Usefulness of Cobra, Kulbit, and J-turn in actual combat?

Hi, I have recently gone you-tubing and watched some videos of the F-22 and The Su-37 performing the cobra and kulbit. A bunch of things have come to mind.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss how useful a maneuver like this would be in combat. Some people say that in WVR you can flip over and launch a IR-AAM and some people say the minute you do that you get IR-AAMed or filled with so much lead you cant fly any more

There is a lot of faulty info on youtube, and I want to get it straight from ATS members and not 12 year olds on youtube. I can never tell what is true and what is fake.

Here is an example (this is not meant to start a VS thread)

First there are the Russian kids who are like
tee-hee weve been doing this for years so the Su-47 is the best and american fighters suck.

And than there are the American ones who are like
bla bla bla yeah well at least we dont put our wings on backwards tee-hee.

I can never find any info

Well, if you've watched new video, you would know Cobra is nothing, even Draken can do it. The Cobra did without altitude, speed and range enhancing, will be a show only. Show what? a dance, nothing more.

I'd recommend doing a search on ATS for keywords such as cobra, kulbit and WVR. In the three years or so I've been on ATS, this topic has been discussed at least ten times. I'm not having a go at your question, but simply direct you towards some great info that has already been posted on ATS (and not such great info...). If you don't have any luck with the search function, let me know and I'll chase up some of the threads.

Ok, yes, I did find some good info.

Mods feel free to lock this topic

Originally posted by BlackWidow23
First there are the Russian kids who are like
tee-hee weve been doing this for years so the Su-47 is the best and american fighters suck.

I had nothing to do with this...
Su-47 may not be the best fighter in the world, but it's downplayed a lot. I'm fairly sure that if a Su-47 and a Raptor were matched up that each one would give the other a good run for their money.









Backward wings r00l! Sorry.

[edit on 2/11/2007 by Darkpr0]

Well if the combat happened over an Air Show then it would add to the WOW factor.

Other than that I think half these maneuvers are probably not in the minds of pilots as they consider how to contend with an opponent in WVR dogfight. The last thing you want to do in a dogfight is lose volocity! At an airshow (on the other hand) you want to go as slow as you can or the paying public would complain!

Naturally I have no experience or detailed knowledge of air combat.

Regards