Chapter 269 The Moody Engine

He turned on the afterburner, climbed upwards, and released decoy bombs at the same time. Then, he pressed the control stick to turn off the afterburner, allowing the fighter to dive downward quickly. The series of positive and negative overloads made Yuji Ikeda almost vomit.

Fortunately, the missile was first attracted by the heat wave of the afterburner, and then climbed upwards, consuming precious energy in the process. After Ikeda Yuji turned off the afterburner and dived, the missile caught up with the flare that attracted it even more.

Damn it, Soviet missiles, damn it! Ikeda Yuji pulled out of the dive and couldn't help but want to curse, but before he could say anything, he heard an anxious voice in his headset, 421, attention, six o'clock!

At six o'clock, in the direction of his tail! The Soviets are coming? Ikeda Yuji heard the warning sound and immediately pushed his joystick to the far right, while pressing the right rudder firmly.

Want to bite me and then launch a missile from behind? No way! Ikeda Yuji took a simple tactic and turned sideways! Compare the hovering ability to see who is better!

Plaster flag, is this a trick? Kovacevic just saw that the missile he fired head-on didn't work, and the opponent dived down to get rid of the missile, so he pushed the nose of the plane and dived down. From an altitude of 8,000 meters, he followed to 3,000 meters, and then the opponent leveled off, and he followed suit. Just when he was about to launch a missile, the opponent began to turn.

Follow the turn! Just when diving, the wings were swept back to the end. Now, as Kovacevic began to turn sideways, the wings automatically rose forward. Those guys at the Mikoyan Design Bureau did a great job! The wing seemed to know what the pilot was thinking! Compared with manual control, Kovacevic was quite satisfied with the current control.

See what tricks you have up your sleeve!

Flying left and right in a straight line for no more than five seconds, Ikeda Yuji did not give the opponent any chance to lock on, but the Soviets behind him could not get rid of him.

What to do? Ikeda Yuji gritted his teeth, flipped a switch on the side of his right hand, and pushed the accelerator to the minimum position with his left hand.

Damn, those cunning Japanese people! Kovacevic looked at the F-15 fighter in front of him, which suddenly braked in the air, and a big guy rose from the opponent's back!

When the F-15 was designed, the back skin was designed to be a large speed brake, which can be opened at any speed without causing pitch changes. This 2.93 square meter speed brake is unique to the F-15 fighter and is generally used for landing, eliminating the need for a parachute.

Soviet aircraft all had a tall dorsal fin at the rear, so the same design could not be used. Later, the beautiful Su-27 fighter designed by the Sukhoi Design Bureau had almost the same equipment.

Now, this speed brake is still a new thing. With the speed brake and the throttle reduced, the speed of the F-15 suddenly dropped, and the MiG-23 behind it suddenly rushed to the front. Although the MiG-23 was also quite agile, it could not do this emergency brake in the air. At this speed, even if Kovacevic opened the parachute, it would be blown away by the airflow in an instant.

Generally speaking, no pilot would do this in an air battle. The most important thing in an air battle is energy! Only with energy can you win an air battle! If you lose speed, you lose everything. For example, the Su-27's Pugachev Cobra maneuver, which is like a god in the eyes of countless military fans in later generations, is just a show at an air show and has no practical significance at all.

Like now, although Ikeda Yuji's sudden deceleration allowed the MiG-23 behind to rush to the front, at the same time, the MiG-23 that rushed out was moving away quickly.

Ikeda Yuji certainly knows that energy determines everything. He does this now only because he has sufficient confidence in his fighter. The two F100 engines at the back have a thrust of more than 110 kilonewtons per engine. With an empty weight of 13 tons, the thrust-to-weight ratio of the whole aircraft reaches 1.7! Among all the third-generation aircraft, the thrust-to-weight ratio of the F-15 is the highest, unmatched! Even the later F-22 cannot compare.

Now, the auxiliary fuel tank has been thrown away long ago, part of the fuel in the aircraft has been burned, and the F-15's overall thrust-to-weight ratio is about 1.4. Chasing the MiG-23 in front is a piece of cake!

With this thought in mind, Yuji Ikeda turned on the afterburner and stepped on the accelerator to the limit, looking forward to the familiar feeling of being pushed on the back.

"Boom!" A voice came from behind, and then a voice alarm came from the cockpit: "Left engine failure, left engine failure!"

Afterburner is actually an afterburner combustion chamber at the rear end of the engine, which has a circle of fuel injectors and spark plugs. The fuel injectors spray aviation fuel, and the spark plugs ignite the fuel to generate more thrust. In this way, there is no more oxygen involved, it is just spraying fuel, so naturally the fuel consumption rate increases sharply.

And now, with the operation of Yuji Ikeda, the fuel injector began to spray fuel into the combustion chamber, but it did not burn immediately after the injection, and the afterburner ignition failed!

In the afterburner, a large amount of fuel is increasing rapidly, and at the same time, in the front core engine, high-temperature combustion gas of thousands of degrees rushes to the rear combustion chamber at lightning speed.

"Boom!" This sound was caused by a small-scale explosion in the afterburner. With the explosion, a large amount of high-temperature and high-pressure gas was quickly formed. It not only sprayed backwards, but the over-pressure airflow also flowed back to the front!

The airflow from the duct rushed to the front fan, and the airfoil fan blades were the first to stall! The fan stalled, causing the first few stages of the compressor to stall!

Technological advancement requires taking risks. The American F100 engine is very advanced and is the first engine in the world to achieve a thrust-to-weight ratio of 8. However, reliability has always been a big problem!

After being equipped to the troops, the F100 engine was prone to stalling, the same symptom as the TF30 of the F-14! This inherent problem of the F100 engine is still being solved by Pratt & Whitney. In history, the F-15 fleet was grounded in large areas in 1979 due to these problems, earning the reputation of the hangar queen. Starting in late 1979, the US Air Force was even forced to accept F-15As without engines and store them waiting for engines.

The early F100 engines were temperamental! The solution given by Pratt & Whitney was to operate them gently, especially not to turn the afterburner on and off frequently! In the actual fast-changing air combat, this is simply impossible.

Yuji Ikeda knew that he was in big trouble.