Yemeni tribesmen shoot down fighter jet

[bemildred]

Source: AFP

SANAA — Tribesmen fighting Yemeni troops loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh shot down Wednesday an army fighter jet, as a sea of protesters demanded the under-fire leader's ouster and trial.

A Sukhoi SU-22 "fell during a regular mission" and opposition leaders were "responsible for the incident," said a military spokesman quoted by Saba state news agency.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated near Sanaa's Change Square, the focal point of anti-regime protests in the violence-wracked Arabian Peninsula country, an AFP correspondent reported.

"We shall not rest until the butcher is executed," the demonstrators chanted as they marched in a neighbourhood of the capital controlled by dissident General Ali Muhsen al-Ahmar's First Armoured Division.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j5Mg27Tz-N_X-K9hSF8WI0xjlD7w?docId=CNG.137b03504ee11701d0f8f331f5092182.5c1

[KansDem]

1. Whoa! They must have the same firepower the NYPD has!

:scared:

I wonder who sold it to them?

[bemildred]

2. Well, it's not that far from Libya?

I heard they "lost" some there.

[xchrom]

3. recommend

[hack89]

4. The newest SU-22 is over 20 years old

I would bet on mechanical failure in combination with poorly trained pilots.

[bemildred]

5. Read that 2nd paragraph: That sounds like the state news agencies admitting

the rebels did it, Edit: and further down it says with AA guns.

[Blue_Tires]

6. if the jet is flying low and slow enough, it can be done

and this probably isn't some unguided RPG...Former Soviet toys like the Strela have been floating around Africa for a couple of decades now...

[bemildred]

7. Low and slow seems likely, I don't know much about that sort of thing.

There is this bit too:

"The tribal area of Arhab has been targeted by heavy air strikes since a general and six other soldiers were killed Sunday in clashes between tribesmen and the Republican Guard.

General Abdullah al-Kulaibi, head of the 63rd brigade of the elite Republican Guard unit, died in the attack by tribesman opposed to Saleh's rule in the strategic town of Nihm, the defence ministry said."

[Plucketeer]

8. ONE bullet...

even a stray one - hitting ONE critical component - can bring down the most sophisticated aircraft. I spent my working years around aircraft. One loose screw has the potential to bring down an otherwise perfect plane. Now - take that perfectly functional example of a plane and fly it thru a hail of amall arms fire. It only takes ONE lucky rifle round tearing a small hole in the turbine section of a jet engine, or thru a critical control component and that plane's going down.

[Fool Count]

9. Tribesmen Said to Bring Down Military Plane in Yemen (Qaddafi's missing MANPADS)

Source: NYTimes

SANA, Yemen — Rebel tribesmen in a mountainous region just north of the capital brought down a military aircraft on Wednesday, Yemen’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/middleeast/tribesmen-bring-down-military-plane-in-yemen.html?ref=world&gwh=E8DA88C84910787322E7DAD12CCCC409

---

Well, it didn't take long for some of the 20,000 missing Libyan MANPADS to find their way into Yemen. Surely, many more similar news are to follow
as distribution channels solidify and street price of those missiles drops.

[petronius]

10. An earlier article said it was guns, not missiles

Has something changed? Is there a known Libya connection?

[Fool Count]

11. It did not say it was guns. It only mentioned guns in one sentence,

namely: "It is not unusual for tribesmen to have antiaircraft weaponry in Yemen, a country awash in arms of all kinds".

That is, of course, true - they have lots of AA guns there and had forever. Yet, this is the first time they shot down a
plane. Libya connection is my own speculation. While it is possible that this particular incident didn't involve Libyan
MANPADS, there is no doubt in my mind that some of them are already in Yemen (among other countries) and more
will be delivered soon. It is only a matter of time that they will be used in combat.

[petronius]

12. The article cited in the previous thread, I meant:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x5009164

"The fighter jet was downed by anti-aircraft guns near Arhab, 40 kilometres (26 miles) north of Sanaa, where armed tribesmen have been locked in combat with the elite Republican Guard, led by Saleh's son Ahmed, witnesses said."

[tabatha]

13. Yep, jump to conclusions much like Faux.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

14. I'm skeptical of any shoulder-fired missile story

These are not passive devices that can sit in a dusty bunker for decades just to be grabbed and immediately launched, they need extensive ongoing maintenance as the batteries and rocket motors have a limited shelf life and the sensors are ridiculously fragile. The IRA obtained a bunch of these in a plot to shoot down British helicopters and didn't successfully fire a single one. Note I said "fire" to say the dickhead was just standing there with the tube perched on his shoulder and nothing happened. I would wager more people have been killed when the rocket motor exploded than have been killed in aircraft downed with them.

