Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 7 - Fighter - full transcript

You're watching the Military Channel.

Go behind the lines.

The evolution of weapons is simple.

They go faster, they hit harder, and they hang around longer.

Stand still for one second, and you're dead.

On the battlefield, nothing is faster than jet fighters.

At speeds of over 1,000 miles per hour, these birds can pull some serious Gs.

Flip off that safety, and the fighter becomes the only combat system that can
target and destroy every other battlefield weapon.

Tanks, choppers, bunkers, factories, convoys, and even enemy planes.

When I got in range, I started firing, and I saw hits in his left engine.

Get ready to go supersonic as we go back through generations of technology to
find out how fighters became the best of the best.



It's time to go ballistic.

Fighter planes are the cutting edge of the world's air forces.

Within the last hundred years, they have evolved into the most sophisticated war
machines ever designed by man.

The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is one of the latest and best.

The F-22 is truly the ultimate fighter.

The first commercially produced stealth fighter, it comes with a world record
price tag of $120 million.

Capable of speeds up to 1,600 miles per hour, its weapons bays are concealed
internally, reducing drag on the airframe and enhancing its stealth capacity.

Its stunning performance has resulted in it becoming a multi-role platform, air
to air, air to ground, fast interception, and electronic warfare.

The F-22 can do it all.

Now, weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology to reveal how engines, armament, airframes, maneuverability, and
survivability combined and evolved into the next generation of fighter aircraft,
the extraordinary F-22 Raptor.

In the 21st century, fixed wing fighters are the alpha and omega of aerial
warfare.

Rockets, bombs, missiles, they bring a lot of scary metal to the table, and it's
all guided right to and through your front door.

Rewind a hundred years and fighter planes didn't exist.

Aviation was in its infancy, and armies were still trying to work out how to
deploy them.



When World War I broke out, this mostly meant reconnaissance.

Initially aircraft actually in World War I were not used as fighters because
they were mainly used to provide an advantage by observing the enemy troop
dispositions.

But gradually, those who were in the air realized that if they could shoot down
the enemy's observers, that would give their own side the advantage.

German and British planes began attacking one another.

First, pilots used their service revolvers. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't very
effective.

The logical solution was to use fixed machine guns, but on an airframe enveloped
by wings and struts, this was no easy task.

When machine guns were positioned right in front of the cockpit, the propeller
presented a problem because it was spinning right in front of the line of fire.

A bullet fired at the enemy could destroy your propeller, causing your plane to
crash.

As this crude experiment illustrates, the bullet really does hit the fan.

This was a brief instant where one bullet from a Lewis Mark II machine gun
passed through the blade.

What was needed was a device which would enable the pilot to fire without
hitting his own plane.

Antony Falker, an inventor from the Netherlands, found the solution.

Known as the Flying Dutchman, his invention would revolutionize fighter planes.

Falker came up with an interrupter gear. It was a timing mechanism in which
whenever the machine gun bullet was getting to where it was firing,

whenever the machine gun was firing, it would interrupt the fire when the
propeller was in front of the machine gun.

The propeller is mounted here on the front. Engine turns, turning the propeller.

Now picture back here your cam. Smooth surface with a small hill or bump on it.

A vertical rod resting on the smooth surface with a series of hinges coming back
onto a horizontal rod.

When the bump on the cam raises the red following rod, the horizontal rod is
depressed against the spring in the breech block of the machine gun,

thus interrupting the fire.

The interrupter gear transformed planes into fighters.

Pilots could now fire their machine gun using a dedicated button on the control
column,

allowing them to simultaneously maneuver the airframe and take aim on enemy
targets.

It also meant that rear gunners were no longer a necessity, and increasingly air
forces began building solo fighters.

Thirty years later, more powerful engines resulted in a new generation of
deadlier fighters.

There's a stream of lead from the guns and he's got him. That's one down.

Increased engine power allowed the airframe to carry heavier weaponry.

In World War I, most planes had one or two machine guns.

By World War II, fighters like the American P-51 had six.

Its Browning M2 machine guns fired the large and very lethal 50 caliber bullet.

It held about 980 rounds of ammunition per side, so it was a very, very
effective combat weapon in air-to-air combat.

About every fourth or fifth shell was actually a tracer so that the combat pilot
could see the effective path of his bullets going towards the target.

