From Wester sources...
The Yom Kippur War began on Saturday, October 6, 1973, with an attack by Syrian MiG-17s on Israeli positions on the Golan Heights, followed by an assault by 700 Syrian tanks. Simultaneously, Egyptian forces launched an assault across the Suez Canal. Total surprise was achieved, and Israel was suddenly faced with the greatest threat to its existence since the War of Independence of 1948.
In the opening Egyptian attack on October 6, 1973, a pair of Phantoms were able to scramble and shoot down seven enemy aircraft. On the same day, Phantoms intercepted Mil Mi-8 helicopters attempting to land commandos in Sinai, and destroyed five of them.
On October 7, Phantoms launched an attack against Syrian SAM sites, but the Syrian forces were now equipped with the new Soviet-built SA-6 Gainful mobile surface-to-air missile. Syrian forces were also equipped with ZSU-23 mobile radar-controlled anti-aircraft artillery. The SAM-6/ZSU-23 combination proved deadly. No less than six Phantoms and thirty A-4 Skyhawks were lost in this single day. Very few of their pilots manage to escape by parachute. At one time, the Israelis were losing three out of every five aircraft they were sending over Golan. These losses were clearly unsupportable, and Chief of Staff Elazer was forced to temporarily abandon air strikes over Golan in mid-afternoon.
The SA-6 was an unpleasant surprise to the Israelis. Israeli electronic countermeasures had been designed to counter the earlier SA-2 and SA-3 radar-guided missiles that had been encountered by the Americans in Vietnam, but these techniques were useless against the SA-6. Earlier Soviet SAMs had used command guidance throughout the entire flight of the missile, but the SA-6 homed in on CW energy reflected from the illuminated aircraft for the final approach to the target. The Straight Flush radar that guided the SA-6 operated over a much wider bandwidth than did the earlier Soviet radars, and used D-band for illumination and G, H, and I/J-bands for initial acquisition and initial launch guidance. The Straight Flush codename is an apparent reference to the five frequencies used by the system. In the semi-active homing mode, the SA-6's homing head and rearward-facing reference antenna receive CW command signals in the I-band. Beacon signals from the missile are in G and H band.
The early part of the SA-6's flight was guided by radar, but the Straight Flush radar operated over a much wider bandwidth than that of the earlier Soviet missiles. The radar ranged over three separate frequencies during search, acquisition, tracking, and guidance. Before the war began, not enough was known about these frequencies or about the ability of the missile to switch between frequencies while in flight to throw off jamming transmissions. The ALR-36 radar warning receiver was of little use in picking up these radar signals, since these emissions were outside the band in which the ALR-36 was designed to operate. Consequently, Israeli aircraft found it very difficult to detect a SA-6 launch, and even more difficult to jam the missile while in flight.
One technique that was occasionally effective against SA-6 missile sites was to use dive-bombing attacks against them. When launched, the SA-6 took off at a relatively shallow angle which steepened as it climbed and accelerated. In order to take advantage of this weakness, the attacking plane would approach the site from a high altitude and then dive down on the battery as steeply as possible.
The fix for the SA-6 problem proved to be in figuring out a way to detect the launch. Hurried modifications of Israeli radar warning receivers were made in the field, assisted by a lot of people in the United States burning the midnight oil in trying to come up with a solution. By the third day of the war, equipment was in the field which could produce a reliable squeal in a pilot's earphone whenever a SA-6 launch occurred in his direction. If the SA-6 launch could be detected, violent evasive maneuvers were often effective in throwing it off the target. These maneuvers turned the side of the aircraft toward the incoming missile and sharpened the missile's turning angle. This would sometimes cause the SA-6 to lose its lock. Another tactic which sometimes worked was for two planes to carry out a "split-S" maneuver, with the lead plane diving sharply into and across the missile's approach while the following plane dove across the first plane's vapor trail. After the third day of the war, these techniques began to work and losses to SA-6s began to drop sharply.
Last edited by Hpasp; 12/09/12 01:31 PM.
