impisible

Retired naval aviator Ward Carroll interviewed Royce Williams and got a firsthand account of the engagement.

https://youtu.be/7tqHWH1bYb0

Ward puts out quality content on his channel. He frequently interviews professional military analysts and asks the kind of questions professionals want answered, not the puff-piece talking head interviews on the major networks.

There is an old manual on USAF dog fighting tactics written by Frederick Blesse after the Korean War. It's pretty interesting: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/delimitedoptions/files/do...

"Assume every pilot you meet is the world's best (you can swallow your pride that long) and maneuver your aircraft accordingly until he shows you he is not."

"When in doubt - attack!"

Nowadays a US pilot can shoot down four Russian MiGs in 30 seconds. That's progress folks!

Please don't post flamebait or unsubstantive comments. We're trying for something else here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apologies, I was going for a WVR-BVR kind of joke but I see how that neither worked nor was really the place for it.

In Ukraine today an entire Russian Air Force might be shot down by a nerf gun (aided of course by Putin’ led decades of systemic corruption allowing the planes to become unusable for their intended purpose).

Yet Russia keeps running sorties and plane based missile launches with impunity.

Please consider balancing out your news with sources other than reddit and twitter.

They’re not really wrong. One of the most astonishing things about this war is how the Russian Air Force is incapable of establishing air superiority against a country like Ukraine.

I think that, while true, that's a different matter. The inability of the Russian Air Force to establish air superiority is not necessarily related to dogfighting losses. As far as I know, Ukraine currently doesn't have much of an air force either.

I don't think Russian combat airplanes are being shot down with "nerf guns" either. For whatever reason, they haven't been able to establish superiority, but how does this relate to dogfighting skills?

A big factor is Ukraine still had a number of Soviet made S-300s and older Buks. Those things are very effective and can shoot down even modern aircraft, including Russian ones.

And remember, Ukraine is the largest country in Europe and the most armed and well trained. They are not Iraq or Vietnam.

Soviet air defense seems to be quite effective against soviet aircraft. I think Ukraine had a decent stockpile of that equipment, but they also got shipments of similar soviet made equipment from neighbors.

They are launching a lot of those air-launched missiles from within russian territory.

Yes, but OP implied that the planes aren't maintained. But the proof is in the pudding. Somehow they're still getting off the ground and launching their payloads.

Provide the counter balance sources please.

Western sources have reported over and over that Ukrainian air defense is severally degraded and their airforce is basically non-existent since early on. And that Russia has lobbed many Kh-22's and other ballistics from their Tu-22s and Mig-21s.

There's a reason Ukrainian leadership is asking for F-16s and Patriot missiles defense system now. I know its fun to imagine otherwise, but this is a time for maturity and realism about the threat, this is not call of duty - real people are dying.

Only amateurs and fools underestimate their enemy. Arrogance and incompetency gets people killed in war.

F-16's make sense, they are combat effective.

Patriot missiles make less sense. They are crap. The only redeeming value to provide Patriots is to deplete inventory.

They have no training or experience flying F-16s. They wouldn't be able to maintain and repair the jets either without training and parts from the US.

Patriots draw fire. If the Russians are focused on nullifying the patriots, then chances of Russian missiles hitting something further back are lower.

> Western sources have reported over and over that Ukrainian air defense is severally degraded and their airforce is basically non-existent since early on.

I don't know in which West do you live, but around here, the Ukrainans are the best. But they just need more weapons. /s

The Tu-22s and a lot of the russian planes that are launching the missiles don't enter Ukrainian airspace. They stay in Belorussian, russian or international airspace in the black sea, and launch the missiles while staying out of the range of Ukrainian defenses.

Why only the second highest medal? What types of things are required to win the highest medal?

Self-sacrifice and very high risk of one's own life (a not insignificant number are given posthumously)

So a lot of medal of honor recipients are infantry pulling wounded squad mates out of danger in extreme circumstances.

The entire air force has only 17, the army has over two thousand.

He did risk his life when he interjected himself between the fleet and the approaching MIGs and then spent the next 30 minutes in a dogfight to down 4 of them. It's probably a lot harder in the Air Force to get one but I would consider that one.

He was brave, and did his duty. But, is this different than infantry advancing while under fire?

The highest is the Medal of Honor for "Conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor

Yeah to get a better idea of what that means there might be an example on Army writer. You have to write these a certain way and the granting authority will have their own quirks.

I imagine the comparison to gritty heroics on the ground, face-to-face, means it's harder for pilots to earn that.

GIYF, there are specific requirements for each medal. The highest one, the Medal of Honor actually gives the holder certain privileges and is as close to sacred as these awards get. If other lives or an entire mission had been at risk, or if he had died in the process of rescuing others, you might see a Medal of Honor here.

The article states that the Russians released information that corrected the record from 3 to 4 kills. I would love to see actual military reports from both sides of the encounter.

First off, a direct interview of the said pilot shows no shotdown of four aircrafts.

direct source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SImG_7g-Lvg

Perhaps CNN or HN OP should find another line of work other than military history.

I mean, he doesn’t count them off, but he describes what he saw at the time - talks about the hits he saw, the planes he saw going down.

The CNN article actually says that four kills were only confirmed by the release of Soviet records in the 1990s, so even at the time he only thought he’d got three.

Obviously this account didn’t make it, but if you enjoy hearing about air combat actions, I can highly recommend the series “Dogfights” from the history channel.

It gets really in depth about what’s going on, the encounters, the tactics, the technology. For me it was edge of your seat TV.

I think History put many of these on YouTube.

My only lament is that I can’t seem to find the pilot episode (or, rather, the show they did that eventually turned into a series).

That show had a great account of Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s action in Vietnam. The only Naval Ace of the Vietnam War, he, too, shot down 3 aircraft in a single engagement. That awarded him the Navy Cross.

He became a disgraced congressman convicted of fraud and corruption. That may be why we can’t find that show anymore. But it was a compelling account, broadcast before the scandal.

Anyway, if this topic is interesting, I highly recommend “Dogfights”.

What I find fascinating is that the Vietnamese air force (not just the Soviets helping them) was quite capable, giving the USAF much trouble. The Vietnamese even had fighter aces! You don't hear about that too often.

I read the article carefully, but I still can’t figure out how Royce Williams managed this feat. It seems like a situation out of a movie in which the bad guys miss when they fire, but the good guy always hits when he fires. He should have lost a dogfight against only one MIG, since the MIG was the superior aircraft. Was he just unbelievably lucky?

The Migs put 263 holes in his aircraft. Grumman combat survivability and skills got him back to the carrier.

He probably both flew well and was very lucky! He mentions the Soviets also flew well but made mistakes. It's not outside the realm of possibility that they simply were as unlucky as he was lucky.

Why did the Soviet pilots open fire? Are there any records that give more information as to their motives? Surely the Soviet brass wanted to avoid direct confrontation with the Americans as well!

This was in 1952. Soviet pilots started flying over Korea in 1951, posing as Chinese or Korean pilots [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_and_the_Korean_Wa...