Day hunter
A day fighter is a fighter aircraft that is only suitable for use in daylight due to its reduced technical equipment. In contrast to the night fighter, it has no fully suitable blind flying devices or landing aids . It also does not have any approach aids necessary in the dark. Other aircraft are only recorded visually. The zenith of the German day hunters was reached in the first half of 1944. After that, the Allied bomber groups increasingly switched to bad weather and night flights. While the separation between day and night fighters was still clear during the Second World War , this became increasingly blurred in the post-war period with the introduction of cockpits that were generally suitable for instrument flight , target display radar and electronic warfare. The term day hunter was used in the planning of NATO in the 1950s and was differentiated from the term all-weather hunter . At the end of the 20th century, some variants of light fighters, such as the F-16 or the MiG-21, that were built without equipment for night flight were among the day fighters.
literature
- Bernd Lemke , Dieter Krüger , Heinz Rebhan, Wolfgang Schmidt : The Air Force 1950 to 1970: Concept, Structure, Integration , Oldenbourg, 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57973-4 .
- Horst Boog , The German Reich on the Defensive , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001, ISBN 978-3-421-05507-1 .