Might be another urban legend but..

Makes for a bloody amusing read regardless

Two British traffic patrol officers from North Berwick were involved in an unusual incident while checking for speeding motorists on the A1 Great North Road. One of the officers used a hand-held radar device to check the speed of a vehicle approaching over the crest of a hill, and was surprised when the speed was recorded at over 300 mph. Their radar suddenly stopped working and the officers were not able to reset it.

Just then a deafening roar over the treetops revealed that the radar had in fact latched on to a NATO Tornado fighter jet which was engaged in a low-flying exercise over the Border district, approaching from the North Sea.

Back at police headquarters the chief constable fired off a stiff complaint to the RAF Liaison office.

Back came the reply in true laconic RAF style:

"Thank you for your message, which allows us to complete the file on this incident. You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Tornado had detected the presence of, and subsequently locked onto, your hostile radar equipment and automatically sent a jamming signal back to it. Furthermore, an air-to-ground missile aboard the fully-armed aircraft had also automatically locked onto your equipment. Fortunately the pilot flying the Tornado recognized the situation for what it was, quickly responded to the missile systems alert status, and was able to override the automated defence system before the missile was launched and your hostile radar installation was destroyed.

Good Day..."

...motto of story


there is always someone bigger and stronger than you.....

...motto of story

there is always someone bigger and stronger than you.....

Like the aircraft-carrier-vs-lighthouse story...

...this one's implausible on a number of levels. First, as anyone who's been to the GP and seen the de-rigeur Hornet low-level display would probably agree, with a jet warplane, you hear it well before you see it. By the time these cops saw the approaching dot, they would've known there was something turbine-powered and angry about.

Then, 300mph works out to five miles a minute, ie. a mile every 12 seconds. What's the range of a police hairdryer?
Further, the electronic warfare suites on board combat aircraft typically include vast libraries of radar signatures... frequency band, frequency sweep range and duration, pulse duration, rate and profile and so on, and the type of radar they correspond to. The system would've gone "Ah, it's a police hairdryer" and told the backseater in the Tornado (not the pilot, as the story claims; at low level, he'd've been too busy either flying the plane himself or watching that the terrain-following system wasn't about to fly the plane into the aforementioned terrain) as much; it wouldn't've been the other way around, with the crewbloke recognising the radar signal by eye.

Further still, combat aircraft ordnance being expensive and scarce once an aircraft actually takes off carrying some means air forces tend to be loath to see it released unnecessarily by, say, a spooked weapons-control computer. Combat aircraft don't operate in the sort of fire-at-will mode described here, with a trigger-happy automated system running in the background the crew have to second-guess and calm down on occasion. There is such as thing as automated weapons release, but that's a multi-step process programmed in and manually initiated by the crew for the attack on a known target; the computers work out at what speed, angle and altitude to bring in the aircraft from and when to let go of the ordnance.

Finally, the story requires the Tornado to have been flying through unrestricted civilian airspace with its weapons and electronic warfare systems hot, and carrying live, armed ordnance. Forgetting for a moment that the RAF, like most of NATO, conducts its live-fire training in the US (unlike in continental Europe, there's plenty of desert to bomb there), so the aircraft would've been very unlikely to have been carrying live weapons in the first place, that's about as gross an act of operational negligence as you can get in military aviation, short of actually going "oops!" and dropping a cluster bomb onto a Maccas. Had this aircrew actually done this, when they got back to base, their commanding officer would've been on the phone to the Navy, arranging to have them keel-hauled.

On top of everything else, "laconic" means "terse" or "curt". A laconic reply from the RAF to the chief copper would not have included words like "furthermore".

...with a jet warplane, you hear it well before you see it...

Actually I-K when any of those buggers come in low and fast you definitely don't hear them before you see them. They illustrate this quite well at the Temora display's too...out of nowhere there's a plane and an almighty roar, then they are gone again. It's only when they circle around and do the fancy stuff in a small area that you hear them coming.

I agree with the rest though, definitely an urban myth

[......you hear it well before you see it. ...

hmmmm, it appears that the speed of sound is now faster than the speed of light !!......hmmmmm

[......you hear it well before you see it. ...

hmmmm, it appears that the speed of sound is now faster than the speed of light !!......hmmmmm

And both of them are heavier than a duck...

quack quack

I would just lke to point out the aircraft was approaching a near-by live bombing range (2.5 secs flight time away).......also the breeding grounds for the Atlantic fur seals who manage to shag & raise young amongst a live bombing range
The second part that Mick missed...............
The missile once armed by the taccom system cannot be disarmed in flight........the pilot had to fly over the sea to discharge the missile because of activity on the range.....the bill for the weapon was also forwarded to the Minister for Police. The cost of the weapon appearing on the ministers accounts is how the story was revealed.
We lived near the range on the East Coast of the UK and can tell you the buggers fly low enough to read their names on their helmets and NO you don't hear them 'til they have passed

[......you hear it well before you see it. ...

hmmmm, it appears that the speed of sound is now faster than the speed of light !!......hmmmmm

And both of them are heavier than a duck...

light and sound?? or a warplane??


umm..yea thanks IK..u always have to go and let the facts spoil a good story dont ya??

NO you don't hear them 'til they have passed

Double negative - does this mean you do hear them before they pass you?

[......you hear it well before you see it. ...

hmmmm, it appears that the speed of sound is now faster than the speed of light !!......hmmmmm

ONLY IF YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES.........

I-K's right guys, it's an urban legend (and a pretty lame one at that!)

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/radar.asp

when jets are coming towards you, unless your looking for them you dont hear them till they're on you.


but if the radar picked it up in the direction that it was pointing, it wouldve had to have been in sight.

when jets are coming towards you, unless your looking for them you dont hear them till they're on you.


but if the radar picked it up in the direction that it was pointing, it wouldve had to have been in sight.

If coppers on radar duty are spending all their time looking at the sky instead of the road they are supposed to be monitoring then theres a few speeding tickets I'm taking to the high court! Maybe I could claim it was a low flying racing pigeon...
I served 7 years in the RNZAF and this story came out in '92 but it was a Harrier Jump Jet on that occasion and maybe a Tiger Moth before that. Many, many inaccuracies quoted in previous posts regarding military technology, especially weapons control systems, but that takes four years training at #4 Technical Training Squadron at Woodbourne Air Force Base to understand and I really don't have the time to type it all right now...

Come on, you can't finish a post with only passing half information on - what about minimum firing distance, surely they should have 'switched to guns' like they do in Topgun.