Armed to the teeth, fighters from all sides became decisive battle winners.

Their machine guns could destroy other planes, carve up convoys, annihilate
tanks.

But with the advent of jet engines in the late 1940s, everything changed.

A new generation of fighters could now fly at 600 miles per hour.

In dogfights, the speeds were so fast the pilots found it harder to hit their
target with guns.

A faster weapon system was needed, something that could seek out and destroy
enemy fighters.

The solution? Missiles.

It looked like the aircraft armament of the future was going to be missiles.

Fire and forget missiles, over the horizon missiles.

You could fire a missile off of a fighter aircraft that would fly away and
destroy something you couldn't even see.

Wow!

In September 1956, the AIM-9 Sidewinder entered service.

The first effective air-to-air missile, it worked by homing in on an enemy
aircraft's heat signature, usually the exhaust or fuselage.

At twice the speed of sound and from distances out to 11 miles, it was lethal.

American F-4s could now ambush Russian MiGs way beyond their visual range.

The aircraft was developed to intercept a threat to the fleet as far away from
the fleet as you could get in all weather and without even seeing the bogey,
shoot it down.

The Sidewinder and the missiles that followed impressed the military.

Maybe now fighters wouldn't need conventional guns.

During the 1950s, a number of studies were done by the Pentagon and by the
military and they'd come to the conclusion that guns were obsolete in fighter
aircraft.

They believed fighter aircraft wouldn't get close enough to use guns.

And so the F-4 and other aircraft were designed with all missile armaments, no
guns.

But the Pentagon and the military had got it wrong.

In Vietnam, U.S. planes did get into close quarters combat.

Even worse, North Vietnamese pilots flying Russian MiGs discovered that the
American missiles had a major flaw.

One of the problems with a missile was that it has a minimum range that once you
fire it from the point of launch, it has to travel so far before it'll arm
itself.

Once you get within that minimum range, aircraft such as the F-4 with all
missile armaments is pretty much infinite.

North Vietnamese with the MiG-17 and the MiG-21 get within minimum range and
basically blow an F-4 out of the sky.

American designers went back to the drawing board.

In 1967, the E model of the F-4 took off with a 20-millimeter Vulcan cannon
mounted in its nose.

The kill ratio went up dramatically.

Today, modern planes like the F-15 carry a whole range of weapons, including
AMRAAM air-to-air missiles.

The F-15 is capable of carrying the Sidewinder missile as well as the AMRAAM on
the Wing Station pylons.

On the Thieselage, we can carry the AMRAAM as well as the AIM-7 Sparrow and then
the fighter pilot's favorite, the gun on the other side.

Spitfires, Mustangs, Hellcats, F-4s, MiGs, proven weapons, proven killers.

In just 40 years, an airframe barely capable of getting off the ground had
strapped on guns, bombs, and missiles to become a deadly assassin.

But to become an awesome supersonic fighter, it had to develop some internal
muscles.

The speed with which it webbed made it almost impossible for it to bring your
guns to bear on it.

Today's fighters are the fastest weapons on the battlefield.

The secret? Under the hood, they're packing some serious power.

The F-22 Raptor has two 35,000-pound thrust-class jet engines delivering a
maximum speed of 1,600 miles per hour.

Go back a century when the Wright brothers took off for the first manned flight,
their ground speed was no more than seven miles per hour.

They used a pusher engine placed behind the pilot.

Test and driven, the pusher did what it said on the can, pushed the aircraft
through the air.

Pusher engines were used early in World War I because it offered the pilot great
visibility by having the engine behind him.

He did not have to worry about the propeller spinning in front of him.

But having the engine and propeller right behind the pilot also had a
significant drawback.

The aircraft hit the ground or hit the water.

Since the engines were located behind the pilot, they would break free and come
down and land on the back of the pilot's neck and would correspondingly kill
him.

By the end of the First World War, the pusher was out.

Propellers went from the back to the front and the engine pulled the aircraft
through the air.

And with the invention of an interrupter gear in 1915, pilots could shoot
forwards through their propeller, eliminating the need for rear gunners.

As a result, fighters became lighter, smaller and faster.

Now, pilots wanted to fly higher.

In World War I, pilots had quickly established that height gave them an
advantage in dogfights and also provided safety from ground fire.

But existing engines struggled at altitude.

