Posted by throwawayffffas 5 hours ago
stares at wingman angrily
I get the concern, but i would remmeber to attribute it to incompetance rather than malice. And from my understanding, there is no shorten of incompetance among gulf arab militaries
Another fighter pilot’s analysis, seen in video below, questions whether the Kuwaiti pilot might even have gone rogue against an ally. That actually seems possible based on the evidence, but it is hard to believe.
The fact that _three_ were shot down using air-to-air missiles is the clincher.
> In January 2026, the United States government suspended immigrant visas for citizens of Kuwait and 74 other countries due to the high dependency of Kuwaiti immigrants on American welfare benefits.[219] Kuwait is the only GCC country on the visa suspension list.[219]
It's also important to note that these are not democracies. The state frequently does things that people aren't entirely happy with, it's only when the people (or religious leaders!) become sufficiently unhappy that it becomes a problem.
That's not similar to Kuwait, a country that has a recent history of being taken over by its largest neighbor and saved by the US
I'm certainly not religious, but it feels rather cynical to make fun of this.
Oh yeah, it's a superpower in-practice actually. Alhamdulilah!
Then it jumps to incredulity that it could happen 3 times.
I don't know why it's so hard to imagine someone pulling a trigger 3 times.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Kuwaiti Air Force switches to ground controlled intercept only after this.
There is also old timer thinking where back in the 50s/60s AIM-9L days it takes a good fraction of a minute for the compressed gas tank to cool the sensor and back in the day they used a rotating 1-D sensor that also took a fraction of a minute to lock on. Very popular hollywood-esque drama "I can't get a lock I can't get a lock" drama.
Unrealistically video game type experience was back as far as the 80s you could spam sidewinders as fast as you can click. LOL they didn't work like that IRL until at least the late 90s.
Note they haven't make missiles like that in 30 years, the 9X and everything newer uses an electric powered cooler that can chill before engagement and stays chilled the entire flight if they want. Its not unclassified but assumed that the missile will not go green on preflight if the electric cooler isn't working on the ground, even the DCS world guys don't know. And they haven't used rotating 1-d sensors since like the 80s, the modern 2-d sensors look like civilian thermal cameras and can "lock on" as fast as a computer algorithm can find the closest object to the center of the sensor that is red-hot, which is probably a couple milliseconds, and apparently based on public test videos the sensor slew rate is at least as fast as human hands pointing a camera. Does anyone make CCD arrays that can go "much faster" refresh than 60 hz for video? I don't think that tech has leaked out except for exotic high speed cameras, and I don't know of any exotic high speed IR cameras, which would be pretty interesting if they existed for engineering purposes. So I bet a AIM-9X takes less than a second to lock on. Which seems to match tons of public unclassified info that modern sidewinders are point and shoot fast as a civilian smartphone or real camera.
So if you're an old timer using 1970s equipment it would take at least 10 to 45 seconds per missile launch which makes for a WTF scenario when 3 friendlies got shot down in a row.
So if you are post Y2K era like we are today, you click lock on lock on boresight mode, click the re lock button on and shoot on each target, the entire engagement took probably about 3 seconds depending on adrenaline level?
There's plenty of public unclassified test video out there and the difference between 90s and 10s IR guided missiles "UI" is pretty dramatic. From near WWI submarine torpedo level of drama and delay to just point and click about that fast. It was a pretty big change tactically.
There's open source intel on google that Iran has SU-27s. Under combat conditions you have an instant to tell them apart. Clearly, its possible to misidentify them at least one time historically as the F-15s did get shot down.
I can assure you from having flown around a lot, if you are wildly outnumbered 3 SU-27 (err, F15) to your 1 F-18 you do not attempt a radar lock you do an IR only attack. The article mentions getting a radar lock first but that is unnecessary for IR guided weapons and in a 3-1 situation will just get you shot down.
Waiting for confirmation from the ground means 1 of the 3 will surely notice and you will be shot down.
