Dogfights

2006

Seasons & Episodes

  • 2
  • 1
  • 0
8.4| TV-PG| en| More Info
Released: 03 November 2006 Ended
Producted By: Digital Ranch
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://www.history.com/minisites/dogfights/
Info

Dogfights is a military aviation themed TV series depicting historical re-enactments of air-to-air combat that took place in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as smaller conflicts such as the Gulf War and the Six-Day War. The program, which airs on the History Channel, consists of former fighter pilots sharing their stories of actual dogfights in which they took part, and uses computer-generated imagery to give the viewer a better perspective of what it is like to partake in aerial combat The series premiered on November 3, 2006.

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Dogfights (2006) is now streaming with subscription on HISTORY Vault

Director

Jason McKinley

Production Companies

Digital Ranch

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Dogfights Videos and Images

Dogfights Audience Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Evengyny Thanks for the memories!
WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.
AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
grantss Great documentary series.As the name suggests, a documentary series on aerial dogfights. Includes World War 1, World War 2, Korean War, Vietnam, 6 Day War, Yom Kippur and the two invasions of Iraq. Also has different forms of aerial combat, including naval and night-fighting.Good narration, great CGI and good, relevant stories. Often shows a progression in tactics within the one episode.About the only negative is that it is very US-centric. Most of the dogfights shown involve US pilots. No Red Baron (if I recall) and very little about the myriad of German Aces of WW2.
haroun elpoussah Just seen the last episode, "Dogfights of the future" Never seen a documentary about aviation so technically flawed, so biased and so politically oriented, it looks like being some joint venture Lockheed-USAF self centered masturbation or some propaganda to make tax payers at ease to spend billions and billions in what was already known by all air analysts at the time for being the worst military money pit due to lobbying of all times and a strategic scam, the so-called 5th generation fighters concept. Firstly, at the time this documentary was made, it was well known that the B1R air2air missile truck was never to be made. From the beginning, Sukhoi presented the Su47 as just a testbed for inversed wings and never to be something else than a prototype so it is already a very bad journalist job as such infos were public. About the use of laser as an aircraft weapon, we're in pure sci-fi conjecture : past tests were led from a naval corvette recently and a Boeing 747 when Reagan was prez, as it needs enormous amounts of energy to shoot something practical and for the recent tests, it was only able to shoot a small boat and a slow flying drone, both would have been easy preys for WWII weapons, other thing is atmospheric diffraction which would make it maybe efficient against low flying satellites, but it is known for long to be not efficient for long range thru atmosphere targeting and sorry, but from the distance they shoot their laser, they would be easy prey for long range missiles and as they need to focus radar on their target and become so a target too, are big, etc etc, such scenario makes the laser platform to be fastly over, well, even AWACS are in real danger since there are very long range lock-on-radar missiles especially designed to get such platforms, but now, back to the 'star', the F22 : if people at Dassault or Sukhoi or any with real aircraft knowledge have seen those 4 F22 downing about 30 Rafales and Su35, they must have laughed non stop for days! First, shooting AMRAAMs from 100km, it as only a 10% hit probability against a non maneuvering target, non aware of the attack and non using counter measures, understand : and old F4 Phantom made a drone target! The longest effective AMRAAM shot in real combat was no more than 35km! Other thing, as I pointed : long range radar guided missiles need a target illuminating by radar so there is no more stealth as soon as you do it. Only way you can assume it is to go nearer using IRST (infra red targeting) but at such distance, you're inside opposing IRST and as F22 is big, it's in other IRST before himself seeing smaller "gen4+" planes, so, in reality, the BVR was already sold in the 60's and they thought on-board cannon was useless as long reality blew F4s in Vietnam. And well, I don't know from where this mockumentary assumes that only F22 and F35 are the only with stealth capacity : it is built of mostly radar absorbant materials and if it ain't use the passive stealth geometry, it has more potent active stealth by anulating radar signals and other bad-ass thing, so, look what happens