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Decoy flares are infrared countermeasures used to protect aircraft from being detected by infrared homing missiles, i.e. those that detect heat sources like a jet engine. Like a plane’s guardian angels, the flares create false heat targets that confuse the guidance system of an enemy aircraft’s infrared missiles. Apart from being a simple and effective defense mechanism, they’re also surprisingly beautiful. No wonder they have been nicknamed angel wings.

Some of my favorites:









More, and larger versions, in the link.

Does flarespam even work anymore? I remember once (playing WiC I think) talking to someone about how the flarespamming the cargo planes do would be essentially worthless against modern weapons.

Flares are a palliative, but don't really work. The last several generations of Sidewiders, for example, have sensitive enough IR sensors and sophisticated enough programming to ignore the several thousand-degree magnesium flares and maintain their lock on the original 700 degree target they were aimed at. I suppose flares could work if they were ejected before the enemy got an infrared lock, or if it's fighter vs fighter, where fighters' engine cores and afterburners run over 1100 degrees C. Maybe. Their use seems best suited to thwarting Stingers - oops, never mind, Stingers use IR and UV guidance - more primitive man-portable systems like the SA-14.

IMO, a better flare would be one that closely imitates the maximum temperature of the assaulted aircraft and thus presents the attacking missile with multiple targets...but even that's not foolproof.

BTW, this Wiki article has some really nice flare-launch pictures from transports and helos....the logical targets for MANPADS.

The article was interesting, but those are the same pictures referred to in the OP link.

Still: SO PRETTY! I'm using one of the gunship pictures as my wallpaper now.

Mostly missile seekers these days havesufficient computing and image processing power to simply say the equivalent of "gee i saw a hot target and than 60 hot targets shot out of that target and fell away at 9.8ms-2 acceleration. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE those are flares."

Of course, the missile will be less of a smarmy asshole about it.

EDIT - Not to mention dual and even tri wavelength IR scanners can easily see through flares.

Larger aircraft can apparently mount lamp or laser jammers (AN/AAQ-24 DIRCM; SIIRCM) which detect inbound missiles and address them individually. I can see how something like that would be difficult to employ on a fighter, where mounting space is limited and more extreme maneuvering might interfere with the jammer's ability to keep the lamp/laser aligned with the inbound missile.

Eurofighter employs a towed decoy and one is under development for F/A-18E/F, but those are both anti-radar countermeasures. An anti-IR towed decoy might manage to look more like an aircraft than flares that drop away, but it wouldn't necessarily resemble an aircraft as far as the actual IR profile is concerned.