nettles wrote:Thankyou for making that plainly clear. One last question, what about speed setting? On commercial airliners, this is set by a knob. On Fighter jets, is speed only set by a knob as well? If so, during a dog-fight, as soon as the fight is over, this would meen you would have to reset speed and re-apply thrust under a dialed in setting to avoid going down into enemy territory in the event of a flame-out caues by over stressing the engines. This to seems less effecient if that is the case.
Nothing in a fighter is anything like the automation you would find in a transport cat aircraft. No FD, no intrusive auto throttles or automation for that matter. You set your speed with movement of your left hand on the throttles. Autothrottles are a thing in a very basic form, i.e. capturing a mach number generally speaking, but that is definitely not used tactically. In modern engines, you can be at MAX afterburner for a very long time and not have any worry about "over stressing" them. I've had many flights in my career that were mostly full AB, especially in my short few years flying the Viper. I might use auto throttles and baro alt hold transiting to and from where I am working, but other than that, I'm hand flying and there is nothing automated about it. Same for instrument approaches.....all 100% hand flown.
On the theme of engines, we don't use thrust reduction for anything. You can see EPR on a specific page on a DDI, but it isn't noted on the normal engine instruments, and it has no application in any phase of flight. Every field takeoff for us is full afterburner for example.