AC-130U Spooky
Posted on 10/18/2001 9:47:20 AM PDT by The Vast Right Wing
Pray for GW and the truth!
Thanks so much for the photos.
Four problems with the concept of bringing a Spectre down with a Stinger occur to me.
First, instead of having one or two closely-spaced turbojet engines, like a fighter would have, the Spectre has four widely-spaced turboprop engines. This means that the image of the exhaust in infrared is not sharp and bright, but rather dim and smeared-out. It's likely that a Stinger's seeker head would have trouble locking on to such a picture: the missileer would probably be forced to stay exposed to give the missile a long, long look at the target. See Problem Four below.
Secondly, the small, low-tech seeker head on a Stinger missile would be completely overwhelmed by the three IR decoy-flare ejectors on an AC-130 (same with the Marines' MC-130). When somebody mashes his thumb down on the flare button, those three huge ejectors start launching (a guess, based on a video clip I saw) between ten and twenty big magnesium flares per second: to the right, to the left, and straight down. (You can see a couple of still examples in Stand Watch Listen's photographs.) Each of those hundreds of flares would be a much juicier target to the Stinger's seeker head than the big, cool, washed-out signature of the Spectre's engines.
Third, the Spectre carries quite a bit of Kevlar armor, as well as a little of the steel kind. Man-portable missiles have to be lightweight, and the Stinger's warhead is only about two pounds, if I remember correctly. If the missile locked on, made it through the defenses, and struck, the crew would notice, but catastrophic failure would be unlikely. Remember, the Spectre has four engines.
And fourth, the Spectre travels with escort aircraft that spend their time doing nothing but wheeling around it using night-vision equipment to look for missileers trying to get a lock.
A possible fifth is that it's likely the enemy already knows about Problems 1 through 4, and is therefore unlikely to waste missiles and missileers attacking Spectres. There are only so many Stingers in Afghanistan, and when they run out of stock and reorder, there's likely to be something of a restocking delay. If I were them, I'd save the missiles for a more realistic target: for example, a slow-moving AH-1 Cobra gunship or a UH-60 Blackhawk troop transport with a nice tight turboshaft exhaust signature. 300mph may be slow for a fixed-wing military aircraft, but it's nothing but a pipe dream for most helicopters--and besides, helicopters are what Afghan missileers are trained to engage.
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