As an example of complex cooperative missions, coherent phantom track generation through controlling multiple electronic combat air vehicles is currently an area of great interest to the defense agency for the purpose of deceiving a radar network. However, it has been a challenge to design the optimal or even feasible coherent trajectories for this type of problem due to the high dimensionality and the strong coupling between the phantom and actual vehicles. This problem becomes even more difficult to solve when realistic kinematic, dynamics, and geometric constraints in a three-degree-of-freedom formation have to be considered. This paper describes how an interesting bio-inspired motion strategy can be used to design real-time trajectories for a (1) feasible constant speed coherent mission, (2) maximum-duration constant speed coherent mission, and (3) optimal trajectory mission for general cases. The proposed method will dramatically reduce the dimension of the problem and thus real-time optimal trajectory design can be achieved. Also the fact that fewer equality constraints are involved in solving the formulated nonlinear programming will make the convergence a lot easier. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.