Techniques To Defeat Anti-ship Missiles
A dangerous task carried out by Sea Kings was to act as decoys, to deflect sea-skimming missiles away from surface ships. This was achieved by hovering close to the ship and as the radar seeker could not resolve targets in azimuth the ship/helicopter combination appeared as a single target. If the helicopter was not too high the missile guidance system would aim for the centroid of its apparent target and hopefully pass between the two. Prince Andrew at one point flew his helicopter as an Exocet missile decoy. Chaff rockets aim to seduce a missile with a similar technique by increasing the apparent length of the target.
The size of the ship's radar cross section (RCS) was too great to allow chaff decoys to be effective and their employment would have been unlikely to have affected the outcome. It has also been claimed—incorrectly—that the hull of the ship acted as a decoy against a subsequent Exocet attack.
Read more about this topic: SS Atlantic Conveyor
Famous quotes containing the words techniques, defeat and/or missiles:
“It is easy to lose confidence in our natural ability to raise children. The true techniques for raising children are simple: Be with them, play with them, talk to them. You are not squandering their time no matter what the latest child development books say about “purposeful play” and “cognitive learning skills.””
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chronicled ... never before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“At the rate science proceeds, rockets and missiles will one day seem like buffalo—slow, endangered grazers in the black pasture of outer space.”
—Bernard Cooper (b. 1936)