As an aircraft climbs, the air gets thinner.

Of course, there's less oxygen and on an engine, the power will drop off.

With the Allison engine, it had a power ceiling of about 15,000 feet.

The higher you go, the thinner the air gets, reducing the amount of oxygen
intake to the engine.

When mixed internally with the fuel, it's less combustible, resulting in less
power.

A solution was needed and designers soon found it.

Engines like the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin used a supercharger, an air
compressor that forced more air into the combustion chamber.

More air meant more oxygen. More oxygen meant more power. More power meant more
height.

Once you put the Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into the P-51, you
discover that it's capable of operating up to 40,000 feet.

Once you put the Merlin engine into the P-51, you find you can go at almost 440
miles an hour.

The key modification that turns the Mustang into the brilliant fighter aircraft
that it was, the key invention was sticking the right engine into that aircraft.

Equipped with the Merlin and extra fuel tanks, the P-51 could fly a phenomenal
seven and a half hours.

This meant it had the range to escort American bombers all the way to Germany
and back again.

They get rid of their long-range wing tanks before the fight and down they go
for the kill.

The story goes, once Guring looked up one day and saw the Mustangs in the
contrails overhead and said the war is lost.

The P-51 was one of the last fighter aircraft propelled by piston engines.

The Merlin had made it one of the fastest fighters on the block, but when the
first generation of jet engines hit the skies, the P-51 was history.

The origins of jet technology go back to the 1930s when scientists around the
world tried to find a faster engine.

One of them was a British RAF pilot, Frank Whittle.

He was studying the gas turbine to see whether it could be applied to
aeronautics as a means to drive the aeroplane propeller, but was finding that
this was really almost too difficult.

And then he perceived the turbojet and discovered that indeed jet propulsion
appeared to be the way to go.

Jet engines work by sucking in air at the front with a fan.

A compressor compresses the air before it's passed through a combustion chamber.

There, the air is sprayed with fuel and ignited.

The burning gases expand and blast out through the nozzle at the back, creating
thrust.

Today, most planes use jet engines, but in the 1930s, Whittle's pioneering work
was ignored by the British Air Ministry.

Even so, he didn't give up. In 1930, he patented the idea himself and continued
his research.

His way of fighting the war was to produce a turbojet aeroplane.

So all these wretched things that went on to stultify the development of the
turbojet in this country were very, very frustrating for him because he really
wanted to produce a war machine.

The clock ticked. Whittle's patent for the engine lapsed.

Around the same time, a German physicist, Hans von Ohain, started working on a
similar device, an engine capable of propelling an aircraft without a propeller.

For a long time after the war, Whittle insisted that Ohain had seen Whittle's
expired patent and had copied Whittle's invention and that he, Whittle, was the
inventor of the jet engine.

After the Second World War, the two of them get together, they discuss their
inventing processes, and both Ohain and Frank Whittle appear to have been
convinced that each of them developed the jet engine independently.

Whittle hoped his jet engine would help the Allies win the war, but it was the
Germans who won the race to produce the first operational jet fighter.

In the summer of 1944, they unleashed the Me 262.

Now that one would come out of nowhere actually, you know, and even the speed
with which it would have made it almost impossible for you to bring your guns to
bear on it.

The 262 had a top speed of 540 miles per hour, making it the fastest fighter in
the world.

But for all its extra speed, the 262 was not going to be a war winner. It came
too late, too few were built, and its maneuverability at lower speeds was
questionable.

In fact, American P-51s found they could sometimes catch and destroy the enemy
jets.

We were escorting the bombers, and just as the B-17s started dropping their
bombs, we were hit by a swarm of Me 262s, the German jet.

And I was up high at about 26,000 feet.

I looked down and I saw this Me 262 coming in behind one bomber and blowing it
up. At that time I rolled over and put full throttle and started down at him.

By the time I got within firing range, he had blown up his second B-17, and I
started firing, and I started getting hits in his left engine.

The Me 262 was piloted by German ace Walter Schuch. Walter had 207 victories to
his credit. But in P-51 pilot Joey Peterbers, he finally found his match.

When I was shot down in my Me 262, I pushed the plane downwards. So my plane
only got hit once.

I dived into a cloud, and as an experienced pilot, you know that you should not
come out in the same spot. They wait for you above it.

