An F-15C Eagle fighter of the US Air Force (USAF) ed a “kill” at a record distance during a test with an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile carried out in March of this year. However, the USAF did not report the exact distance at which the shooting took place.
The test involved a fighter from the 28th Test and Evaluation Squadron, working in partnership with the 83rd Fighter Weapons Squadron, at Tyndall Air Force Base (Florida), during the Weapons Systems Evaluation Program – East (WSEP East), where the missile was fired at a BQM-167 drone target.
According to the websites The Aviationist e The War Zone, the missiles used during “Combat Archer”, as the exercise is also called, do not carry real warheads, but rather telemetry instruments. Kills are validated by evaluating how close the missile is to the target during the attack.
The exercise is also one of the rare opportunities fighter pilots have to fire a real missile. Fighter planes are normally loaded with training/inert missiles, where only the armament guidance systems are real.
Missiles and other ammunition are sensitive and need to be stored in special magazines, with temperature, humidity and other aspects controlled. Outside these environments, the lifespan of these artifacts drops a lot.
It should be ed that missiles also do not necessarily need to collide with the target to bring it down, since the weapons have proximity fuzes. The missile senses its distance to the target and explodes close enough for the shrapnel to cause severe damage to enemy aircraft.
The latest AMRAAM variant, the AIM-120D, is believed to have a range in excess of 160km, but the USAF also did not specify the variant used in the record kill. The longest-range air-to-air missile ever used by the US was the AIM-54 Phoenix, carried exclusively by the F-14 Tomcat Navy, with a maximum range estimated at 190km.
As the The Aviationist, the F-15C kill at the Eglin-Gulf Test and Training Range likely topped the Phoenix numbers.
The F-15C/D Eagle and F-15E Strike Eagle can carry eight air-to-air missiles and are typically carried in two main configurations: 6×2 (six AIM-120 AMRAAM and two AIM-9 Sidewinder) and 4×4 ( four AMRAAMs and two Sidewinders), the latter being the most common.
The last two and most modern variants of the legendary fighter, F-15QA e F-15EX Eagle II can carry 22 missiles, a huge jump in the plane's payload. The USAF is expected to acquire 144 new Eagle IIs.
It should be ed that in March a BQM-167 drone appeared on the edge of a Florida beach.
