F-18 Follows a Tomahawk to impact on ship

Hot knife through butter.

 

It was just some empty containers. A .50 BMG round would do the same.

Not some empty containers, an empty container.

 

Imagine if it had hit between two containers! I bet it wouldn't have been such a nonevent.

 

During the Harpoon test program they did a similar test and filmed it from the ship like this was. To maximize the damage to a ship the Harpoon missile performs a "pop up" maneuver so that it can finish the attack by diving down on the target.

As with this test there was an explosion of the residual fuel in the missile that blew off a hatchway right in front of the camera which was pretty cool.

The test was a success the missile performed as designed and the film crew went onto the target ship to retrieve the film. As they were finishing collecting the film and the cameras the realized that the ship was taking on water. After the ship sank they figured out that the engine shaft had actually went through the bottom of the hull and that was what sank the ship.

Given that experience it's easy to see why they would test the missile with it programmed to just hit high and not hit down by the waterline.

 

Pidgeon: "What the **** was that?!"

 

FOUO, Distribution D. Russians should not have been able to get ahold of those pieces of film, but we know how that goes.

 

Probably ordered them from Amazon.

 

Guys, probably some Russian guy found the original video on the internet and uploaded on youtube with a Russian title, I have seen so many videos like that with Russian titles but you can easily find them with the original English titles too.

I think this is the original one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgv5ixxgTsQ

http://news.usni.org/2015/02/09/video-tomahawk-strike-missile-punches-hole-moving-maritime-target

 

Is it me or was that a total waste of tax payer dollars?

 

..a waste?..only if there's no squabb..
Cheers,RE 😜

 

If it had it the ship behind the cameras, then yes. Otherwise a minor expense, relatively speaking, and something that should be done for almost any testing.

 

They periodically test missiles like this for a number of reasons. One is that the engine and associated hardware can degrade just due to sitting. These engines are small turbines, not rockets, and they aren't "hermitically" sealed. Tomahawks are carried by aircraft and in going up to altitude and descending you can have condensation accumulate in the engines. While most of the parts are all nickel and titanium, things like bearings, can get corroded if condensation gets into the compartments. A certain very small percentage of missiles are fired to provide a statistical background and this determines the life of the fleet and the frequency that the missiles have to be taken apart for refurbishment.

Designers of cruise missile engines go to great lengths to insure that the engine will perform as designed even after sitting for 15 or 20 years without even an inspection or intermediate maintenance. The term used in the industry is that these are "wooden rounds" and the idea is that they can sit for protracted periods without any maintenance or inspection at all. If you had to tear down these engines on a regular basis, that would be very expensive. Instead they determine a schedule for refurbishment based on failures in testing of a small sample of test firings.

After sitting that long the starting cartridges are fired to crank the engine over and inject big flames into the combustor (think burning magnesium and Teflon) and the engine goes from sitting (and sometimes it is sitting at -60 F at altitude) to full power in about 3 seconds. Typical turbines take 20 to 30 seconds to start and the best thing that I can say is that a cartridge start of a missile engine is a violent occurrence, but it's really cool to see a streak of flames 15 feet long coming out the back of a turbine.

There are very good reasons that they do this and if you think about it a bit it all makes sense.

 

Thanks for explanation - was totally unaware such issues - makes good sense as pointed out..

 

They have large stores of old powder bags for the big Naval guns. As simple as that is they even have to drag that out and test it from time to time. Its the cost of preparedness. Cant expect to be able to build all this stuff when we need it.

 

Exactly. And with a flight test you are testing the entire system, not just the engine and that is important too. There are literally thousands of things that could be effected by the long period of storage in a cruise missile, and the storage conditions are horrible. These things are carried on the wing of an aircraft through storms and rain and through salt air for years and years and then are expected to come to life and perform flawlessly for their entire mission. Since they get carried to altitude they cannot be sealed although the inlets and exhausts are covered, these covers aren't air tight, and moisture always finds its way in. The fact that these things work as well as they do is really pretty amazing and is a testament to the time and effort it takes to design an build them.

Sometimes they take missiles down and test or inspect individual components but that only goes so far. The sampling by doing live fire tests even with an inter warhead, is small, but they do enough to make sure that they have a statistical data base and that are assured that it will all work when they need to fire for real.

The success rate (meaning hitting the target, not just starting and flying off) for the Tomahawk is recently up to about 90%, which is pretty amazing when you realize that this system does its thing without any human involvement after the button to send it on its mission is pushed, and the technology involved is all from the early 1980's.

 

Much better than the Russians are doing. On one recent launch from an SU-22, only one of six cruise missiles worked. They launch over the Med or over Iran, depending on the missile and launch aircraft, and have had abysmal launch and BDA results.

Incidentally, that ship is designed for reuse as a target and the fuze for the Tomahawk can be set to do minimum damage to the target ship (delayed fuze timing) and still test the functioning of the entire system.

 

OR? the Tomahawk could be a TLAM-N. Though, that's not likely, because, as far as I know, nothing in our fleet is currently certified to put that nuclear option in the field.

 

David- The AGM-84s, latest of which is the AGM-84G/H TLAM-ER do have a very similar profile from the same basic design. Tomahawk Land Attack Missile Extended Range for those who do not remember hearing that acronym before. Optimized for fixed vs marine targets.

 

Once again, *awesome* stuff guys! Thanks from me too for the posts!

Cheers,
Ian

 

David- As far as I know, the Navy gave up the aircraft delivered nuclear role while I was still active duty in the early 90s.

 

I hope that wasn't the container my new 488 was in...I declined the shipping insurance.