2.75" FFAR

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KJ_Lesnick

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What was the accuracy of the mighty-mouse rocket in mils? I've seen figures of 20 mils and others at 7.5
 
2.75 FFAR (Free Firing AREA rocket). They work okay with forward airspeed. The reason why attack helicopters are able to get decent effects is they use diving fire and usually shoot them under 1000 meters. In the old tyme days when we lobbed them from 2000+ meters from a hover it was mostly to try and get targets (tanks) to button up so they could not use their heavy machine guns. We were happy that they stayed (mostly) in the range complex at gunnery training.
 
yasotay said:
2.75 FFAR (Free Firing AREA rocket). They work okay with forward airspeed. The reason why attack helicopters are able to get decent effects is they use diving fire and usually shoot them under 1000 meters. In the old tyme days when we lobbed them from 2000+ meters from a hover it was mostly to try and get targets (tanks) to button up so they could not use their heavy machine guns. We were happy that they stayed (mostly) in the range complex at gunnery training.
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I'd always seen it as, "Folding Fin Aerial Rocket".

en.wikipedia.org

Folding-Fin Aerial Rocket - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
sferrin said:
yasotay said:
2.75 FFAR (Free Firing AREA rocket). They work okay with forward airspeed. The reason why attack helicopters are able to get decent effects is they use diving fire and usually shoot them under 1000 meters. In the old tyme days when we lobbed them from 2000+ meters from a hover it was mostly to try and get targets (tanks) to button up so they could not use their heavy machine guns. We were happy that they stayed (mostly) in the range complex at gunnery training.
Click to expand...
I'd always seen it as, "Folding Fin Aerial Rocket".

en.wikipedia.org

Folding-Fin Aerial Rocket - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
You are correct. Actually there are a number of names for them that include inappropriate words that start with "F".
To @KJ_Lesnick point, they are fairly accurate when fired with forward velocity as they were originally designed to come off of diving fixed wing aircraft. There are many legends in Army Aviation about gun pilots in Vietnam who could do almost mystical things with the rocket, like making them "turn" around a group of trees by using aircraft trim. During the Cold War when attack helicopters had to become snipers, shooting FFAR from a hover made them very imprecise and were used strictly for suppression, until the Multi-Purpose Sub Munition warhead was developed. Then it was to be used as something of a mini-artillery barrage, but few thought it would very effective. Thankfully we never found out. With American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq the FFAR went back mostly to firing with forward velocity. They were more accurate, but it was not something you used very close in except in dire emergency. If you watch any of the SOAR video on YouTube you will see that they are firing their rockets at ~500 meters (or less) as they have to do "danger close" most times for their customers. It should not be a surprise that the Special Operations community spearheaded the development of the laser guided 2.75 rocket/missile. The new guided version has been used to good effect in operations.
 
FFAR anecdote if such a thing is permitted.

Several years ago, while going through crates of material our museum had received, I picked up one of the unidentified cylindrical objects in a wooden crate. A metal piece slid downward and I realised I was holding the rear half of a 2.75 in FFAR rocket, with 20 or so additional rear ends I could now recognise in the crate, not to mention a number of front ends of FFAR rockets. My heart stopped. They were all dummies of course, but I should have looked and thought before picking up that thing. It might NOT have been a dummy.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
Well, if you want to read an account of an actual shootdown--or attempted shootdown there's always the Battle of Palmdale on August 15th 1956 to consider...


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What bugged me about that video is how the narrator kept referring to the Mighty Mouse rockets as "Missiles" which they weren't being unguided projectiles and what I don't understand is why their fuses weren't equipped with a self-destruct ability also why weren't these rockets equipped with proximity-fuses? One final note is that the F-89s lacking a proper gunsight was a serious design oversight.
 
There is one story out there where an F-89 hosed off all 104 rockets at a target. One went rogue and actually hit the target while the other 103 went another direction.
 
Imagine what it would've been like if during the 1960s the FFARs were replaced with the FIM-43 Redeye.
 
NMaude said:
What bugged me about that video is how the narrator kept referring to the Mighty Mouse rockets as "Missiles" which they weren't being unguided projectiles
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Depending on the era of the narration, this might not be in error: stuff from the 1950s often talks about guided missiles, since a rocket, gun projectile, or hand grenade is also technically a missile. At some point, the 'guided' part became assumed, and anything unguided became not-a-missile.
 

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