Countermeasures

Is a flare or chaff better in a dog fight? What’s a good program for dogfight? I’m trying to pass a mission with 3 mig 29’s with my wingman shot down. I can’t seem to evade these missiles. It doesn’t help have to wait ROE weapons hold. Any thoughts? I had not stop tones. At first I thought they were air defense until I was able to visualize one of the Migs. I ended getting shot down with no missiles lock tone.

It depends what kind of missile they fire at you! If you are close range chances are it’s a heat seeker so you need flares. The fact you are getting no launch warning further confirms heat seeker.

Chaff and flares are not a “magic bullet” though. You can’t just defeat a missile by popping these.

chaff - for radar guided missiles

flares - for infrared guided missiles

just popping them only works for older missiles, if you want to avoid something newer (R-77, AMRAAM, ...), you'll have to combine it with some maneuvers (notching, ...)

Me and a friend play a private mission which has a mix of SAM's and AA targets. I tend to have a burst of both 4 - 6 with an interval of 0.25 Secs. As said by others add in some manoeuvres and it greatly increases chance of survival. Watching a video of Youtube user "Pickinthatbanjo", he gives good tutorials and analysis using Tacview and game footage. I learned from him, having short bursts and releasing CM's when changing aspect is best way to fool missiles - generally speaking.

Is a flare or chaff better in a dog fight?

Chaff and Flare are not the same thing, than in sense that both are released from aircraft

There are mainly two kind missiles, IR that are heat seekers, and radar guided that use radar to find you

The flares are generating lots of heat quickly, and idea is that the IR seeker would find it and seek to it. The chaff is lots of scattered metal fabric pieces that gets scattered in the air and that "cloud of metal" will then reflect the radar signals back and blocks the radar capability see through it and radar seeking missile can confuse chaff cloud as target because it reflects back more radar signals.

Both chaff and flare are currently simulated same manner in the DCS, while they shouldn't. A chaff has a lifetime just a second or two while it should stay up in the air for hours or days and scatter across the sky, blocking all radar signals through it or making more difficult to them pass through it. Why chaff release would be really disallowed as it doesn't care what or whom radar is searching the sky, it will interfere with all of them.

The flare is not either correctly model, as USA and Soviets flares were different kinds, burning at different temperature, other was "by the specs" built while other had variation with each flare so IR seekers saw a multiple different kinds on each flare and so on had even more trouble to identify what is the original heat source (your engine) as each flare could burn at slightly different way.

The general rule of thumb would be that BLUFOR flares were good to reject BLUFOR flares but loved the REDFOD flares. And REDFOR flares loved BLUFOR flares but rejected well REDFOR flares. Reason was that both sides tested their missiles against their own flares, so designed well to ignore those.

A chaff should work best when you get it released between you and the radar / missile, as it can't see through it. Even when the chaff speed would soon drop to zero, it can't be cancelled out by radar filter as the radar waves do not get through it (first they need to go through it toward target, then the wave hit the target and bounce back toward the radar and get through the chaff again, each passing would simply get bounced to pieces so no signal gets through).

The flare is little similar, but what you want is that flare is passed through you and your engines and then rapidly away from you. As the missile will fly toward it.

One of the differences is too that the chaff should cause a radar guided missile to blow if it uses a radar proximity fuze, as the proximity fuze detects the chaff as close by aircraft and gets triggered.

While flare doesn't do anything like that for IR seeker, as the IR seeker has as well a proximity fuze, but flare doesn't cause such proximity sensor detection. And this is why chaff could as well work against a IR missiles with radar proximity fuze as the IR seeker doesn't know how far the target is, only its direction, and proximity fuze is waiting to get close. But different proximity fuzes based laser, IR or magnetism doesn't get fooled by chaff.

At first I thought they were air defense until I was able to visualize one of the Migs. I ended getting shot down with no missiles lock tone.

The Migs were using a IR seeker missiles against you. You don't get a warning as they can use a optical search device (IRST) that is front of the cockpit to find you from very long range if the weather allows. And then they can just estimate your range to launch their R-27T or R-73 missiles.

Your only way to find those if they fly radars turned off, by visually spot them, and then do the maneuvers and release flare.

