Not much other than PLAAF hardware is battle proven now and Pl-15 is having all the attention now
The Kashmir conflict 2025.
- Thread starter ohan_qwe
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The Pakistanis are definitely overclaiming the number of kills they achieved against India on May 7th, but their senior military and political leadership are not necessarily intentionally pushing disinformation.
The reality is virtually every air force will exaggerate their performance in combat, and the reason for this is actually quite simple.
Just as sales representatives are measured, compensated and promoted for the volume and value of the transactions they generate, fighter pilots are evaluated, honored and promoted for the kills they achieve.
Outside of arguable exceptions like the Ukrainian Air Force, most fighter pilots don't get a lot of opportunities to score air-to-air kills, so even a single "confirmed" kill can make or break a career.
Naturally, both fighter pilots and their chains of command, regardless of nationality, religion and politics, will have serious incentives to declare kills that they're only 70%, 50% or even 30% certain about as "confirmed."
this would be news to me. surely this is not mistakenly referring to the pl-15 seeker images we've been seeing, right? if this means meteors were actually exchanged and had a 0% pk that would be huge.
edit: perhaps im misreading the passage. it is not totally clear which missile they are referring to, but since the succeeding sentence talks about the pl-15 it may be referring to pl-15 seeker.
Potentially the PL-15E having good pk at near maximum range against fighters like the Rafale, and superior to the meteor in all aspects.
They'll be hoping it's pilot skill, not missile performance as the reason for the shootdown.
So there was a report earlier in CNN that cited a Pakistani military official who said there were 125 jets in the air during the 1 hour aerial engagement. My question is - have we seen any more A2A missile debris other than the two somewhat confirmed PL-15E missiles?
Did India get a chance to launch any of their ASRAAM or Meteor missiles in their inventory? Given that if was an intense engagement, there should have been countless more missiles fired and missile bodies found on both the India and Pakisani side
Did India get a chance to launch any of their ASRAAM or Meteor missiles in their inventory? Given that if was an intense engagement, there should have been countless more missiles fired and missile bodies found on both the India and Pakisani side
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We got evidence pretty quickly for the other fighters downed. As time passes the odds of us getting hard evidence like we got for the first Rafale goes down. Also the fact that IAF is not saying anything is due to them trying to deny any Rafales or IAF planes in general were downed. Their behavior probably wouldn't be any different if it was 1 or 3 Rafales downed so their lack of comment doesn't really say much in this case as we already know at least 1 Rafale was downed.
The misidentification of Mirage 2000 as Rafale is fairly plausible. Maybe one of the Su-30 or MiG-29 was misidentified as well, it's plausible there are more than 2 total Su-30 or MiG-29 downed. It's also still possible that there are Rafales that went down in more remote places and we don't have any evidence of them as IAF is covering it up. However that possibility tends to decrease as time goes on.
Yes, in addition to it being in their interests there is also just a significant degree of systematic over counting of kills. If you look at any major previous conflict even going back to WW2 virtually everybody over reports kills. It's partly everybody wants to make themselves look good and partly because fog of war is a thing and it can be hard to tell what actually happened because you don't have access to your enemies' records during a war.
However I was asking as you did a lot of good work compiling what we already know if you knew of any evidence for more Rafales downed as I couldn't find any but with the thread being this long it's hard to know if I just missed something.
PL-15 really isn’t even China’s best missile at this point. The successor has been in service with J-20 for approximately two years now. Due to the nature of weaponsbay you can’t really see them.
In air to air combat, it is hard to confirm kill over night. even if the missile impact, it is possible the jet still survive and limp back to base.
it is also possible 5 bandits were hit, but maybe only 3 were actually down, and 2 was damaged and limp back to base.
Analysts know the max stated ranges in their heads, but think there's a big trade-off for these long range missiles.
That's why they label all of these missiles AWACS killers in derision.
Rather this than accept the uncomfortable possibility that consistent investment in missile tech over decades have yielded dividends.