F-15 Eagles ‘Battle’ IAF Rafales During Red Flag 2024 Drills

 

BVR Battle: F-15 Eagles "fight" IAF Rafales during Red Flag 2024. Revenge for 2004 defeat against Su-30s?

Years after the Sukhoi Su-30 MKI "overpowered" the US Air Force's F-15s, the Indian Air Force's (IAF) Rafale fighter jets gave the American fighters a tough fight in the recently concluded Red Flag exercise.

In the 2008 edition of Red Flag, the IAF sent out Su-30MKIs to face off against F-15s and F-16s. After the war game, US Air Force pilots posted anonymous assessments on YouTube. They said that American fighters would soon lose their competitive advantage over Russian fighters. This was the first time that the Su-30MKI participated in an international warfare match of this scale and faced off against more advanced Western fighters.

The F-15 pilots gained amazing experience using the Lockheed Martin F-22's thrust vectoring, which helped them exploit the Su-30's vulnerability in tight turns.

A US Air Force pilot shared his assessment of the comparison of the two fighters. "So we started to move towards him, and all of a sudden we saw the [Su-30's] tail going down, and he started using thrust vectoring," the pilot was quoted as saying.

"But now he started to fall out of the sky. "You fall out of the sky so fast you don't even have to climb," the pilot added. "All you need is a little pull on the stick, accelerate, go aim your gun and get your brain going." Nevertheless, the professionalism and skill of the IAF pilots in Red Flag earned them the respect of their US Air Force counterparts.

Sixteen years later, the French-made Rafales of the IAF fleet were able to match the performance of an F-15 in a Red Flag exercise at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The two fighters did not engage in a dogfight.

Red Flag is a multi-scenario air combat exercise designed to provide realistic combat situations. The participating forces are divided into Red Force, simulating elements of the air defense complex, and Blue Force, simulating elements of the offensive complex. In this exercise, the Red Force was mainly made up of USAF aggressor squadrons, flying F-16 and F-15 aircraft. This was the first time that IAF Rafale aircraft participated in Ex Red Flag, operating alongside RSAF (Singapore), USAF F-16 and F-15, and USAF A-10 aircraft. The mission included offensive air defense and beyond visual range (BVR) combat exercises as part of Large Scale Military Operations (LFE) in Air Defence. An IAF official told Euro-Asian Times: However, the higher level of performance was equal to ours. The F-15 fighter jets belonged to the Singapore Air Force, while the weapons belonged to the US Air Force. ”

The Rafale has a BVR of 90% and is equipped with MBDA Meteor air-to-air missiles (AAMs) with a range of 100 kilometers. In comparison, the F-15EX has a BVR of 88%. It is equipped with AIM-120 AMRAAM AAMs with a range of 75 kilometers.

For air combat, it is equipped with a 30mm GIAT 30M/719B cannon, while the F-15EX is equipped with a 20mm M61A1 Vulcan cannon and AIM-7 Sparrow medium-range semi-active radar-guided air-to-air missiles.

The IAF's Rafales may not have had a chance to compete with the F-15s, but the pilot who assessed the performance of the Su-30MKI in 2008 had high praise for the Israeli-powered MiG-21 Bison aircraft. The radar, active radar missiles and electronic jamming devices were modified to make it almost "invisible" to the mechanically scanned arrays of the F-15 and F-16 at that time. The Indian pilot was able to slip through the US Air Force's radar screens and engage in a dogfight with two American fighters.

"The MiG-21 could fly from 10,000 feet to 20,000 feet at 110 knots with its nose in a scissor position at a 60-degree angle," he said.

When the US Air Force's F-15C fighters defeated the IAF

This story is legendary in the history of US-Indian war games. Cope India 04 was held at the IAF's Gwalior Air Force Station from 15 to 27 February 2004. During the exercise, Indian pilots defeated U.S. Air Force F-15C fighter jets 90% of the time.

The Pentagon later defended the results, saying the rules of engagement had been skewed in favor of Indian fighters. The F-15s were not equipped with Advanced Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars. (The new F-15 EXs are equipped with AESA radars.) Secondly, the aerial battles typically pitted six Eagles against up to 18 Indian Air Force aircraft, and they had no capability to simulate beyond visual range (BVR) combat (at the request of the Indian side, who had been asked not to do so, deploying AMRAAMs).

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