when F22 meets Rafale : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOswfrc7Xtg And we don't speak about diponibility : at best, the full USAF F22 fleet can make only 60 missions a day where the same number of Rafales, Typhoons, Grippen, Sukhois, etc could make about 500 missions a day. Passive stealths need special shelters and are grounded for 2/3 days between each flights making'em easy preys on their bases... So, I REALLY don't know what is the point of such kind of childish cartoon? Pumping more money from taxpayers in a time when Bush was still in charge? Reassuring US citizens about they'll keep total air supremacy in the future? The point is I'm interested in all that flies for 40 years and I've never seen or read something as stupid except some stupid Youtube patriotic comments from people that had never been in a cockpit and never handled a yoke.
Robert J. Maxwell It's a marvelous recreation of aerial combat from World War I through modern conflicts. I can't think of any computer-generated graphics (or whatever they're called) that have so convincingly recreated the aerobatics of combat aircraft and explained them so clearly. The aluminum surfaces glisten. The sun always seems to be shining, and when an airplane turns, the shadows on its wings turn with it. If the image is rearward, looking over a wing, you can see the elevators tip up and down slightly as the aircraft climbs or dives. Every detail on the aircraft seems exact. It's beautifully done. The graphics are nicely supplemented by newsreel and combat footage.The narration takes us through the events, one by one, and sometime the participants tell us what they were thinking and what their intentions were. There is some sentiment, not much, in these recollections. The general layout of the conflict is described -- we learn why Mig Alley was so dangerous and why heavy bombers over Europe required fighter escort -- but the politics are absent. For each engagement, the principal characteristics of each airplane are described, and enemy aircraft get their just due.One major observation and one minor. In the episodes I've seen, the victors were all Americans or American allies and the enemy lost, even when the opponent receives credit for being "an expert pilot." We sink the Bismark. We sink the Yamato. We shoot down every enemy airplane in sight, it seems, without losing any of our own. Why Rickenbacker and not von Richthofen, for instance? I wonder if it isn't somehow dangerous for younger and more impressionable viewers to watch a series like this in which we see a simulacrum of a video game in which we always win. The scientific studies of media presentations on real life have produced complex and mixed results. But I wonder. Is there a covert message? And, if so, is it: "Let's go to war and play Dogfight"? One of the pilots interviewed mentions the need in a successful fighter pilot for "skill, aggressiveness, and the fighting spirit." I don't know what a fighting spirit is but fighter jocks seem to have the other two traits in spades. No power on earth could put me in a situation as dangerous as aerial combat. It takes a heap of persuasion to get me off the ground at all. An ancillary note: A curious psychological study of fighter aces in the Korean war found a disproportionate number to be later-born children. There is weak support from other studies showing that later children are a little more open, agreeable, and maybe adventurous. Bomber pilots are more often first borns. George H. W. Bush has said that he preferred flying a Gruman Avenger with a three-man crew during World War II because he wanted the company. That puts him in the wrong slot, an anomaly, because he was the second son. He should have wanted to fly fighters but I'll give him a pass.
Strategum Over 90% of all episodes are of American victories. The rest are 'our side', whether Israelis, in admittedly the same one-sided accounts, defeating many times their number of foes, or the RAF who are represented as having to use an American rather than British pilot in a British-Canadian Squadron portrayed shooting down more unarmed planes than warplanes. The series seems to forget that the definition of a dogfight is the aerial combat between fighter planes. Seriously, in 3 seasons not a single mention of "The Battle of Britain"(admittedly the most important series of dogfights to western freedom), the Spitfire nor a British even Canadian star. There is not a single episode where an enemy fighter pilot is the star shooting down an American fighter pilot in a dogfight. That's not 'a little biased', that's 'totally biased'. That's not a 'historical documentary', that's 'propaganda'. Even non-Americans have risked and given their lives for the American ideals of 'Truth and Justice for all', but this series has none of that. I've collected such documentary series in book, tape now DVD form for over 40 years. This is the first one I'll refuse to include.