Plausibility check: Kamikaze/Eject tactics by FAA in Falklands.

[Curiousone]

Picture this for me if you will.

You're a young (impressionable), patriotic, ballsy fighter jock in the Argentine Air Force during the Falklands war. The San Carlos landings have just started. There's a briefing for the next strike you're being sent out on.

The direction the war is taking is being explained. The other services are being blamed, the Navy has pissed off after the Belgrano got torpedoed, the Army has it's best units on the border with Chile. Add in stirring propaganda about how the British are behaving, imperialist invaders subjugating the homeland, how if we lose inevitably there'll be further wars etc. It's up to the flyboys to prove their worth.

The war is at a critical moment, sink enough ships or the right ships right now and win or otherwise no matter how hard the fighting is continued you'll inevitably lose.

The squadron is asked for a volunteer/s to step forward to employ a new tactic.

Your aircraft will dispense with drop tanks & be loaded to the hilt with bombs. You are to fly directly into the core of the formation in San Carlos at maximum speed & wavetop height, aim the entire aircraft at the largest ship you can find & eject at the last moment, crashing the aircraft bodily into it as you rocket above and over before your parachute deploys.

If you succeed and in doing so win the war the Airforce will name a medal after you. If not you will still receive it's highest existing award. You are told (whether true or not) that there's a non-negligible chance you'll survive.

so..

Your (the readers) reaction to being told this in this setting?

Your expectations of the outcome had it happened & some death or glory pilot had stepped forward?

 

[Kome]

If you succeed and in doing so win the war the Airforce will name a medal after you. If not you will still receive it's highest existing award.

Im assuming this part here isn't negotiable captain?

MUTINY!

 

[HesitatedEye]

I have to ask the question why would anyone volunteer for it I mean at this stage the Navy is hiding in port and if the British are landing troops why would you not just say you know what I'm going for a drink you fly the sodding plane.

 

[Curiousone]

I have to ask the question why would anyone volunteer for it I mean at this stage the Navy is hiding in port and if the British are landing troops why would you not just say you know what I'm going for a drink you fly the sodding plane.

They fought hard OTL, were respected by the British for it. Hitting one of the four ships the British thought they couldn't afford to lose while at least one was in San Carlos seems like a fair moment for taking a last-ditch hail mary shot.

 

[Tredecimus]

Can I scream "Tennouheika Banzai" before I eject?

 

[zert]

How many of these pilots will later declare a mechanical emergency and either land or eject when their plane can no longer "fly" to the target?

 

[Richard V]

Most kamikazes failed to hit their target, and Japanese kamikaze manual called for the pilots to keep their eyes open to the end least they miss. So ejecting would most likely cause a near miss than hit.

Besides the whole point of suicide attack was to make use of untrained pilots flying obsolete aircraft. Argentine air force didn't have this problem. If you have good pilots you can skip bomb.

 

[Magniac]

Perhaps a better sacrifice-your-birds mission for the Argintinians would be to send a couple of sorties against the taskforce when the UK ships were still out of FAA range, what with the Argentinian lack of inflight refueling.

I'm thinking it seems less desperate, while the psychological advantage to be won from hitting the RN a surprising distance out, & then successfully hiding the fact that your handful of Mirages that went in had to ditch en route home, that alone is serious pressure, even if no British ships are put out of action.

And with this you really only have to sell your select volunteer FAA pilots on the merits of ditching/ejecting near the ARA's prepositioned naval units. (Okay, with the RN dominating the surface, that one operational sub is in for a lot of work. Maybe the FAA can rustle up some Catalina flying boats. To do retrieval work in South Atlantic waters. Hey, you can't make an omelette etc.)

 

[Mike D]

I'm thinking it seems less desperate, while the psychological advantage to be won from hitting the RN a surprising distance out, & then successfully hiding the fact that your handful of Mirages that went in had to ditch en route home, that alone is serious pressure, even if no British ships are put out of action.

There's two major problems with that -

(a) the Argentinian air force loses the majority of their planes in very hit and miss attacks long before the RN gets close to the islands, therefore leaving the men occupying the islands seriously lacking air cover as well as sacrificing the air defence of their home land should the UK decide to attack Argentina proper (unlikely but you never know).

(b) France gave a lot of co-operation to the UK and provided as much information about French aircraft and weapons in Argentinian service as they could as well as providing Mirages to act as 'enemy' for the Fleet Air Arm and RAF pilots to train against before they went down south.

If Mirages suddenly appear somewhere a long way from the Falklands then all the British have to do is phone the French, ask whether there's any chance of those aircraft making it home as they weren't carrying drop tanks and now they know that Argentina's just sacrificed a large part of their air force.

 

[Magniac]

Note I didn't specify how many planes they'd send, beyond a vague 'handful'. Realistically, if they somehow make the psychological leap necessary in coming to the conclusion this is needed (which is really the big WI here; they were overconfident of their abilities to defend Islas Malvinans, at least when the taskforce was still a way off) then they aren't sending more than two or three. But with a Mirage squadron of only 17 planes, of course that's still something. If hardly 'most' or 'a large part of' their airforce.

Of course there's also the greater number of Skyhawks in play. Maybe the Argentine navy decides to do something as risky as this with a couple of their own Skyhawks, as a way of making up for the absence of 25 de Mayo. But still, there's this problem of the guaranteed-destruction-of-a-plane concept at work in any attempt at sortieing beyond operational range.

The French Connection: A one-way sortie, or, more realistically, long-legs, Mirage or Super Etendard sorties involving both inflight-refueling-capacity and a tanker aircraft the French had no idea existed*, that's a good way to destroy British faith in the intelligence their allies were providing them with.


*This seems more plausible. But involves a pre-war PoD.

 

[SunilTanna]

How are the FAA going to find the task force if it isn't at a known location? Just vaguely, to the east of the Falklands?

The way they found British ships otl is either:

A) hit them at a known location (San Carlos or bluff cove)

Or:
B) fly low level, pop up, and fire an exocet at the first thing you see on radar... Which was either a picket or the unlucky Atlantic conveyer (a civilian ship not up to the threat).

It's quite another thing to fly past the pickets, without getting shot down, and then keep flying past more British ships until you reach Hermes or whatever, especially if don't know precisely where Hermes is.

 

[Curiousone]

Chances that a Skyhawk can get hit by flak in San Carlos, crash unintentionally into a British warship? Effect on British tactics if they can't quite tell if it was intentional or unintentional?