In the skies around me I can see smoke trails from missiles and flares, black smoke and flames from burning wreckage, but who is winning and who is losing I could not tell you. As I glance back and forth over my shoulder (TrackIR rules) I spot a target, padlock him and bring him around to my nose. Somehow I find the right button combination on my throttle and the radar goes into BORE mode and I lock him up. Friend? Foe? I think I see a red star! My missile comes off the rail and I know it is too late, I hesitated too long!
To my astonishment the missile jinks hard to the left, leading the Su-27 and tracking for a scant couple of seconds before plowing into the tail in a brilliant explosion. I hit something! I hit something!!
Wow, it isn’t an Su-27 at all, it’s an Su-33, the navalized version of the Flanker! Bigger and beefier, it takes damage from my missile and trails a plume of grey smoke from the wing, but he isn’t finished. Yanking back in the stick the tunnel vision kicks in for a brief second and then he is back in my HUD and I fire again. I wait a second, two, three, I’ve missed! Launch again! Just as my missile comes off the rail the first missile hits him and he blows to pieces and plows into the ocean.
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Meanwhile my wingmen are trading blows with other fighters and it looks like the war of attrition is staying pretty even.
While I’m off watching my wingman I switch views back into my cockpit just as the water reaches up and grabs me as I slam into it at about 700 knots. So much for paying attention. Sitting back I watch one of my wingmen get worked over by another Su-33. First he takes some cannon hits and he ends up trailing smoke. A short range air-to-air missile zips by him and misses but I can tell he is losing the battle of angles with the Flanker-D.
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Another two turns and it is all over for the F-15C as he takes a second missile dead center. All is not lost however, as another flight of F-15s enters the fight. No different than jousters from centuries past the combatants scream toward each other launching missiles at minimum range.
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