The Harrier is an amazing little dogfighter, and has scored
notable sucesses against supposedly superior supersonic, air
superiority fighters. In the Falklands, the Harriers chewed up the
Argentine airforce's Mirages, Skyhawks and what not. Notable was a
Mirage's lack of sucess with dealing with the slow, subsonic
Harrier.
I dunno if the brits used VIFFing, but that has always been a very
big advantage of the Harrier. Most dogfights take place at subsonic
speeds, where manuverability and low speed handeling is an king
rather then speed and trust. While the poor Mat pilot is pulling
gees trying to get his overpowered plane around, all the brit has
to do is to clip his plane into a VIFF manuver and point it at the
Mig with far less cost in time and effort. No gusses who actually
has the real advantage there.
In any case, a Mig 29 is a poor trade for a Harrier. That's
multimillion dollar, super high preforming aircraft was supposed to
be able to beat the relatively cheap by comparism, slow mud mover
all the time round.
I suspect, given the same, large boresight missiles used by the
Mig, the Harrier would win virtually everytime in a WVR engagement.
Prehaps the Harrier's main defiency is it's lack of juice to evade
missiles, but then again, most modern air superiority fighters also
only stand a marginal chance of dodging missiles once they are
fired at them. The idea is to get the first shot off.
Maybe there's still some magic left in that old british
ingeunity...
