Don't know why this wasn't mentioned, maybe because of the possibility of it getting hijacked into PWEC but....

The F/A-18 Super Hornet got its first air to air kill a few days ago! And this wasn't the only first kill--it was also the first air to air kill by a US fighter in 18 years!

First Kill in 18 Years

Neato.

v6,
boNes

Oh, it was mentioned. A certain someone couldn't resist killing the thread.

Ah...I wonder what the kill method was. It would be so cool if it was a guns kill.

v6,
boNes

Posted a few days ago, I asked that the discussion not go into PWEC territory but one certain poster almost immediately purposefully made it PWEC and was suspended for 2 weeks.

Most likely a slammer as I'm sure they wouldn't have been that close.

AIM-120 would be my guess as well.

I saw a reference that an F-15E shot down a drone as well. I sure hope it was a guns kill rather than wasting a SLAMMER. Wouldn't think the drone would have a good heat signature for an AIM-9.

Drone shootdown

Yeah, unlike that US ally that shot down a drone with a Patriot missile.

v6,
boNes

unless you feel this goes into pwec, can you tell me why is this a big deal ? kinda sound like a virginity thing.
also this whole syria stuff is confusing,so the us fired over a syrian aircraft acording to rules of engament in their own territory ,what ?
has that country completely colapsed ? i though there was still a governament and the only diversion was who side to side against isis,governament backed or separatists.

Because the Super hornet has never gotten an air to air kill until then. So yes, to some extent it's a virginity thing.

It did not come without some hiccups though. Details have been released about the shootdown method. An AIM-9X was fired first, then the kill was with an AMRAAM:

Shootdown Details

v6,
boNes

9X was defeated.... by FLARES?!?!?!


Huh. Someone needs to set up an inquiry to find out why, since the 9X is supposed to reject decoys like flares easily. That's it's claim to fame. If it can't do that, maybe we need to go back to 9L's from the 1980's. At least one might think they would be cheaper.

Missiles aren't cheap, need to make sure they work as advertised.

Slammer's proven. And proven to be very good. 9X needs to step up to the plate bigtime, Basic flares shouldn't defeat it.

Yes, well according to the article it was because they were testing them against US flares. So, they were tuned to reject those. But since in the real world they are facing non-US made flares, well, now they're not tuned against those so they fail. Problem even existed in the 80s, as we really did not have a way to get Soviet flares to be able to tune the Sidewinder to those until the flares from the Frogfoot was procured by the CIA.

v6,
boNes

Its been a running theme for over 70 years now where key U.S. systems tend to end up being technologically compromised early on, whereas the U.S. usually isn't able to get its hands on equivalent Russian technical data until the system in question has been around for a while. Heck, U.S. intel didn't even find out about the AK-47 until it'd been in service for almost a decade!

This mostly one-way technical intelligence street means that the Russians are of course free to tailor their gear around the known weaknesses of the U.S. systems that they were designed to face, both in technical and doctrinal terms.

They put a lot of effort into preserving technological surprise for their forces, and I would guess that they aren't especially happy right now that its been demonstrated how effective their multispectral flares are, I doubt they were expecting them be employed against anything more advanced than some ageing donated Stingers when they gave them to Syrians.