Originally posted by MaxCola45
Barring the account is a complete fabrication, it sounds something like this may have happened:
F-16's were laden with weapons in strike configuration. This severely limits the aircrafts agility.
Aircraft meet unexpected air defense SAMs. They drop their ordnance beforereaching target in order to be able to take evasive action, and then high
tail it out of there.
There have been a couple of threads here regarding Russian sales of the newest generation missile
systems...
Russia delivers air defence to
Syria...
Syrian threat: SAMs gallore
Question: Do the various SAM types (ie: S-200/S-300/S-400) have detectable differences in their radar-signatures? If so then perhaps this could have
been the ploy:
IAF planes fly laden with training-rounds along with sophisticated radar-detectors that look like a fully-weaponised plane on air-defense radar,
Syrian SAM batteries switch on and track incoming aircraft, IAF planes pick up SAM radar-signal, dump training-ordnance and high-tail it back to
Israeli airspace, IAF analyse collected data to determine Syrian SAM capabilities and types fielded.