And that is why both are aces. Thank you for serving...

Also a doco on Combat Tree and Teaball would be great.

Thanks for posting thanks for your service.

You might know the answer to this, so I'll ask: was there ever a published minimum altitude for the Sparrows prior to the M model with its inverse monopulse seeker? Reports of them being unreliable at low altitude are common, but exactly how bad was it?

Yeah, a crew is a team, and the kills belong to both. I only play DCS, but given that my stick work is better than my radar work, it has given me a keen appreciation for WSOs/RIOs. Better that someone who knows what he's doing handles that, instead of me mucking about. And the second set of eyes is very appreciated. As is dealing with the Tomcat INS....Looking at that thing I wonder how much work it must've been to navigate the Phantom. One thing I was wondering about Ritchie's (and deBellevue's) Success was that aside from having a really, really good WSO is that he might've also had a really good crew Chief and Armourer? Just thinking about one of the comments that one of the guys wrote on one of the earlier on the "The Fight Between Two Legendary US Aces That Gave The Phantom A Gun"-video, about the rocker grate and how that trashed a load of Thank you for your service and taking the time to write to us all. It would be very interesting to have an interview here with you, to see how flying the F-4 was from the WSO's perspective.

A Drachism of sorts? Nice.

@@AndrewGivens More like typical British understatement. Not enough snark to call it a Drachism. :P

@@whyjnot420 agreed. Drach takes sarcasm to camp levels. However, Pound doesn't usually indulge in such over humour, so this is perhaps his directional equivalent for the moment? Whatever, it certainly landed.

Yes, that was a good one. I agree it was Drach quality, tho perhaps not a Drachism for the books.

I agree keep it up more weapon docos please

WOULD!

I totally agree!

seconded

​@@hlynkacg9529 Thirded. I'd really like to hear about the plans to pair the Canadian Arrow with Sparrows. Come to think of it, a nice long video all about the Arrow would be pretty awesome too.

I think the Skyflash might get its own little video at some point. I shouldn't be surprised, because he'll get the chance to talk UK defence procurement politics, which is *always* great fun as a discussion... Really! Maybe not upbeat, but fun.

20 checks plus front and rear signal? If everything was working right, it took longer to hook the equipment up than to punch off the stations. We were using the 383 checker to analyze the RF sent to the launchers too, but it was computerized so it went quickly.

@@vernmeyerotto255 I have not pulled a functional check since 1981. Honestly, by December of '81 I was in business school learning accounting, finance, and economics. I was a 462 in the USAF. The only testing machine I remember was "the beer can". I do remember loading dozens of AIM-7F on the F-15 through the years. The ignition wire was fastened to the missile by an 8" pipe hose clamp. Weird days. Best job I ever had.

@@Easy-Eight 321, fire control systems... radar, optical sight and bombing computer on F4Es. The 20 checks verified the presence of signals through the umbilical connector within certain voltage limits at trigger pull. We used a 406 box to verify RF radiating at the front and rear signal horns at the launcher. It was crude, but at least let us know the the missle had the proper prelaunch data. That was every 45 days. We did full radar calibration, including missle launch simulations on each station with a computer verifying the validity of the launch data at least once a year. I know the guys in Thailand ran every system through radar cal prior to Linebacker II, and one of the SOF officers had caught the weapons guys providing rough handling to AIM7s at a flightline entry point during Linebacker I. They returned 8 missles for functional check after that - 7 failed, so that was corrected before Linebacker II as well. That may have helped Capt. Ritchie a bit. Yup, best job I ever had. By 1980, I was busy working on a BSEE.

Laypeople don't care or even think about it.

The Sparrow just had to get over menopulse to become truly mature.

@@MADCATMK3103 Wow is that an appalling pun. I felt compelled to give it a thumbs up anyway.

@@TheOsfania I'm a layperson, and I know that it was completely transformative: Vastly improved clutter reception, no more angle deception jamming (unless you count cross-eye jamming and its ilk, but those are _hard_ ), etc

​@@patrickchase5614 If you want the italics to work on "hard," at the end of your post, you'll need to put a space in between the second underscore and the closing bracket. The system gets confused by other symbols if they're right next to a bold or italics command. _Hard._ (_Hard._ See?

No. I can't work out which branch you served in. You'll need to give me a clue.

​@@AndrewGivensyes, it is too "cryptic" for anyone to guess. Must be some obscure sub-section of the "department of the boat people" 😂

@@daszieher You mean the department of seafaring curch mice that handles their extra spicy secret sauce? Aka the cooks? ;) :P

Same. More like 15 years for me, although I never watched it extensively. The programming is mindless drivel, even the "educational" stuff, and I hear it's much worse now. At least you could watch kind of basic, overly-simplified history with some interesting images at one time, now it's just aliens and propaganda

I haven't watched since the history channel showed history programs and discovery had science stuff. Wings of the Red Star and the like were actually good, if a bit simplified as you point out.

Thanks so much for this! Great to hear that you’re enjoying the videos!

He's only human! No-one can match Drach's output! Thanks for the great videos, Pound.

You are watching the exact same stuff as me! All of it excellent.

Good work, Glad the aid is arriving still. We hope you can out it to good use.

What were you flying? Pilot? WSO/RIO? Very interesting stuff. Sounds like 80s experience considering the M models stated. Not a lot of info out there about US 80s mil aviation as we weren’t engaged in any large scale fighter fights.