[PacerLJ35]

15. Some truth

While it's common for older generation MANPADS to be unserviceable...some of the systems taken from Libya were SA-24s, which are fairly new and haven't been on the market that long...and therefore Libya couldn't have had them for too long vice the SA-7s some of which are probably 20+ years old. Even that being said, insurgents can be pretty resourceful and make an inoperable missile system working...this was the case in Iraq...many of the missile shots were SA-7s and SA-14s, most of which were probably taken from older ex-Saddam stocks and were modified with working batteries.

[14thColony]

16. My experience with these missiles is to the contrary

The Soviet- and now Russian-made MANPADS (SA-7/14/16 in particular) have shown an almost freakish ability to survive in environments and storage conditions that I imagine would even dumbfound the engineers that designed them.

A MANPADS of this type comes in a wooden or metal storage crate which normally contains two missiles in pre-sealed launch tubes, two battery-coolant units, which power up the missile and super-cool the seeker head (if applicable), and one gripstock, which is the actual firing mechanism. The crates are well-padded and pretty well sealed. The SA-7/14/16 (and clones thereof like Sakr-Eye, HQ-1, SM-1, etc.) have no critical maintenance requirements while in storage.

I've inspected hundreds of these missiles in various storage conditions in various places, and I would be confident that >90% of the Soviet/Russian systems (and their clones) would launch, track, guide and detonate as advertised.

As an extreme example I'm familiar with, in the wake one conflict some years ago dozens of MANPADS were recovered from the most horrible 'storage' conditions imaginable: tubes, gripstocks, BCUs removed from the storage crates, wrapped in raggedy tarps and BURIED IN THE GROUND for several months, if not longer (may have been a LOT longer, no one is sure). By the way these were Soviet-era weapons so they weren't exactly new when they went in the ground; mostly 1970s manufacture IIRC. These dozens were later instrumented and test-fired by a particularly expert R&D organization, without any attempt to maintain them (that was the whole point of the experiment). Full sequence success rate (that's lock-launch-track-guide-detonate) was close to 100%. Lesson I took away from this: unless the tube is smashed or bent, it's probably going to work just fine.

As for the IRA, I'm not sure what they acquired. I know they got a hold of the occasional Blowpipe, perhaps some Javelins. I'm not as expert on British MANPADS, and for all I know they may be very finicky about storage and maintenance. The fact they're all Semi-Active Command-to-Line of Sight systems means that unless our hopeful IRA man had very good training on how to guide it, he wasn't going to hit anything anyway. But as the ex-Libyan kit is all infra-red passive homing, they're much further towards the 'point-n-shoot' end of the spectrum (I oversimplify somewhat, but not much).

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

17. I studied under a professor who was a big shot arms control official

Did the R&D organization rebuild the batteries?

The IRA got their hands on misc SA-7's sourced from North Africa which all proved to be unserviceable. The British took it very seriously though.

My professor first encountered SA-7's captured by the South Africans in commando raids against various terrorist groups in Southern Africa after the downing of the Air Rhodesia flights by ZIPRA in 1978 and 1979. The SADF set about a program of developing countermeasures and intended the fire the captured weapons against drones but only successfully fired several of the captured weapons even after hand-rebuilding the batteries.

In the early 90's he encountered Afghanistan era Redeyes that were obtained by a European intelligence agency, also determined to be unserviceable and were destroyed without further inspection.

[14thColony]

18. No, they didn't rebuild anything

That was what shocked a lot of us. Honestly before then I would have completely agreed with you, especially the way these examples were handled, which was rough to say the least. It was the battery-coolant units that got me -- still can't explain that many BCUs retaining a useful charge for that long, but not for nothing did the Soviet weapons engineers have a reputation for building things that would function in the most extreme conditions. Well-earned in my opinion. Western kit, of course, tended to be a bit (a lot) more sensitive about things like storage and maintenance.

Who knows, maybe it was a one-in-a-million fluke, but statistically I think that's unlikely.

In the African examples you cite, it might come down to environment: perhaps hot-n-humid is worse for survivability than hot-n-dry. While a remote chance, I wouldn't totally discount the possibility that what the ZIPRA/ZANU acquired might have been Strela-2 knock-offs from a less-sophisticated (at the time) manufacturer like North Korea or China. I know in other weapons (e.g., small arms) there is a marked difference in quality between actual Soviet-made and almost-anyone-else-made, with the Soviet kit being the top grade.

I looked into the IRA example a bit since I wasn't familiar with it, but what I found said they did launch at least one of an unk number acquired against a Lynx, missing the helo. That was all I could find.

[PacerLJ35]

19. That's great

But I've personally encountered SA-7s and possibly even SA-16s that were operated by insurgent groups. They were operational.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

20. I never said they weren't

But for the sheer number of these weapons that have fallen out of state hands they sure don't make themselves known very often.

[ellisonz]

21. That would be more dependent on motive...

...and opportunity. Firing a surface to air missile makes you one heck of a target. Furthermore, if they are a threat in a conflict area pilots will tend to fly more evasively.

Basically they're good against low-flying propeller aircraft and slow low flying helicopters.