.

WestPoint23,

>>
... how would one snap that picture at that precise time so close to the aircraft unless they had high grade pre set cameras?
>>

Actually some of the most stunning footage there exists of air combat comes from EOCG tracking adjuncts installed on everything from SA-2 to HAWK. Nearly all the lighterweight (i.e. effective and survivable) ADV based systems use this mode almost exclusively because missiles can be fired to a late gather and then 'snap' correct with only 2-3 seconds of warnng as the tether goes taught..

We'll never get to see it (if only for 'marketing reasons') but it does exist. Occasionally someone will get sloppy and show the roughly equivalent range tracking cameras in action out at Fallon or Nellis.

And the one thing that strikes you (other than the now-color brilliant clarity of the footage) is _how easy_ it is to keep even an aircraft which junior jet ranger is 'moving' with near constant, random, applications of G, under a set of optical cross hairs.

That said, there is no reason to assume that this is not, exactly as you state, a digitally merged fake.


KPl.

Originally posted by ch1466
Actually some of the most stunning footage there exists of air combat comes from EOCG tracking adjuncts installed on everything from SA-2 to HAWK. Nearly all the lighterweight (i.e. effective and survivable) ADV based systems use this mode almost exclusively because missiles can be fired to a late gather and then 'snap' correct with only 2-3 seconds of warnng as the tether goes taught..

WTF are you talking about. I am fairly well versed in military affairs, however I have a hard time understanding what you're talking about most of the time. You talk in a kind of pigeon english making what you're trying to say very hard to follow.
At least in this post you aren't sprouting acronyms left right and centre.

PS. You'd garner much more respect if you thought out your posts more - make them more coherent.

One more thing, if this picture is indeed real the missile cannot be a Patriot unless its a post 91 version. Pre 91 versions had a proximity fuse warhead. Meaning that just before impact the warhead would blow up in front of the missile spraying its target with debris. As you can see from the picture the missile is close enough so that if it was a patriot it would have gone off.