@@baremetalmafia F/A-18A

The US was the first to use an Active seeker head on a weapon which was the ASM-n-2 Bat anti ship glide bomb and it was experimented with for shipborne SAM application in the Bumblebee program both of which is a WW2 program

It's kind of funny to realize the Iranians started out with hundreds of top of the line 4th-gen fighters in the 80's, and forty years later they are reduced to piloting monkey-model Soviet planes, homegrown F-5 copycats, and...their few remaining Tomcats and Phantoms. It makes me wonder what the Saudis are going to look like in 50 years, when the oil has run out and they can't afford their expensive Uncle Sam-gifted toys anymore.

Early days of bvr combat, radar guidance, just amazing tech for the time.

A Falcon video would be very nice. Like the Sparrow it was also the victim of poor handling and an unsuitable launching aircraft, as it worked perfectly fine in the Convair Deltas.

That is pretty much how a Con Rod warhead works. I worked on the Bloodhound Mk 2 SAM for the first four years of my 30 year RAF Career back in the 1980's. This is a bit long, but explains exactly how it works. The warhead on that weapon weighted in at 330lb with an explosive charge of 80lb (77lb RDX/TNT) in the main charge and 3lb in the central exploder and explosive train from the detonator which was in a Safety and Arming Unit external to the warhead). The SAM unit broke the Electrical and Explosive trains from the Detonators to the Warhead and the Fuze until the missile had pulled 14G plus for more than a few seconds. The Explosion train ran down the centre of the long axis of the Warhead from the rear of the warhead to a point in the middle of the warhead where the main exploder charge was located. The Main explosive charge was a cylindrical concave shaped charge mounted within a cylindrical convex shaped plastic liner contained within a thin mild steel tube. The tube was surrounded by 354 hardened steel rods which were around 16 inches long and 1/4 inch square. These rods were wrapped around the tube two layer deep. At the front of the warhead the rods were welded together top to bottom between two rods, while at the rear the one on top was welded to the rod to its right, while the bottom one was welded to the rod on its left. The welds were about an inch long. This resulted all of the rods being welded into a flattened hoop. To keep every thing together, the rods were then coated in epoxy resin. Round front and rear castings were attached to both ends which had the mounting points for attachment to the missile at both ends, with the explosive train tube at the back. After launch the Safety and arming unit armed the warhead by closing the electrical contacts between the detonators and the Fuze and exposed the Detonators to the explosive train. The Proximity Fuze also became active. The Fuze was known as a PRANGER fuze which stood for Pulse Range Gate. The Fuze was unlike the WWII Doppler VT fuze, this was a proper pulse ranging radar with a peak power of around 7kw and a Pulse Repetition Frequency of 10,000 pulses per second. It transmitted out of two of the four aerials fitted on the outer skin of the warhead bay (180 degrees apart). and received the target echoes on a pair of receiver aerials that were 90 degrees to the Transmitter ones. The fuze actually looked out in a cone around the missile with a beam around 10 degrees wide, 70 degrees from the central axis of the missile There were two Receiver channels in the fuze. One for short range target detection for returns at less than 10 feet and the main channel that had a range gate window on it that would receive echoes at ranges between 10 and 110 feet. The Fuze was fitted with various ECCM systems , which I will not go into., but if the Fuze detected what it thought was a valid target return it sent a high voltage electrical pulse to the detonators. When the central exploder detonated, the shock wave went through the main charge and the plastic former and resulted in a cylindrical shock wave hitting all parts on the mild steel tube at the same time. This threw the rods out through the missile's airframe at a speed of around 900 metres a second. The welds were strong enough to hold the rods together and they expanded out to form a hoop of steel 180 feet in diameter before the welds failed and the rods broke apart. The Missile itself was doing Mach 2.5 at this point (800 metres per second plus), thus the rods expanded out at an angle of around 40 to 50 degrees from the direction of the missile's flight. As soon as the rods broke apart, the probability of getting a kill dropped off massively. That was why at ranges of more than 110 feet the fuze wouldn't see the target. Fun Fact, the Warhead was smaller in diameter than the Missile Airframe and running through the warhead bay were cable looms, Hydraulics pipes, thicker parts of the structure that allowed the two halves of the warhead bay to be connected together (so that you could fit and removed the Warhead and the Fuze) and the Fuze aerials around the outside. Seeing this resulted in varying densities of structure that the rods had to cut through to get into free space, this risked breaking the welds of the rods before they got out of the missile. Therefore the parts of the warhead bay structure within the missile which were just the airframe skin, were lined internally with rubber sheets to minimize the risk of the rods breaking apart. Biggest Target the missile was every fired at with a live warhead was a Canberra Drone at Woomerra in Australia during the Missile's Service Acceptance Trials in 1964. The Missile quite literally chopped the nose off the Canberra.

​@@richardvernon317 that is honestly the most indepth, understandable and helpful description of the type I've ever come across in at least 15 years of casual online searching. You have no idea how many unanswered questions about specifics you've finally given me some closure to. Thanks a hell of a lot, I really appreciate it👍

​@@richardvernon317 unreal 🙏

@@richardvernon317 Very thorough. Now there is no need for a video. Regarding the misunderstandings I described I do not believe I did a good job explaining the other party's error. They believed that the rods spread out individually and continued forward like arrows to impact or puncture the target ahead of it. Thus when I wrote linearly rather than laterally. Now this would not normally be of any significance but this individual was at the time a junior enlisted - let's call him an armorer - who had supposedly been trained about the system who was spouting off about it's capabilities to a mob of his buddies. I believed him at the time and only learned of the error many years later when I read the precis of the research paper about the warheads development.

Absolutely. 👍

To be fair, the cluster-foxtrot which is BAe and the MoD's development & procurement policies deserve time on their own to talk about. Only then can you really put Sky Flash into true perspective.

A well placed combat boot behind the missle's radome had a similar effect.