ALLEGIANCE: AUTOBOT
SUB-GROUP: TRIGGERBOT

FUNCTION: AIR COMBAT
FIRST APPEARANCE: TRANSFORMERS # 46

“Don’t fire till you see the lights of their eyes.”

Profile: The skies are unsafe for aviation when Dogfight is in the air.
He terrorizes friend and foe alike. Not one to take chances, he buzzes even
non-military commercial aircraft just to make sure that they keep their distance
from him. This wild, wicked sky-flying street fighter likes to go nosecone to
nosecone with his opponents in what he calls “a dance of doom.” He
generally doesn’t begin to fire until he’s close enough to count the rivets
in their fuselage. Sometimes he’ll even partially transform to his robot mode
in mid-air so he can punch it out with an enemy aircraft. It doesn’t take much
to get his fuel flowing – he’ll fly into action against a flock of pigeons if
they accidentally interfere with his radar. Optimus Prime has tried to calm
Dogfight down by instructing him in mechano-meditation, a discipline that teaches
the art of mastering one’s behavior by learning how to recognize and modify
the electrical pulses within one’s emotional cortex module. So far, the results
have been negligible. Dogfight’s aggressive outbursts are deep-rooted. They
stem from a moment of indecision in his youth. He was on air guard duty for
his village on Cybertron. While on a maintenance break on the ground, he saw
a squadron of jets approach in the distance just as an air tanker carrying vital
fuel relief was arriving. Before he could decide whether the squadron was friend
or foe, it destroyed the tanker. All the while, Dogfight remained on the ground.
Without the fuel many of his neighbors had to shut down for a long time, and
some have yet to fully recover. Because he hesitated to take action, Dogfight
blamed himself for this tragedy. Ever since, he’s never hesitated. And he’s
never met a Decepticon that he didn’t want to destroy immediately.

Abilities: Dogfight’s swept-back wing design allows him superior maneuverability
in jet mode. A state-of-the-art navigational system gives him the ability to
constantly adjust his speed, altitude and direction to compensate for the inherent
instability of this wing design. His maximum speed is 1700 miles per hour and
his range is 3000 miles. He is armed with two fusion reaction-powered blowtorch
blasters in both jet and robot modes. In jet mode the blasters are mounted under
his tail section and pointing behind him to surprise any enemy aircraft that
try to sneak up on him. He commonly leaves a twin trail of flame from the blasters
as he streaks through the air. His wingtips are serrated and can cut through
all but the toughest steel alloys. One of his favorite tactics is to fly close
enough to his opponents so that he can use his wingtips to slice off their wings.

Weaknesses: Dogfight is vulnerable to mid-air stalls during some of
his more dramatic flying maneuvers. So far he has been able to pull out of all
of them before actually crashing on the ground, but he’s come close to destroying
himself on several occasions.