reply to post by BlasteR
Just a real quick nitnoy correction, the missiles are radar guided missiles, not anti-radar missiles. Anti-radar missile generally use passive
guidance, so chaff won't be effective against them. Radar missiles come in two variants, semi-active and active. Semi-active missile rely entirely on
the shooting aircraft's radar to get tracking information. So do active missiles for a period of their flight time, before the on-board radar on the
missile kicks in and the shooting aircraft can leave. In both cases, chaff is used to to confuse the host aircraft or missile radar, by creating a
target with a larger radar cross section than the aircraft being targeted. Modern radars have ways of dealing with this (doppler gates which cut out
non-moving targets), and there are other countermeasures available these days as well(towed decoys, expendable radar jammers, on-board jammers etc),
though chaff still has utility.
Edit - because I'm pretty sure untility isn't a word...
[edit on 13-5-2008 by Willard856]