I turned 45 degrees in the cloud. They kept looking for me, but I was gone.

For 60 years, Joey had no idea what had happened to his adversary. But then, out
of the blue in 2005, he received a phone call and an invitation to meet Walter.

Over a couple of beers, the German admitted that he eventually had to bail out
of his Me 262.

We didn't have an ejector seat, and I had to see how I could get out. I pulled
myself up with both hands and pushed my foot off the joystick.

And then I sailed down. It went really fast.

And on the 18th of May, 2005, Walter and I met for the second time, the first
time in person, and we're the best of friends.

Joey's P-51 might have won the day, but the ME 262 marked the beginning of the
end for propeller planes. Jet fighters were the future.

The next leap forward in engine designs would result in breaking the sound
barrier.

After the war, the U.S. fitted a very small plane with a rocket engine.

Like a bullet with wings, the Bell X-1 was the first plane to go faster than
Mach 1, the speed of sound.

In October 1947, Chuck Yeager became officially the first man to go supersonic.

Roger and James were both fighter pilots in the Korean War.

In the F-86 Sabre, they experienced what it's like to break the sound barrier.

It was towards the end of my tour over in Korea. My flight leader spotted some
MiGs down below, and we were at fairly high altitude, maybe 30, 35,000 feet.

And we performed a high-speed dive to engage them.

And then during the maneuver to get down there, we, of course, exceeded the
speed of sound.

But we had such an overtaking airspeed with the aircraft or the MiGs when we
finally did get to their altitude that we overshot them considerably.

We had to pull an awful lot of Gs just to recover from it. We had quite a good
engagement there.

Today, modern jets go supersonic on a regular basis, on manned flights even
reaching speeds of Mach 10.

Fighter aircraft have become the fastest weapons on the battlefield.

This need for speed is essential, but it's not the whole story.

Fighters have to be maneuverable, and for this to happen, a whole lot rests on
the wings.

If you try to turn an ME-109 as tightly as you can turn a Spitfire, the wings
will come off.

Newton's law of gravity, what goes up must come down.

Nice theory until you see an F-22 Raptor in action.

Fighter planes fly in the face of physics, pushing the airframe to the very
edge.

But to go this fast and pull these kind of moves, you need some serious
engineering.

Highly evolved engines, state-of-the-art avionics, most important of all, wings.

The basic structure of a wing hasn't really changed a lot. The materials have
changed, some of the shapes have changed.

But the basic thing is you need airflow over the wing section, and that gives
you lift.

Lift counteracts the force of gravity, and that's what flying is all about.

The air flowing over the wing has to travel a certain amount of distance.

In a conventional wing, the distance that the air travels over the top is a
greater distance than the air traveling across the bottom.

If it's traveling a longer distance, it must therefore travel faster. When it
travels faster, it's got less pressure.

So you have less pressure on top of the wing and more pressure on the bottom of
the wing,

and the greater pressure on the bottom of the wing makes the wing travel upward
when the airplane goes away.

Go back to World War I, and wing development was in its infancy.

The big question? How many wings should planes have?

The idea with a biplane or a triplane is to have more wing to make the plane
more maneuverable.

If you get another wing to make yourself a triplane, then when you are turning
in those tight turns,

all the weight of the aircraft magnified by centrifugal force is distributed
over that many more surfaces, over that much more wing.

But triplanes and biplanes had a major disadvantage.

The extra weight of the additional wings, struts and wires created more drag,
slowing down the plane.

In the 1930s, lighter and faster monoplanes with single wings began to appear,
and a new branch on the fighter family tree was born.

The major air forces began to produce a series of classic purebred fighters.

Two of the best were the British Spitfire and the German Me 109.

The Spitfire had large elliptical wings with low wing loading.

In aerodynamics, wing loading is the loaded weight of the aircraft divided by
the area of the wing.

This gives engineers a rough idea of the aircraft's lift to mass ratio, which
affects its rate of climb, load carrying ability and turn performance.

If you compare it to the Me 109, which was its German opposite, you can see that
the German aircraft has got a much smaller wing,

and that means it's got a much higher wing loading.

There's a lot more aircraft per bit of wing on the Me 109, and that means that
if you try to turn an Me 109 as tightly as you can turn your Spitfire, the wings
will come off.

