Supplement: How NOT to fly a Low-Altitude air-to-ground Attack
Somebody released this Bayraktar-taken video of two Ukrainian fighter-bombers striking the Russian garrison of the Zmiyniy Island.
Somebody released this Bayraktar-taken video of two Ukrainian fighter-bombers striking the Russian garrison of the Zmiyniy Island.
What you can see are two Ukrainian Su-27s streaking in at low altitude, perhaps 150m, to release ‘dumb’ bombs. Probably, each released two. The video is not clear enough to say the type, but I doubt they are anything else than FAB-250M-62 or FAB-500M-62, ‘slicks’.
Now pay attention:
at least one of bombs released by the formation leader failed to detonate;
which was just as good because the detonation of that single bomb nearly blew up his wingman, in turn,
causing the wingman to miss by a wide margin:
Additional points:
they deployed no parachute-retarded bombs, although such like FAB-500ShNs should be in Ukrainian arsenals, and
they deployed no bombs with delayed fuzes.
I know, it’s going to sound ‘unfair’, and ‘harsh’, and many aren’t going to like the following, but, ‘praise, where praise is due, and critique, where critique is due’.
By all respect for Ukrainian pilots who, no doubt, are longing for action and are ready to pay the price for defending their country…. really, the gents in question have ‘balls’ the size elephants. But, this is a ‘brilliant’ demonstration that they are simply not trained well-enough, or at least do not have sufficient experience to fly this kind of missions.
Nobody with sufficient training and experience would fly this kind of attack in this fashion: if, then there would no ‘welded wing’ formation, but open formation with a separation of at least 15–30 seconds between the two aircraft — or, and better yet, with each aircraft arriving over the target from entirely different direction, 30 seconds apart from each other.
Of course, one could say, ‘well, Su-27-pilots are spending 90% of their time training air-to-air’ — and, no doubt, that’s truth. But, the problem is that before the war they flew too little to at least try training these 10% of air-to-ground properly. Moreover, considering this war is not going to be over ‘tomorrow in the morning’, at least their commanders should know better but to send pilots lacking training and experience into combat operations of this kind…..or be humble enough to ask their Su-24- and Su-25-colleagues how to do this properly.
Once again: pilot bravado, all nice and fine. As long as nobody gets hurt — I’ve got no problem with it. But, this is just a waste of pilots and aircraft that simply can’t do the job. I, most sincerely, hope they’re far better than this in air combat.
And: delivering ‘A-10s & F-16s’ — sorry but, gauging by this performance, that would make absolutely no sense: they would rush to complete their conversion training, but deploy their new combat aircraft before completing their tactical training. The result would be a deployment of F-16s in exactly the same fashion like these two Su-27s.
Get them UAVs (the video is shown a Russian Mi-8 destroyed by Bayraktars while trying to unload supplies at the Zmiyniy Island, on 7 May 2022).