Original title: Random talk about weapons

Painted by Wu Zhifeng

In recent years, fixed wing fighters, helicopters and military UAVs have encountered "black flight" (unauthorized flight) repeatedly in the takeoff and landing phase around the world. On May 22, a typhoon fighter collided with a "black flying" UAV during landing over Manning Airport in Bavaria, Germany, which made people pay attention to such incidents again.

Ordinarily, the fire control radar, collision avoidance radar, photoelectric/infrared search equipment, etc. equipped on fighter planes (including fixed wing fighter planes and helicopters) can also be used to monitor UAVs flying at low altitude. Why do such accidents still occur?

First of all, when a fighter takes off and lands or goes around, it is flying in the troposphere at a low altitude with unstable airflow. In addition, the flight speed of the fighter at this stage is limited. In case of special circumstances, there is little room for the pilot to control the fighter for correction. Therefore, the pilot will focus on the changes of important parameters such as the fighter's flight attitude, landing gear status, engine temperature, navigation information, and so on, without taking into account others.

Secondly, the fixed wing fighter's fire control radar, photoelectric/infrared search equipment, etc., are mainly designed to find fast flying targets; Collision avoidance radars on helicopters and UAVs are mainly used to avoid obstacles on the ground when flying at ultra-low altitude. It can be seen that searching for UAVs characterized by "low, slow and small" is not the specialty of these detection devices.

In addition, in order to ensure safety, fixed wing fighters usually turn off the fire control radar during takeoff and landing. The "Black Flight" UAV is generally not equipped with a secondary radar transponder, and its flight path is irregular. Once these UAVs are out of the view of airborne electro-optical/infrared search equipment, it is difficult to be found.

Since it is impossible to effectively find the "black flying" UAV at this stage with airborne equipment, how to solve this problem? The answer is to do a solid job in prevention.

The establishment of airport clearance zones is the unified practice of all countries. The clearance area refers to the clean near ground space demarcated around the airport to ensure the safe takeoff and landing of aircraft. In this space, the height of buildings and obstacles is strictly limited. UAVs, kites, power umbrellas, gliders, hot-air balloons and even birds are not allowed to enter, and anti-collision lights are also installed.

For a long time, an important reason for the "black flight" of the fighter planes of various countries is that the clearance area is "unclean", which requires further improvement of the joint management and control mechanism, strengthening the publicity of the aviation safety law, and relying on administrative and legal means to manage UAVs from the source. At the same time, we should enrich the means of detection and countermeasures so as to give early warning in time and respond at a critical moment.

On the one hand, it is necessary to strengthen the early warning ability, build an air situation early warning system composed of detection equipment from different angles and at different levels, and improve the detection, recognition and tracking ability of low altitude and ultra-low altitude targets.

On the other hand, it is necessary to enrich countermeasures and eliminate the "black flying" UAVs found in time. It includes not only the use of soft killing means, that is, the use of professional equipment for electromagnetic suppression to interfere with and block the UAV receiving control signals, so that it can crash or land out of control, but also the use of laser weapons, UAVs and conventional fire to conduct hard damage at critical moments, so as to ensure the safety of fighters. (Zhang Simeng and Feng Jianyong)