Because the wing on the Spitfire is so gorgeously, lavishly big, and because of
that nice elliptical shape, the Spitfire can turn a lot tighter in a dogfight
with an Me 109.

What did it claim, Johnny?

A 109 destroyed, buddy, yes.

Oh, good show.

When Spitfires and Me 109s went head to head and the Spitfire out turned the Me
109, the German pilot only had one chance.

Deploy his landing flaps.

You could change the angle of the landing flaps electrically from 10 degrees to
20, 30 degrees and so on.

The Spitfire could only do two positions, flaps down and up.

The German pilot, the Wiley Rabbit, could use it in tight turns.

When the Spitfire was behind him and he couldn't keep up with his tight turns,
he just changed the flaps to a 10 degree angle.

Thereby he had more lift and the plane could turn better and could maneuver
outside the target area of the enemy.

And then he put the flaps back in and dived nose down to escape.

Great wing design helped both the Me 109 and Spitfire become legends, but they
weren't the only World War II fighters breaking new ground in aerodynamics.

The P-51 Mustang became the first production airframe built with laminar flow
wings.

Laminar flow is the smooth, uninterrupted flow of air over the contour of the
wing compared to a turbulent flow.

A wing with high laminar flow should experience less drag and turbulence.

Engineers applied this principle to the Mustang's wings.

Its cross section, or airfoil, was relatively thin at the leading edge and
progressively wider to a point of greatest thickness at the aft.

The result? Drag was reduced, lift and speed were increased.

This was a new invention back in the late 30s and early 40s.

This was the first airplane to ever incorporate a laminar flow wing.

In 10 or 15 years they went from biplanes that did 120 miles an hour to
airplanes like this, which were top speed of 505 miles an hour.

So the advances that were being made were being made weekly during that period
of time.

And the laminar flow wing was just something that was developed at that time and
first put on an airplane in the Mustang.

The evolution of laminar wings was a huge step forward, but it didn't provide
all the answers.

With the invention of the jet engine, planes got faster and that extra speed was
putting a lot of strain on the wings and the tail.

The airflow over the top of the wing would tend to become supersonic.

So that even though the plane was flying well below the speed of sound, the
local airflow over the wing was at the speed of sound or above.

You would create a standing shock wave and you would have a disturbed wake
behind that shock wave that would beat the tail of the airplane to death, so to
speak.

And it caused a lot of accidents.

Designers needed to find a wing design that could cope with the stress of
supersonic flight.

The solution lay in the work of an obscure German aeronautical engineer called
Adolf Busemann.

Busemann was inspired by the V-shaped wake that trailed behind boats navigating
his hometown harbor.

He took this image and in 1935 presented a design for a V-shaped aircraft wing.

First, his idea got little attention, but 10 years later in 1945, the U.S. and
Germany independently developed and built swept wings.

Cruising at supersonic speeds, the wings would function effectively.

The swept wing delays the onset of these shock waves and allows the pilot to
maintain control of the aircraft as his speed increases.

The tail is delta wing built on the success of the swept design.

Shaped like a dart, the delta forms the basis of most modern wing designs.

It transformed fighters into faster and more maneuverable planes.

But what happens if things go wrong?

One plane down doesn't necessarily mean you lose a good man with it.

When I knew that I had a good parachute, then I was very relieved.

Today's jet fighters are the fastest, baddest birds on the block.

They can destroy any target, anytime, anywhere.

That's why every army in every time has tried to blow them out of the sky.

Pilots live their life on the edge, knowing that just one bullet, one error in
judgment, one mechanical malfunction could end in disaster.

But if the worst does happen, they always have one last chance, their parachute.

Go back to World War I and bailing out of a fighter was tricky.

Pilots were issued with primitive parachutes that had to be opened before they
jumped out of a plane.

A device was needed which would allow the pilot to jump out and get himself to a
safe distance from the plane before the parachute would open.

It took the genius of a stuntman in Hollywood, Leslie Irvin.

Irvin worked for the film industry, performing parachute jumps from 1,000 feet.

In 1918, he invented a free-fall backpack parachute and a ripcord the pilot
could pull to open the parachute when clear from the plane.

The idea is that instead of having to drop out of an aircraft in order to
parachute, you can actually jump out of it with a parachute that will
subsequently open and enable you to descend safely to the ground.

Irvin's invention was adopted by air forces around the world.

