[moose1am]

The USA's Phoenix Aim 54 missile's cost 1 million dollars apiece. They were designed to shoot down Soviet Backfire Bombers. At the end of WWII an American B29 bomber landed in Russian Territory and the Russians copied the design before ever returning the bomber to the US Air Force if they did that. They may have just kept the plane. They reverse engineers the B29's design and developed the Backfire Bomber which was capable of carrying cruise missiles. The Aim 54 was also designed to shoot down low flying cruise missile. It was not designed to take out small maneuverable jet fighters. Those jets were to be shot down with the AAARM medium range missles that were fire and forget not radar guided by the plane doing the shooting. The F14's carried three different types of missiles. They also carried the short range Fire and Forget Heat Seeking Sidewinders.

To avoid a Aim54 you first have to know it's there and where it's going. You just fly perpendicular to that missile's flight path an turn into the missile as it closes on you. There is no way that Aim 54 Horse of a missile can match your planes turn radius. It will pass right behind your plane if this maneuver is performed correctly and timed right.

Originally Posted by Chock

I do know that in one well-publicized test, an F-14 fired four AIM-54's at four QF102 Drones, which had been modified to give a signature similar to MiG-21MFs; and on that test it destroyed two, hit and damaged a third, and missed the fourth, and in order to do that, its radar had to 'time-share' painting the four targets, as it could not lock and guide on all four at once. Still an impressive feat, but it nevertheless left it out of ammo with one (possibly two) 'hostiles' coming at it. So unless it could maintain a three to one or better kill ratio, and its enemy had less than that in superior numbers, the chances are it would lose, not including wingmen of course.

The Soviet doctrine of swamping enemies with less capable, but numerically stronger forces, has been shown to work on numerous occasions throughout history (though not always), but one only has to look at the T-34 versus the Panther and Tiger tanks in WW2 battles to see how it could and did work (albeit with horrendous casualties). The Panther was the German response to the T-34, but when the Wehrmacht asked why German designers couldn't make something like the T-34 for them, the response was that: 'they could, but it would never pass their quality control'! Still, that's the Germans for you.

In a war of attrition, simpler equipment is often a wiser choice, for example the MiG-25 and the MiG-31. Both of which the US and NATO were keen to get a close look at during the cold war. Eventually they did, when Viktor Belenko defected in a Soviet MiG-25 to Japan. Western designers were staggered to find that it was made mainly from stainless steel, rather than titanium or some other fancy metal, and had vacuum tubes in its avionics as opposed to transistors and microchips. Thus they began to dismiss it as a threat, however they did kind of skip over the point that even with all that old and simple technology in it, it was still a Mach-2.8-capable interceptor, which is what had got them all worked up in the first place, so much for military intelligence eh?

So I guess sometimes its perhaps foolish to underestimate a potential enemy, and I'm not suggesting that the F14s of Iran could be completely dismissed as no threat at all (providing they can be maintained in an airworthy state), but I do think that they are not a huge threat to a more modern aeroplane - especially one assisted by a vastly superior AWACs datalink system.

Anyway, let's hope we never find out.

Chock