and yet, many fighter pilots since they were invented around the end of WW2 have managed to dodge them. missiles don’t chase their targets, they don’t have the fuel to. they use something called proportional navigation to aim for where they believe their target will be in order to make their apparent movement disappear. a sidewinder, for example, has 15 seconds of fuel. after that, it’s a glider. if the pilot doesn’t feel like dying that particular day, and they dodge at the right time, the missile misses and lacks the speed to catch the jet.
if you want examples of how pilots use aggressive maneuvers to evade missiles, there are plenty of videos on YouTube about the subject, including some from Desert Storm that feature the F-16. or head over to the War Thunder forums, there’s plenty of nerds there who would love to spend days leaking classified military documents and info-dumping on you.
Missiles can pull g forces that would kill a human.
and yet, many fighter pilots since they were invented around the end of WW2 have managed to dodge them. missiles don’t chase their targets, they don’t have the fuel to. they use something called proportional navigation to aim for where they believe their target will be in order to make their apparent movement disappear. a sidewinder, for example, has 15 seconds of fuel. after that, it’s a glider. if the pilot doesn’t feel like dying that particular day, and they dodge at the right time, the missile misses and lacks the speed to catch the jet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_navigation
if you want examples of how pilots use aggressive maneuvers to evade missiles, there are plenty of videos on YouTube about the subject, including some from Desert Storm that feature the F-16. or head over to the War Thunder forums, there’s plenty of nerds there who would love to spend days leaking classified military documents and info-dumping on you.