All told, it saved the lives of over 10,000 aviators.

But parachutes on their own aren't always enough.

The introduction of jet power vastly increased the speed of planes, making it
virtually impossible to bail out with a parachute.

The only way to do it is to blast yourself out of the path of the plane.

You want to blast away from the tail fins, you want to blast away from the
wings, you just want to be away from the plane because it's going to hurt you.

In 1938, German engineers came up with a solution.

They built an ejector seat powered with compressed air.

When triggered, the pilot and the seat would shoot clear of the plane.

But the ejection process wasn't easy.

It would involve a series of crucial steps.

The first thing is he has to bring himself in an upright position.

When he activated the trigger lever, the compressed gas comes from the valve to
this cannon.

It creates a pressure and slides the whole seat out of the tracks from the
cockpit.

Once free of the plane, the pilot had to manually open the harness, release the
seat, and pull the cord to open the parachute.

After the war, countries around the world carried out further research into
ejector seats.

In the summer of 1946, British company Martin Baker conducted the first live
flight test ejections.

As the seat leaves the plane, the stabilizing drogue preventing the seat turning
over in the air opens and then...

ejecting closer to the ground was still a challenge.

A more propulsive force was needed to fire the pilot high enough for his
parachute to safely open.

In 1960, Martin Baker came up with the under-seat rocket.

Watched by members of the world press and observers from the United States,

Doddy Hay pulled the face-blind which resulted in an ejection height of over 300
feet.

His design had enough explosive force to fire the seat and pilot to a safe
height,

even when the plane was on the ground.

In the last 40 years, they have saved the lives of countless pilots.

One of the lucky ones is Ralph Harrison, a Canadian Air Force starfighter pilot
stationed in Germany.

On a cloudy day in 1980, he went on an exercise at 1,500 feet.

Just minutes into the flight, he heard a succession of explosions followed by a
deafening bang.

There was smoke going in the cockpit.

So the only thing going through my head was, what do I have?

Can I solve the problem? Can I fix it? And then I realized I couldn't fix it.

Known as the missile with a man in it, the Stubby Wing Starfighter was the first
US jet fighter in service to fly Mach 2, twice the speed of sound.

But soon after it entered service, it became one of the most accident-prone
fighters ever produced, giving it a whole new nickname, the Widowmaker.

The Kalsky F-104 doesn't so much have wings as it has stumps of wings.

It's like a leaf twisting and turning as it falls through the sky, but it's
twisting and turning and falling through the sky twice the speed of sound.

It looked like Ralph Harrison was going to become another victim of the
starfighter curse.

As his plane began to disintegrate, his only hope was his ejector seat.

After the camp he goes, the seat fires and everything works automatically.

There's a seat kicker that actually throws you out of the seat.

And then the parachute opens and this whole sequence is about three seconds. So
it happens pretty fast.

The starfighter hit a field, exploding in a giant fireball. And Harrison? Well,
he had a great view.

I enjoyed the view. I enjoyed the parachute ride and the trip down was quite
pleasant.

Flying fighter planes is always going to be a risky business. And in dogfights,
those risks go through the roof.

That's why the evolution of combat tactics is one of the most important branches
on the fighter's family tree.

When a pilot finds himself with an airplane at six o'clock, he knows he's in
very serious trouble at that point.

In the 21st century, jet fighters are multifunctional. Ground attack, air
defense, intercepting. They've got all the bases covered.

Rewind to World War I and combat aviation was a lot simpler. No bombs, no
rockets, just guns and chaos.

There were no rules. No one had fought a war from the air. Pilots learned their
craft by trial and error.

But then in September 1916, German fighter ace Oswald Belka published the Dicte
Belka, a guide for air to air combat.

His tactics were simple. Number one, always attack from behind. The enemy can't
see you and he can't shoot back.

Number two, place yourself between the sun and the enemy. This blinds him for a
few seconds and he can't aim accurately.

But the classic dogfight is basically a turning fight to position one aircraft
on the tail of the other.

When a pilot finds himself with an airplane at six o'clock, as the term goes, he
knows he's in very serious trouble at that point.

Thirty years later, planes were faster and more maneuverable. But Belka's
principles still applied to the ballet in the skies.

Before the Second World War, some theorists thought that the era of dogfighting
would be impossible because airplanes were moving in excess of 300 miles per
hour.

