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From: wolit@rabbit.UUCP (Jan Wolitzky)
Newsgroups: net.aviation
Subject: Re: Sidewinder vs. 172
Message-ID: <3304@rabbit.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Nov-84 09:53:02 EST
Article-I.D.: rabbit.3304
Posted: Wed Nov 28 09:53:02 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Nov-84 03:17:53 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 27

If IR-guided missiles were all you had to worry about, I'd guess
you'd be pretty safe.  Just to be sure, why not bring along a couple
of highway flares, and drop them out the window occasionally, to spoof
any that do lock onto your exhaust pipe.

Unfortunately, you'd also have to contend with 20mm cannon fire, which
is harder to trick...

For what it's worth, the awful film "The Final Countdown" a few years
ago showed an F-14 downing a WWII-vintage Misubishi Zero with a
Sidewinder.  It was incredible fiction, of course, but the producers
got so much cooperation from the US Navy -- it was the most unsubtle
recruiting propaganda I've ever seen -- that they probably checked to
make sure it was technically accurate.

Incidentally, there is also a *NORTH* American country that has plans
to use the P-51.  (No pun intended -- the plane was originally
manufactured by North American Aviation.)  Piper Aircraft Co. is
trying to sell the idea of a turboprop-powered P-51 to the USAF as a
close-support plane.  They call it the "Enforcer," but I don't think
anyone is taking the idea too seriously -- for one thing, P-51
airframes are incredibly rare, and I would imagine that setting up the
tooling to manufacture new one would be too expensive to be
competitive with currently-manufactured foreign planes of this type.

-- 
Jan Wolitzky, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ; (201) 582-2998