iyaayas01 posted:

Short answer, yes. Longer answer will be forthcoming later if Flanker or anyone else doesn't beat me to it.

Armyman25 posted:

Our quarters were next to the flight line at Al Assad. Sometimes it seemed like the Marines were trying to burn up the month's fuel budget at night with the constant F-18 traffic at 3 AM.

The Gloaming posted:

Mr. Despair posted:

Pretty sure it's been dumped, with the focus being on the PAK.FA.

e. The T-50, this sexy guy.

kill me now posted:

That article is about a P-51 and a Skyraider not a Skyhawk

Pretty impressive that the P-51 pilot managed to get out and parachute safely at relatively low level.

Aciid c0d3r posted:

His back-seater started to panic when that happened, and Maj. Lawson ejected him and attempted to get the engines restarted.

slidebite posted:

That is fantastic. Thanks.

DeesGrandpa posted:

Jane's USAF was the poo poo. Until another game lets me relive the fighter part of Air Force One I refuse to believe differently.

Scut posted:

As a Canadian this pretty much sums up my stance on the F-35. I think it's an amazing piece of engineering, but in my opinion the only reason Harper's buying into them is to win favours in Washington. I don't much see the point in subsidizing the American arms industry when our primary role as a military is to protect refugees from guerrillas most of the time. A fleet of tooled-up 80's era jets and modern drones are going to sling bombs against dudes in Toyota pickups armed with RPG's just as effectively as a transforming stealth ultra-jet.

I don't want to open up a can of worms here. To be clear, I think it's a loving amazing machine. I think resources could go into other loving amazing machines that are good for something other than killing people.

mlmp08 posted:

Is that bomarc Flanker is flipping off the one in Albuquerque? Looks like it is...

slidebite posted:

Sure, it was somewhat ahead of its time compared to its contemporaries, could fly high and should have been very, very fast, but there is more to a modern fighter than that.

helno posted:

I would also like to call bullshit on the 9k will kill you.

Typical airliners are pressurized to 8000 feet with no supplemental oxygen.

Above certain hights you need more than just oxygen to breath you need enough pressure to get it through your lungs into your bloodstream.

jwoven posted:

The SU-27 is the sexist plane.

movax posted:

Or a Flanker swings in, handily out maneuvers it, and sticks a PL-8 up the tailpipe or something.

iyaayas01 posted:

A couple thoughts...

Whoever said that UAVs are the future of long loiter time missions is absolutely correct. Also, whoever said that the future of air support in a counterinsurgency is long loiter time/persistent ISR/precision strike with low yield missiles (i.e., Hellfires) is also absolutely correct.

VERTiG0 posted:

I used to like the F-35, then I read this thread.

stealie72 posted:

Am I missing something, or is their only purpose to skirt along international borders to make the Russians feel better about their former world power status?

Frozen Horse posted:

What is this flying radome storage cabinet? Was this one of those attempts at stealth through coating the airplane with enough quarter-wave dipoles to destructively interfere with its own radar return?

priznat posted:

I pictured some guy at the wheel of one of those Humvees, screaming his lungs out.

EduardoEspecial posted:

It's too bad that it's left outside in the elements. It has definitely seen better days.

Scratch Monkey posted:

Edit: from the Wiki page, the F-35's current problems

Psion posted:

It also looks stupid. This is important


I still hold a grudge over the YF-23.

Oxford Comma posted:

What does Canada do that would require a replacement for the F/A-18? Or are the Hornets just so old that they're soon going to fall apart?

movax posted:

Ideally, since you didn't go through FMS in the first place, should just call up Boeing IDS and order another few dozen Hornets. But that would be sane.

Stroh M.D. posted:

If you buy fighters mainly to defend your airspace from Russians, isn't it kind of a dumb idea to buy said fighters from Russia - which knows that this is what you're gonna use them for?

Psion posted:

e: for Flanker, reactivate BOMARC too, use it as surface-to-surface.

Slamburger posted:

Just thought I'd drop this youtube of a history channel show I just watched (45 min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AK85wOxUso
It's nominally about fighter plane development through the cold war up through the F15 (with interesting commentary about its development re: John Boyd and the Fighter Mafia), but it also talks about how bomber doctrine influenced the adoption of (or lack of) pure fighters. It has a lot of interesting canceled/experimental planes in it, parasite fighters, and all kinds of good stuff. Definitely worth a watch.

iyaayas01 posted:

I think it's well known here that I hate the F-35, think that LockMart are a bunch of incompetent fools, and that Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich are both rolling over in their graves at what has happened to their company.

That said, the "well we haven't used x in Afghanistan but we have used y, therefore x is completely useless and we should immediately cancel it, but we should buy 100,000 copies of y" is lazy logic that appeals to emotion. There is more to what the military does than Afghanistan and counterinsurgency; also we're leaving fairly soon, so it clearly makes complete sense to restructure our entire military establishment to effectively engage in counterinsurgency in a landlocked geopolitical backwater in Central Asia.

e: I should add that canning the C-27 program when they did is stupid and that the whole program should've been given to the Army in the first place. Still doesn't make that logic any less flawed.

WEREWAIF posted:

Ethiopia