this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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[–] Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

keep in mind that missiles have to spend their energy maneuvering just like jets do. so an agile aircraft with a well-trained pilot has a pretty fair chance of evading any single missile shot at it.

[–] bluGill@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Missiles can pull g forces that would kill a human.

and yet, many fighter pilots since they were invented around the end of WW2 have managed to dodge them. missiles don't chase their targets, they don't have the fuel to. they use something called proportional navigation to aim for where they believe their target will be in order to make their apparent movement disappear. a sidewinder, for example, has 15 seconds of fuel. after that, it's a glider. if the pilot doesn't feel like dying that particular day, and they dodge at the right time, the missile misses and lacks the speed to catch the jet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_navigation

if you want examples of how pilots use aggressive maneuvers to evade missiles, there are plenty of videos on YouTube about the subject, including some from Desert Storm that feature the F-16. or head over to the War Thunder forums, there's plenty of nerds there who would love to spend days leaking classified military documents and info-dumping on you.

[–] fist_of_fartitude@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The missiles are smaller, faster, and don't have to keep a human alive inside.

[–] Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

the missiles have as little as 5 seconds of fuel, make most of their attack run as gliders, and lack brains to do more than programmatically guess at where their target will decide to be. they aren't intelligent, and don't understand physics.

I'm gonna tell you the same thing I told the other person. while getting shot at is a life and death situation, a well-trained pilot in an agile aircraft might dodge missiles even without chaff and flares, using nothing but the skin of their teeth and their many hours of training on how proportional navigation works.

[–] Burstar@sopuli.xyz 3 points 22 hours ago

I think the confusion is that the techniques employed are to tire the missile out, not dodge them. It is possible to dodge in some cases, but, this is due to limitations in missile's radar (and/or energy) far more than the fighter outmaneuvering something that can do 20g turns at mach 7. Thus, the maneuverability metric that originally brought on this entire conversation is not nearly as beneficial as described as they don't need to turn on a dime, just in the right direction at the right time.