Targeting became a combination of guesswork and basic deflection. This involved
firing the guns into the space ahead of the target to allow for the speed of the
enemy plane and the speed of the bullets.

If a fighter plane did find itself in a tight corner, very often it would
perform a split S. The pilot would invert the plane, execute a half loop and end
up flying level in the opposite direction.

The P-51 with altitude would come down into its six o'clock position. Usually
the 109 would try to pull up and you'd go into a split S and hopefully you would
end up on its tail and be able to shoot it down.

The Mustang could go as tight as you could pull it. Whatever you wanted it to do
and you were capable of doing, it would do.

We could keep up with the 109, we could outperform it, out turn it, we could out
dive it, we could out fly the 109.

Three P-51 groups, the 8th, 9th and 15th shot down an incredible 4,950 German
planes. But dogfights weren't limited to Europe. In the Pacific, American and
Japanese fighters also engaged in fierce air-to-air maneuvers.

American pilots would team up in pairs, flying the ingenious Thatch Weave. Named
after Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Thatch, two planes would fly a parallel course
until a zero latched onto the tail of one of them.

They would then bank steeply inward. If the enemy pilot followed his target, it
would lead him into a deadly position where the other member of the team could
shoot him down.

In the 1950s, the end of the dogfight seemed near when the first air-to-air
missiles became operational.

The reason? Why go toe-to-toe with machine guns when you can safely destroy an
enemy plane from distance with a missile?

The idea in the 1960s was that you didn't even need to have a maneuverable
fighter aircraft. All you needed was maneuverable missiles. The fighter aircraft
would fire from miles away from where anybody else was and the missile would
hunt down the enemy and blow it up.

But missiles didn't end dogfights. The experts were wrong. Fighters like the
American F-4 still got up close and personal with MiG jets in Vietnam. And way
too often, the F-4s came out second best.

An F-4 couldn't turn with a MiG-17. While it had the advantage in a vertical
climb, in a vertical dogfight or in flat-out running, the MiG-17 could actually
turn inside the F-4.

The F-4 had the aerodynamics of Iraq. It had two motors, it was very loud, it
didn't maneuver very well, and it just didn't go as fast as it could. Our
enemies were developing better aircraft, faster aircraft. We had to have
something to catch up.

The American Air Force acknowledged the need for a plane that was fast enough
and maneuverable enough to outgun Russian MiGs at close range. The result was
the F-15 Eagle, a dedicated air superiority fighter.

When it was let off its leash in 1976, it proved itself an awesome dogfighter.
It really can do quite a bit of dogfighting. It's got some very powerful
engines, so many adversaries we can out-climb, and it is very maneuverable, so
we can turn inside the corner of many adversaries as well.

In 30 years, the F-15 has scored over 100 victories with no losses. An awesome
tally. But one its successor is certain to break.

The F-22 Raptor entered service in 2005. Lightning fast, it's equipped with
advanced avionics that can identify, target, and annihilate enemy planes. It
also has stealth capabilities, making it almost invisible to radar. The end of
dogfights? Perhaps.

The F-22's radar is tremendously powerful and able to pick out enemy aircraft
long before they know the F-22's in the area. If the F-22 does get into a
dogfight, it has the maneuverability and speed to win that dogfight, even in
close range. But chances are, the F-22 will knock the enemy fighter out of the
sky before the enemy pilot even knows the F-22 is around.

The high-tech world of 21st century fighters looks set to revolutionize aerial
combat. But ask a veteran World War II pilot like Joey Peterbers, and he'll tell
you that old is gold.

Good job, boss.

Thank you.

What a ride. I did three barrel rolls and two loops. Like riding a bicycle, duck
to water, you never forget. Yeah, it was really great. Nice job.

In under 100 years, fighters have been transformed. They've gone from
underpowered, undergunned lightweights with three wings to supersonic, single-
winged assassins like the F-22.

Drawn together, the branches on the F-22's family tree reflect its unique
genesis.

The marriage of an interrupter gear and machine guns gave birth to the first
effective fighter. A British and a German master jet propulsion.

Improved wings led to greater maneuverability. And the combination of stealth,
missiles and advanced radar has produced a new generation of first look, first
kill fighters. The F-22 Raptor.

Weaponologically, it's the top of the tree.

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