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The High Yo-Yo Or, Turning Smarter, Not Harder
Or, Why a Yo-Yo Is Better Than a Merry-Go-Round
By
--)-Rapier
--, Fighter Ace
Content Manager
| "Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him. By holding out advantages to him, he can cause the enemy to approach of his own accord; or, by inflicting damage, he can make it impossible for the enemy to draw near." |
| - Sun Tzu The Art of War |
| "In air fights it is absolutely essential to fly in such a way that your adversary cannot shoot at you, if you can manage it." |
| - Oswald Boelcke, German Air Service 40 victories |
| "I always thought to go around in circles, slower and slower, was a ridiculous thing . . . It's not the way to fight. The best tactic is to make a pass, then break off and come back." |
| - Brigadier General Robin Olds, USAF
13 victories, WWII 4 victories, Vietnam |
The classic air combat problem is, as Oswald Boelcke put it, to shoot the other guy and not get shot yourself. This is far more difficult than it seems at first. A new Fighter Ace
flyer often thinks that the only way to get a good shot is to fall in on someone's six and fly around behind them until you're lined up. To employ this tactic successfully, you need to have turn performance parity at the very least and hopefully have a better-turning plane entirely. This accounts for the popularity of the Yaks and Spits in the current arenas. Beginners in slow-turning planes may find themselves entering a series of nose-to-nose head-ons, as neither side is able to get on the other's six. But there is another, better way.
Fly Smarter, Not Harder
What we need is a way that a faster but slower-turning plane can turn with a more nimble opponent to get a shot. And the solution is to look at how physics affects our turn performance.
All things being equal, a slower plane will turn tighter (but not necessarily quicker) than a faster plane. The reduction in speed also means a reduction in the centrifugal force that wants to push the plane to the outside of a turn. However, if we make a flat turn that puts us in the same plane of maneuver as the opponent, we quickly find ourselves out of speed, out of altitude, out of ideas, and, very soon, out of luck. We know that if we get slow enough, we become a sitting duck to the faster sharks in this virtual ocean. We have to find a way of turning that keeps our speed and energy up. The key is to make an out-of-plane maneuver to take us out of the opponent's gun range, do our slow turning, and then come back at the enemy with guns blazing.
How to Do the Out-of-Plane Bop
| "My approach was to attack from above if possible in a fast pass, and to pull back up after firing. I could quickly move out of the other fellow's gun range and wait until he had stopped doing whatever he was doing. If he had gone into a turn he would have lost speed and I was in a good position to come back down on him with speed." |
| - Lt. Colonel John C. Meyer, USAAF 24 victories |
We know from reading the Guns Defense article (we did read it, didn't we, kiddies?) that the most common defensive tactic is a hard break turn designed to cause the shooter to overshoot. Now let's put ourselves in the place of the shooter. Hopefully we are approaching our target with a speed and altitude advantage. (We are going to need this energy, so make sure that you have it going in.) Following the Gunnery Help article (Rap eyes the room balefully), we aim for the spot where the opponent is going, make our firing pass, and then pull up. Now what?
What we want to do is to pull up out of gun range and do some serious slow-speed turning.
| Using this tactic, you can kill any tighter-turning opponent. |
As we climb, we will be going outside the radius of the target's break turn. Our fast fighter cannot hope to turn with the slower target. (This is more pronounced if you are flying a FW or P-51 or LA-7, due to their high wing loading.) As we pull up, we roll slightly into the target so that we can look down the down wing at our opponent. We want to make sure that they continue the turn. In the meantime, we are putting energy, in the form of altitude, back in the Virtual Energy Bank and our plane is slowing. At the top when our speed has dropped to just above stall speed, we roll our plane until we can look at the opponent through the top of the canopy. We will be not quite inverted at this point, as the opponent is inside our turn radius. We pull back on the stick to use gravity to help us around the corner. We are now headed down and aiming at the point in space where our opponent is going. This should result in another high-speed firing pass. Repeat as necessary until the opponent is dead.
To more easily visualize your flight path, pretend you have a hard-boiled egg in an eggcup in front of you. You draw a line on the egg shell (this is you) starting from the edge of the eggcup, going up the egg and over just to one side of the egg's point. Then continue drawing the line over the other side, back down to meet the edge of the eggcup. In the maneuver I described, your flight path would be an egg-shaped ellipse with the pointy part of the egg being at the top of your climb. The opponent's flight path is the outside edge of the eggcup. The line would intersect the cup's edge at two points, which are your firing opportunities.
| "Before the Spit pilot knew what had happened, I was high above him, the Thunderbolt hammering around. And that was it -- for in the next few moments the Spitfire flier was amazed to see a less-maneuverable, slower-climbing Thunderbolt rushing straight at him, eight guns pointed ominously at his cockpit." |
| - Major Robert S. Johnson, USAAF 27 victories, WWII |
Using this tactic, you can kill any tighter-turning opponent. It helps to have a steady eye and excellent shooting abilities. If you don't kill them on the first pass, set up and repeat as many times as is necessary. With time and practice you should be "eggsellent" (Rap ducks the thrown fruit and boos). So until next time, this is the Shooting Gourmet!
Johnson, Robert S., with Martin Caidin. Thunderbolt
! New York: Ballantine Books, 1958; p. 148
Shaw, Robert. Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering
. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute Press, 1985; pp. 71-73, 254, 333
Sims, Edward H. The Aces Talk
. Toronto: Ballantine Books of Canada, Ltd., 1972. Formerly published under the title Fighter Tactics and Strategy 1914-1970; p. 206
Sun Tzu. The Art of War
. James Clavell, ed. New York: Dell Publishing, 1983; p. 25
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