Not necessarily. There are conceivable situations where supermaneuvrability can turn a situation where an enemy is on your tail and has a lock onto a situation where you fired a missile at them and you're safe. But yes, it's not the normal game plan. The normal gameplan is very likely to degenerate into such situations, though.

Nobody is saying that it’s impossible for this to be useful. We’re saying the odds are incredibly stacked against it.

At best it is a Hail Mary in a 1v1 WVR knife-fight.

By modern air doctrine, this can pretty much only happen in the specific scenario where every other plane has been splashed, since nobody would willingly enter such a scenario if they could avoid it. Modern IR missiles are more maneuverable than planes, so the aggressor will have to have emptied their missile stores completely. And the defender will need to be in a position where they’ve exhausted every other possible defensive resource and be in imminent risk of being downed by the bandit’s cannon.

If all of that is true, it could be a last-ditch survival effort. If it doesn’t generate a shooting opportunity, you’re dead since you’ll never have a chance to gain the energy needed to stay on the offensive.

Nobody in this entire tire fire of a thread has come up with a single additional plausible scenario.

You only need that if your missiles are dumb enough to not be programmable for more complex than simple following paths.

It’s much safer to teach your missiles to do the manoeuvre instead of making the plane do it first.

> It’s much safer to teach your missiles to do the manoeuvre instead of making the plane do it first.

Indeed modern air-to-air missiles can do this and much more. They can be launched and lock on after the launch and have full-sphere attack capability (unlike earlier missiles, which even in a high off-boresight scenario would still require the launching aircraft to be behind the target).

If an enemy fighter has you locked up, you're dead. The No Escape Zone of modern infrared missiles (AIM-9X, Python 5, Iris-T, Derby, and of course R-77) is almost always going to kill you unless the missile misfires/hangs.

Our last 9X shot in combat? https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/news/a270...

Here's a much better account:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14344/heres-the-defini...

To recap the article, missiles aren't perfect, especially when they've been flown on and off carrier decks. And this "miss" isn't even data; it's microscopic anectdata. In fact, I don't know of another combat launch of the 9x.