Ironically if it were a flight of 4 F-18 they'd probably not have been as skittish at radar locking a mere 3 aircraft and the IFF (assuming its probably configured and working etc) would have informed them they're friendlies. IFF can only tell you if everything on both sides is working perfectly and powered up, if you don't get a friendly response all you know is it didn't work. Not unlike a network ping command. If ping works you know they're up and accepting pings from you, if ping doesn't work, you don't really know anything for sure.
Possibly the primary fault was the Kuwaiti lack of situational awareness. Somehow he's in shoot down range of three other A/C and he's got maybe 3 to 5 seconds to shoot them down or be shot down himself.
Somehow there is no discussion on what both A/C were doing. Usually a landing on an airfield would not look like a bombing run but possibly the F15s were doing something "weird" for which they could be blamed. The total censorship of what they were doing points to them being up to something dumb "lets buzz the airfield during active combat would could possibly go wrong" and they get shot down for looking like an attack run. Or a mix up where there's a published ahead of time safe altitude window around 15K but these guys for who knows why were 1000 feet off the ground doing who knows what. Maybe they had a good tactical reason to do it but its damning that nothing is being reported as an excuse.
Clearly any passive IR detector thats theorized to exist for years either doesn't exist or doesn't work very well. In theory, a smart enough IR camera should be able to notice something very warm indeed is getting rapidly brighter as it approaches you. In practice, these don't exist, or don't work. "Oh yeah they didn't have those when I was in, but they totally have them now" for the last 30 years. Apparently, not yet in 2026.
I find it unfortunate that people who do this for a living can't legally comment, people who do this for a hobby are not asked or actively ignored despite extensive practical experience, and people who mostly have a grift of looking authoritative for legacy media get automatic blind belief despite sometimes spouting total nonsense. This is the typical journalistic response in ALL disaster situations not just military aviation.
Slaving heatseekers to radar is the standard way of employing them. I reckon by "having flown around" you're referring to DCS, which is absolutely unrealistic when it comes to engagements.
>Clearly any passive IR detector thats theorized to exist for years either doesn't exist or doesn't work very well. In theory, a smart enough IR camera should be able to notice something very warm indeed is getting rapidly brighter as it approaches you. In practice, these don't exist, or don't work. "Oh yeah they didn't have those when I was in, but they totally have them now" for the last 30 years. Apparently, not yet in 2026.
MAWS exist and they're employed on a lot of aircraft. I don't believe Strike Eagles have them though. An F-35 would get a missile warning for a heatseeker, it's not science fiction technology for quite a while now.
>I find it unfortunate that people who do this for a living can't legally comment, people who do this for a hobby are not asked or actively ignored despite extensive practical experience, and people who mostly have a grift of looking authoritative for legacy media get automatic blind belief despite sometimes spouting total nonsense.
You don't get practical experience by playing flight simulators, it's not comparable to how planes are employed as weapons systems.
Countermeasure AN/ALE-47
I don't think they had radar lock, I think they were firing IR missiles. They wouldn't have had much time to respond, and IR missiles are normally much smaller than beyond visual range radar missiles, which would explain how all 6 pilots survived.
Rumor is there was a problem with the IFF identification system sync. If that's true, the Kuwaiti pilot just saw 3 jets coming into their airspace with no IFF working, under a very compressed timeframe with lots of inbound UAS and potentially aircraft.
I could see some logic in not putting cams pointing forward because theoretically the pilot is looking where they're going and not putting one facing back because flight time to impact is so low they can't evade anyway, but a side attack is survivable if detected early enough... Also facing back they're going to be "seeing" their own exhaust most of the time.
The total non-reaction by the pilots in the public videos would indicate that if those planes even had -57s they were not working or not working well enough to matter or not working fast enough to matter.
I would agree some monster sized BVR missile will be easier to detect. In practice does it matter if the missile detector works at short range if the attacker would likely be in guns mode at short enough range anyway?