Lucky for you, if they use those IR seekers, you can just dump many flares as in DCS each flare and chaff works only as a multiplier for missile to get them tracking those instead you (lose a lock). Like if each flare has a 0.2x change per second to get missile locking to it, then if you dump out 5 flares, then that is much higher probability (0.66x) that missile seeker will lock to them in the DCS logic. That is a known limitation in the current DCS design (until we get a missile seeker FOV's, their logic corrected to reject counter measures by their position, trajectories etc, instead work just as a multiplier to lose a lock).

So your biggest aim when taking a hit from any form of missile is to make it have to waste energy and/or loose lock/track, as others have mentioned the loss of lock/track is done with Chaff for Radar guided and Flare for Heat, however with out doing anything but dropping these your chances of survival are .. well low.

Now before i continue here I'm going to cavet what i'm saying with 'This is if your DEFENSIVE' if you want to remain OFFENSIVE then you need to start looking at F-POLE and other means.

- Radar Threat -

Your primary aim against a radar threat is to confuse the seeker into locking onto something else (The Chaff ideally) or to loose you completely, failing this you want to: 1. Make it run out of energy, 2. make it drive into the ground.

To achieve this the normal means is to first put the radar itself on the beam, turn so your 3 or 9 is at the threat, this starts a notch, which as other great videos will explain will depending on the type of radar used reduce your doppler shift which in turn tends to have the radar think your part of the ground clutter. Once you have started the notch typically drop 1 - 4 bundles of chaff, at the same time you want to ELBOW on the vertical plane, this is exactly what it sounds like imagin your plane is at your shoulder and you want to get to your hand, roll and pull down at 90 degree's, loose a bit of altitude then pull back level again dropping chaff when you do. the goal in this is to confuse the seeker head and also to force the missile to use energy to follow you if it has to.

If the missile has not been able to be defeated before it goes active and has enough energy to meet you..

1. keep notching and elbowing unless you don't have enough altitude in which case try and mask yourself if you can.

2. In the last few seconds remember you HAVE the paddle switch, it's better to bend the bird by over-g then it is to die, a rapid move in the vertical (and preferably the horizontal plane) at the last few moments can cause enough of an angular change in vector that the missile can not turn to compensate given its running by this stage on pure ballastic energy (hopefully).

-- Heat --

Against a heat seeker you have the issue that your biggest source of heat is also your means of thrust and 9/10 your going to be in burners or something when they are launched at you.. Presuming you see the missile launch and know it's coming first.. unless it's an AIM-9X ou should have been trying to keep him out of your 6 ;) but you want to dump flares (Sequence is up to you .. i tend to do 2 then 2 about 1/2 a second apart or so) while both trying to create as much angular Aspect change as possible and if i'm in burners cutting them instantly.. The missiles aren't likely to change their target if I'm showing them 2 F404's in Afterburner vs 2 flares..

--Electro Optical---

Russian SAMS and Jets especially can carry Electro-Optical weapons.. or basically visual guided the issue here is you can't tell if they are or not so basically you have to treat them like IR, and just try and defeat them using aspect and energy.

How do i fire off chaff and flares - can't understand how to release them ?? can anyone guide me to the right button selection please

DLC TOGGLE/ Countermeasure Dispense in controls. I have mine mapped to my stick.

Oh sorry. That’s for the F-14B. I didn’t see you were referring to F/A 18.

How do i fire off chaff and flares - can't understand how to release them ?? can anyone guide me to the right button selection please

Read the manual for full details, but the things to do are to turn the DISPENSE switch to ON, and the CM MODE on the RWR page to MAN, S/A (Semi-auto) or AUTO. If you don't do those then repeatedly pressing the CM AFT button (that causes the CM program to run) won't do anything (as I discovered to my horror when SAM inbound :().

TIp regarding chaff and flare in DCS f18c

I did some study of how many chaff you need to "comfuse" an enemy sam missile ( radar guided missiles )

It seem that you need to drop minimum 5-6 chaff to have a good defensive effect.

Example set your hornet to drop 2 chaff every 1 second, repeat 3 times.

The same goes with flares defending against IR missiles.. drop example 3 flares in 1 second.

The above will make your chances of survival much higher than if you just dump 1 flare or 1 chaff its rarely enough.

In case still struggling