I'm pretty certain this one was blown -- it's an urban legend. Way I heard it was a Harrier in the Peak District ... (Also note: Sidewinders are short-range air-to-air missiles, not anti-radiation or air-to-ground weapons, and I believe they're under manual control. Also: a training flight wouldn't normally be carrying live rounds, would it?)
But still, it's an amusing story, and I wouldn't put it past some bored flyboy to have written that response if the police were really being that silly.
I've often wondered what would happen if you put a windmill with appropriately size 'window' on it for the radar frequency of a Gatso somewhere in it's line of sight. Or just set something like that up and powered it for a while with an electric drill or similar... Any idea what wavelength Gatsos use?
You know, what we need now to settle this is some knowledgeable former member of the Royal Air Force who could give us some information. Where might we find such a person?
Yeah, I'm with urban legend. I wouldn't have thought speed guns put out anywhere near the power to trigger a RWR, as they have to be safe to point at people...
That story was old enough to have hair on it when we cheerfully dissected it during my Intro to Guided Weapons and Electronic Warfare course back in 1991!
In a nutshell, what autopope says. Also, I don't know of any system that auto-fires ARMs; they're too valuable and the risk of a blue-on-blue (i.e. friendly fire incident) is too high. The most that ECM systems normally do automatically would be dump chaff and perhaps trigger active jamming.
I'd heard of it happening before... but then the number of urban legends that make it into the newspaper are rather spectacular. (I've shopped my own employer to Snopes in the past when people wouldn't believe me.)
There was a Project Bike article a while back on stealthing a motorbike against radar speed traps (this was before the widespread rollout of GATSO). Active ECM was discussed in the article but no attempts were made to actually get it working on the test bike. Mostly they tried bonding passive ferrite radar-absorbing materials to fairings and to the wheelspokes which apparently kicked back a lot of differential doppler signal under test. AFAIR they drew the line at fitting HARM or ALARM missiles to the bike.
It might be better to put reflection enhancements onto the spokes so that you get a lot of odd doppler reflections at silly speeds (twice bike speed both forwards and backwards) to confuse the camera or gun logic...
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But still, it's an amusing story, and I wouldn't put it past some bored flyboy to have written that response if the police were really being that silly.
I've often wondered what would happen if you put a windmill with appropriately size 'window' on it for the radar frequency of a Gatso somewhere in it's line of sight. Or just set something like that up and powered it for a while with an electric drill or similar... Any idea what wavelength Gatsos use?
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In a nutshell, what autopope says. Also, I don't know of any system that auto-fires ARMs; they're too valuable and the risk of a blue-on-blue (i.e. friendly fire incident) is too high. The most that ECM systems normally do automatically would be dump chaff and perhaps trigger active jamming.
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