Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

I've just seen it a few moments ago on the BBC and so far i've only found one news report online but as the title says apparently a NATO aircraft shot down a SCUD! Now i've never ever heard of this happening for real, can it be true or is it more likely that a reporter has bungled the story?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/ ... 6X20110822

EDIT: US DOD offical has confirmed it but not said what type bagged the kill, exciting!

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why not. just takes a crew in the right place/time.

You'd have to get the sucker in its boost/launch phase, but I see no reason for this to be impossible. An AMRAAM can reach M4.0, a SCUD would take a bit to acheive this. Absolutely doable and something that should result in some neat nose art. SCUD SLAYER! Laughing

If true, this marks a new capability that I hadn't considered. I'm curious to know how close the fighter was to the launch, and if knocking down missiles was its assigned mission (as opposed to a lucky, quick thinking pilot acting on his own initiative).

Any possibility it's a Styx modified for SSM use?

Had a look for more info this morning but nothing new on this. I suspect we'll have to wait until a journalist asks the right questions to the right people if we're to find out more, if they even ask at all that is as they might not realise the historical significance of the event.

Who knows, maybe it wasn't shot down in flight but in fact destroyed on the ground. SCUDs are rather big however and have a high IR signature in their boosting phase as well, so in theory it's certainly possible. Maybe we'll learn more in the future.

I read an early article in which the official statement was about a NATO aircraft INTERCEPTING a SCUD.

I think journalists simply misunderstood the "intercept" part, that is actually very misleading.

My opinion is the pilot saw the SCUD launch vissually or evenually on the radar and reported it to the Command and Control. Maybe it was even not a fighter jet, but an AWACS which recorded the missile launch.

Remember that for the avarage people out there who do not know much of military tactics and capabilities, Hollywood movies rule.

marco9 wrote:

Remember that for the avarage people out there who do not know much of military tactics and capabilities, Hollywood movies rule.

I agrere completely with that, it's much like how reporters count anything with tracks as a tank. However with this case its rather unusual as no journalist has ever credited an aircraft with knocking down a scud before and according to Reuters they confirmed the story with a US DOD official. From that I don't think its clear cut that it wasn't shot down by an aircraft, not yet anyway.

Wouldn't be the first incident in Libya. If one remembers the early reports about Rafales shooting down a Lybian AF aircraft (G-2 Galeb). It turned out that the aircraft already landed and was in fact destroyed with a bomb on the ground and not shot down in flight as previously reported. It wouldn't surprise me if it's a similar case here.

No mention about this shooting down in the NATO Key Hits list for August 22nd. Let's wait for the list they'll provide tomorrow, but I really doubt that any direct action was taken a part from monitoring the SSM either visually or on the radar.

Scorpion82 wrote:

Who knows, maybe it wasn't shot down in flight but in fact destroyed on the ground. SCUDs are rather big however and have a high IR signature in their boosting phase as well, so in theory it's certainly possible. Maybe we'll learn more in the future.

Quote:

A NATO warplane shot down a scud missile fired from Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi's home city east of Tripoli, Al-Jazeera TV reported on Monday citing information received by one of its correspondents.

I'm not sure how one would interpret this as destroying it on the ground.

marco9 wrote:

I read an early article in which the official statement was about a NATO aircraft INTERCEPTING a SCUD.

I think journalists simply misunderstood the "intercept" part, that is actually very misleading.

My opinion is the pilot saw the SCUD launch vissually or evenually on the radar and reported it to the Command and Control. Maybe it was even not a fighter jet, but an AWACS which recorded the missile launch.

Remember that for the avarage people out there who do not know much of military tactics and capabilities, Hollywood movies rule.

We might not know for awhile. It probably didn't happen, but if it did, it's unlikely that most journalists would understand the implications, and the military would be happy to keep a lid on such capability.

And so far the only, report. unconfirmed, has come from Al-Jazeera. Everyone else is camping onto that.

Scuds don't fly at a particularly high altitude.

Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

Can this be true.. (NATO aircraft shoots down a SCUD!)