It was early morning ( 1:45 am) of 27th April 2008. A LTTE Air Tigers’ plane was returning after completing its mission in Manal Aaru (Weli Oya) . Unusually it was detected by Army radars. LTTE planes used to fly at very low altitude to avoid detected by enemy radars. A J-7 (Chinese Made) fighter plane was sent to shoot it down. It started chasing down Tiger plane.
For those who didn’t know LTTE used improvised passenger plane Zlin Z 143 for its Air missions. This planes didn’t have any safety features and have 0% chance of survival against any fighter plane.
Image: Siriththiran(L) and Rooben(R) were the two LTTE pilots who carried out LTTE’s first(march 2007) and last(Feb 2009) air raids.
SLAF pilot got behind the Tiger plane and multiple times tried to lock and launch IR guided Air to air missiles. But to his surprise it failed.
Then he chases down the plane to detect the LTTE airfield where the plane was landed. It can be detected by the illumination of lights used by ground forces to direct their pilots for landing. But there were no such illumination / lighting detected. He returned to his base disappointed.
They say few Air Force officials started to speculate that LTTE must have acquired some advanced technology which could deactivate enemy air to air missiles.
But the truth was revealed only in February 2009. A LTTE plane was shot down in Colombo and it was thoroughly inspected by the Air-Force.
Usually IR(Infra Red) guided missile systems uses the heat produced by the exhaust pipe at the tail of an enemy plane to lock and launch. Here what LTTE did was they blocked the exhaust of the their planes and diverted this exhaust to the front side of the plane.
This was the reason why SLAF(Sri Lanka Air Force) pilot was unable to launch IR guided missiles on LTTE plane. LTTE intelligence knew that most of the planes used by SLAF was using this outdated IR Guided Air-to-Air missile systems. So they used this simple trick to protect their planes.
As far as landing and lighting of LTTE runway was considered LTTE knew that Air Force planes would chase their planes and try to detect their air-fields through the illumination lights at night. So they found an alternative for this too.
LTTE built trenches near the runway and made their ground members hide there and once LTTE planes return from missions they had to guide them using torch lights. LTTE trained both their pilots and ground staffs on this tactics where pilots had to land at a very limited light (sometimes no lights). Enemy planes cannot see (from distance) lights rays coming from this torch lights.
LTTE had very long and wide runways for this type of emergency landings.
Image: Tourists check a shot down LTTE plane kept at an Air Force War museum.
By diverting the exhaust pipe of their planes and using torch lights for landing LTTE was able to confuse Government forces.
So the answer to your question is apart from being disciplined LTTE members were very Clever. Irrespective of whether you are a LTTE supporter or hater if you are interested in military tactics and start reading LTTE history (right from the beginning) you will end up using the word clever at least 100 times.
Edit: Recently then SL President and current PM Mahinda Rajapaksha confirmed that LTTE used the technology.
The terrorists(LTTE) had modified their small planes in such a manner that the air to air missiles on our jet attack aircraft could not detect the heat signature from their aircraft engines. That was the first time the world had encountered such a terrorist tactic.” PM Rajapaksa observed.
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