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Yes, and in the WVR fight, doing a trick like that isn't helpful. You kill all your energy. While the nose is moving, your aircraft is still going in a similar

Yes, and in the WVR fight, doing a trick like that isn't helpful. You kill all your energy. While the nose is moving, your aircraft is still going in a similar plane of motion and has little capability to use the vertical. The funny thing is, everyone already knew this. The venerable Harrier could perform a manoeuvre called "viffing", in which it rotated its engine nozzles back to vertical whilst in horizontal flight. But the ability wasn't used at all during the Falklands war in the early 80's. And here we are in 2020 and people are still debating it.

scarier 6y ago
Heh, I guarantee you that Harriers in the Falklands used "viffing"... as an administrative maneuver. The Harrier family has a whole menagerie of weird and wonderful TVC party tricks that are notoriously difficult to pull off, need a bunch of excess altitude as a backstop for when things inevitably go wrong, and generally aren't applicable to air-to-air combat. All that said, I agree with you that it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme. Supermaneuverability has certainly expanded the envelope of potential post-stall maneuvers (and, more importantly, dramatically reduced pilot workload in those regimes) far beyond what the Harrier is capable of, but outside of the airshow circuit it continues to remain a solution in search of a problem. "Fighter pilots HATE him! Learn this one weird trick that the bandits don't want you to know about and win 100% of your BFM engagements!" If only it were that easy...
- tolien 6y ago
  > it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme I wouldn't be surprised if it was Top Gun and "hit the brakes, he'll fly right by".
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    "What is he gonna do, gun me?"

scarier 6y ago

Heh, I guarantee you that Harriers in the Falklands used "viffing"... as an administrative maneuver. The Harrier family has a whole menagerie of weird and wonderful TVC party tricks that are notoriously difficult to pull off, need a bunch of excess altitude as a backstop for when things inevitably go wrong, and generally aren't applicable to air-to-air combat. All that said, I agree with you that it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme. Supermaneuverability has certainly expanded the envelope of potential post-stall maneuvers (and, more importantly, dramatically reduced pilot workload in those regimes) far beyond what the Harrier is capable of, but outside of the airshow circuit it continues to remain a solution in search of a problem. "Fighter pilots HATE him! Learn this one weird trick that the bandits don't want you to know about and win 100% of your BFM engagements!" If only it were that easy...

tolien 6y ago
> it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme I wouldn't be surprised if it was Top Gun and "hit the brakes, he'll fly right by".
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  "What is he gonna do, gun me?"