Employing The ADM-141 TALD

Employing The ADM-141 TALD

What is TALD?

The ADM-141 TALD (Tactical Air-Launched Decoy) is an unpowered gliding body that is released from an aircraft to act as a radar decoy. A Superhornet can carry up to 12 TALD.

AI aircraft generally carry at least 2 TALD in a typical SEAD/DEAD (Suppression / Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses) loadout. Often the employment of these stores results in a lack of quick response to pop-up ground-to-air threats. While you may often want your wingman to quickly shoot a HARM at a threatening missile site, if a wingman is carrying TALD he is more likely to release a TALD and make a lazy circle 15nm or larger in diameter. While the circle gives the TALD time to penetrate the missile envelope of the SAM threat, puttering around for 15 minutes is probably not in the best interests of your flight or your mission objectives. It is generally wise to remove all TALD from AI loadouts, as their effectiveness when used by AI is questionable. In order to get wingmen to release TALD, order them to “engage air defenses”. You will hear the radio call “Ducks away.”

When humans carry TALD they can be employed rapidly and in mass quantity if so desired, but time must still be given to allow the devices to get from where they have been launched to where one wishes they go (remember, they are unpowered). Still, the primary purpose of TALD is to force the enemy to energize their radars, and in Jane’s F-18 opposing forces seem to need little encouragement to make that happen.

TALD can also be useful in air-to-air situations; it can be launched straight ahead while the launching aircraft then immediately maneuvers vertically to gain an advantage or disengages rapidly in the direction opposite the TALD launch.

Differences Between the Sim and Real Life

Current TALDs are actually ADM-141C ITALD (improved TALD) featuring turbojet engines for increased glide distance and time airborne. A typical realistic TALD employment would be a mass release (2-4 TALD per aircraft) from a group or multiple groups of support aircraft arriving from multiple directions. These support aircraft would be dedicated only to TALD release, and at the conclusion of this task would RTB. The large number of airborne radar decoys would serve to overwhelm the opposition’s tracking capability and disguise the direction and number of true attacking aircraft. Real TALDs can also be programmed to change heading and speed. Due to Jane’s F-18 AI tendencies to release a single TALD only, and the lack of programmable TALD, this implementation is difficult or impossible to model in the sim.

Jane’s F/A-18 Manual References to TALD

• Page 4-68: Available hardpoints.
• Page 5-108: The second type of decoy in Jane’s F/A-18 is the TALD or Tactical Air Launched Decoy. This device, really a small glider, is released from the aircraft similar to a weapon and mimics a real aircraft’s RCS and flight profile. Its primary use is to trick enemy ground-based radar operators into illuminating the TALD and thus pinpointing their location for SEAD aircraft to attack.
• Page 5-129: While the ADM-141 Tactical air launched decoy (TALD) is not really a weapon, it is loaded and released just like one. TALD stations are selected in the same manner as described for the A/G Iron bomb symbology. When the weapon release button is pickled, all selected TALDs release.