Alan C. Mack

And it was a daylight flight.

And what we think was an HN-5, which is a Chinese variant of the SA-7, was fired at us.

It went right between my aircraft and Chalk 2.

Flares deployed, decoyed it, and off we went.

The flare...

Well, without getting into too many details, it matches your heat signature.

And so when the missile locks onto you, right?

So when a guy fires the man pad, he looks at you, it locks on, and he fires it.

And so the missile is going to seek, it's going to home in on your heat signature that it locked on.

So the idea is to throw another heat source that is first a little hotter and then more matches you, right?

And the idea is that a more sophisticated missile, I hope I'm not getting too technical here.

This is fascinating.

A more technical missile, a newer missile, will see the flare launch and say it will start to follow it and will go, that's a flare, ignore it.

So now it goes back to the other heat source, but you've sent out more than one.

So a different temperature...

Flair is out there to get it.

And the idea is to get your engine exhaust out of their field of view, their decoys.

It happens at low level.

It happens so fast that you don't know it's coming.

Like no one says, oh, there's a missile coming.