Re: KAL007 Coldwar Mystery

In article <11uekev4v0ua822@corp.supernews.com>, Pat Flannery says...

>Fred J. McCall wrote:

>>:Key words: "F-14A configured like the ones we sold to the Iranians"
>>:The Iranians could have modified it. I've never seen a photo of one, but
>>:the Iranians were supposed to have modified their F-14s to carry Hawk
>>:SAMs in an air to air mode in place of the Phoenix missiles.

>>Which didn't work for shit, by the way. The AWG-9 in no way gives
>>guidance to HAWK.

>>:If they could pull that stunt off,

>>They couldn't.

>>:hanging bombs on it would be a piece
>>:of cake by comparison.

>>And hitting anything with them without ANY kind of air-to-ground
>>aiming system would take a bloody miracle!

>>There's much more to strike warfare than just hanging ordnance on the
>>airplane.

>This is almost cruel to do, but look:
>http://www.afwing.com/gallery/iran/7.jpg
>Here's one in flight with a Hawk on it:
>http://www.afwing.com/gallery/iran/6.jpg
>I assume they modified the Hawk's homing system so that it worked on the
>AWG-9's frequency as a giant SARH missile.

My recollection is that the air-launched HAWK was an air-to-surface
anti-radiation missile. That's a plausible hack, and wouldn't require
any help from the launching aircraft's radar.

It's also irrelevant. There is no such thing as an aircraft you can
point at and say, "not a threat because that model doesn't carry air
to surface ordnance." Modern antiship missiles, in particular, need
very little in the way of integration if you are willing to accept a
bit of risk, and there are a whole lot of aircraft/missile combinations
in service that don't appear in the user's manual for either the aircraft
or the missile.

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