Effect of payload size on pre-emptive flare countermeasure against man-portable air-defence (MANPAD) system

Military aircraft face a serious threat from early generation Man-Portable Air-Defence (MANPAD) systems. Robust countermeasures have to be used to counteract this threat. Most commonly these are used after the threat has been launched and detected. The ideal solution is to defeat the system pre-emptively before the missile is launched. One way to achieve this is to fire pre-emptive flares giving the MANPAD another hot source to track and lock-on to. However, use of pre-emptive flares can quickly deplete the flare magazines limiting the mission time and the area in which the aircraft will be protected. In this paper we discuss the use of CounterSim, a missile engagement and countermeasure simulation software tool, to investigate what effect the flare output and burn time may have on the effectiveness of preemptive countermeasures. The first set of simulations looks at a flare of full intensity and burn time pre-emptively released at the beginning of the simulations. Then, flares of reduced intensity and reduced burn time are used. In a second set of simulations the pre-emptive flare release time is investigated by delaying the firing up to one second from the beginning of the simulation.