page_title: Basic fighter maneuvers
section_title: Out-of-plane maneuvers
hierarchical_section_title: Basic fighter maneuvers / Principles / Out-of-plane maneuvers
caption_attribution_description: English: The tactical egg is an imaginary bubble that represents all possible motions of an aircraft in a dogfight, showing the effects of gravity on the aircraft's maneuvering. Pursuit curves are determined by the angle off tail (AOT). Image from United States Navy - Naval Air Training Command (NAS Corpus Christi, Texas) Flight training instruction manual. (Rev. 08-06 CNATRAP-821) 2006
context_page_description: Basic fighter maneuvers are tactical movements performed by fighter aircraft during air combat maneuvering, to gain a positional advantage over the opponent. BFM combines the fundamentals of aerodynamic flight and the geometry of pursuit, with the physics of managing the aircraft's energy-to-weight ratio, called its specific energy.
  Maneuvers are used to gain a better angular position in relation to the opponent. They can be offensive, to help an attacker get behind an enemy; or defensive, to help the defender evade an attacker's air-to-air weapons. They can also be neutral, where both opponents strive for an offensive position or disengagement maneuvers, to help an escape.
  Classic maneuvers include the lag pursuit or yo-yo, which add distance when the attacker may overshoot the target due to higher airspeed, the low yo-yo, which does the opposite when the attacker is flying too slow, the scissors, which attempts to drive the attacker in front of the defender, and the defensive spiral, which allows a defender to disengage from an attacker.
context_section_description: Maneuvers are rarely performed in the strictly vertical or horizontal planes. Most turns contain some degree of "pitch" or "slice". During a turn in an oblique plane, a pitch turn occurs when the aircraft's nose points above the horizon, causing an increase in altitude. A slice turn happens when the nose points below the horizon, causing a decrease in altitude. The purpose is not only to make the aircraft harder for an enemy to track, but also to increase or decrease speed while maintaining energy.
  An out-of-plane maneuver enhances this effect, by diverting the fighter into a new plane of travel. Increasing the pitch or slice can quickly provide a change in speed, which can just as quickly be reversed by returning to the original plane of travel. Out-of-plane maneuvers are not only used to provide a reduction in turn radius, but also causes the fighter to fly a longer path in relation to the direction of travel. A maneuver such as a high Yo-Yo is used to slow closure and to bring the fighter into lag pursuit, while a low Yo-Yo is used to increase closure and to bring the fighter into lead pursuit.
  During an out-of-plane maneuver, the attacker's nose no longer points at the defender. Instead, the aircraft is rolled until its lift vector (an imaginary line running vertically from the center of the aircraft, perpendicular to its wings), is aligned either ahead of, directly at, or behind the defender, using roll rate instead of turn rate to set the proper pursuit curve. The aircraft's velocity vector (an imaginary line in the direction of motion) will be pulled in the direction of the lift vector.
caption: Maneuvering planes, showing oblique and vertical turns.
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