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“How to fly and fight in the MiG-29”
by Jon Lake
London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.
The MiG-29 radar contacts display is not anything like what pilots in the west have in their cockpits. The Russian radar is powerful and flexible but it lacks the on-board processing to give the pilot a decent, clear picture with the threats ana-lyzed and prioritized, stuff that we take for granted. Even though the MiG-29 radar has a fairly good detection capability, the situational awareness that the Russian pilot gets is nowhere near what the F-16 pilot gets. The MiG-29 pilot has a very hard time knowing who he has locked on to and what the situation is. Therefore, the Western pilot enjoys a significant situational awareness advantage. This means that a plane of ours could quite often get into the fight unnoticed by our opponents because their system would not permit them to see the whole engagement. As the MiG-29 pilot enters a BVR, all he knows is range and he gets a little tick on his radar scope showing that his target is within missile range parameters. The Russians put the radar projection into the HUD but it is like stick-ing a transparent map up in front of the HUD. The radar display is not presented in a three-dimensional way with contacts appearing in the bit of sky where they actually ap-pear. As an F-16 pilot, I personally think that is a waste. In the F-16 I don’t see a radar picture in the HUD, but we can have the position of a locked-up target displayed to us in space and that is much more useful. If I get a radar lock, the bore site cross on the top of the HUD gives me a locator line which tells me that my radar lock is, for example, 50 degrees left. The MiG-29 pilot doesn’t get that, all he gets is a radar image saying that he has got a lock here and he has to look to the scale on the left side to say where it is. His radar can look with the scan centered straight ahead, left or right but when the pilot looks in the HUD he cannot tell which direction the radar is looking in unless he remembers where he set the switch. Otherwise, he has to check it. So he might be flying straight ahead and the radar picture shows a contact straight ahead but in reality the target would not be straight ahead as the radar scan is looking sideway. This is just too much to worry about in the cockpit. We in the F-16 don’t have to think about it. In addition my HUD gives me updated information of airspeed, altitude, heading and weapons status. That’s why the MiGs are so reliant on GCI or AWACS control. Even the firing procedure in the Russian plane is much more labor-intensive. We get everything we need in the HUD. It tells us how far we can turn away and still provide the missile with guidance and the computer works out the time of the missile flight. A count-down clock automatically winds down in the HUD and we know when we can break away completely. Our opponents don’t have that. Their old-fashioned equipment is hardly high-tech stuff.