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Nied

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Posts posted by Nied

  1. The STOVL F-35 rolled out for the first time today:

    Article

    That's not a David Hingtgen/TV show pilot joke!

    On a serious note: does anyone else think that big intake door they used for the production version will make a great sail for a gust to pick up and knock the aircraft over as it's trying to balance itself on a column of thrust?

  2. Australia's asking for the F-22 again: http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/sto...onsider%20F-22s

    You're going to make me wear out my Family Guy firebreathing bug.

    Hopefully this and the F-15 groundings will help get the F-22 approved for export and drive down prices so we can buy more for us as well.

    Also can you imagine the RAAF with a combo of Superhornets and Raptors? They'd be one of the most powerful air forces in the Pacific!

  3. LOL :) As a stereotypical polite Canadian I'll apologize to the stereotypical ignorant Americans for derailing our topic ;):lol:

    In all seriousness, the tangent is off but hasn't this thread already gone way off topic? :)

    You crazy Canucks!

    Don't you know that to be a real political discussion you need to apend your opponenet's ideology with the word tard?

  4. Add me to the list of guys who came here via the Valkyrie exchange. Came here looking for more pictures of the the Yamato (then Toycom) YF-19 during the summer of 2000. Lurked on the forums for a few months when they launched at the end of 2000 and finnally got sucked in and joined at the begining of 2001.

  5. ARC's down so can't ask our resident F-22 pilot. (Dunno if he could say or not, but he surely knows if anyone)

    ::facepalm::

    Now why didn't I think of that!

    There's no mention of it over at Fencecheck and I know there are some Raptor pilots over there. That's definetly something to ask Waco since IIRC from my lurking, he's in AK where the rumors say the interception flew from.

  6. I've got good news and bad news:

    The F-15s have been grounded... Again.

    Boeing designs new technology to allow bomb drops at Mach 2! Bonus Macross tie in: the active flow control design used is very similar in concept to the Active Aerodynamic Control on the YF-19.

    I've also heard rumors that some F-22s made their first Bear intercept last week, but I haven't seen anything to confirm it from a reputable srouce.

  7. No sh*t..... everything went downhill for the Navy and the Tomcat after that crap. Too bad Reagan wasn't around anymore to get these things completed. Reagan was a military friendly president all the way. I miss the 80s.

    If anything it was the A-12 itself that did more to frack over Naval aviation than anything else. Read the program summary on globalsecurity.org sometime if you want to make yourself really mad, I'm honestly surprised criminal charges weren't brought against the contractors. The Navy would have been better off going for the A-6F (which was canceled to pay for the A-12) or one of the more robust Bombcat variants (though that would've been a whole other can of worms at the time). The only way Saint Ronnie could have saved naval aviation from that screw up would have been to not order it in the first place (he was still in office when the decision to buy it was made).

  8. We're getting off topic, but, the F-35 fills a nice nitch role, it really more then anything else is a modernized, stealthy THUD, with a bit of F-16 and F-117 mixed in, and for the marines, Harrier. In that respect it makes a nice interdictor aircraft that can go in first, hit key targets and then fight its way back out. Is it a pure fighter, no, is it a pure attacker, no, is it a strike fighter, barely. Is it a tank killer/close air support aircraft, no way in H3!!.

    Interesting you bring up F-105, since I always felt that the JSF is closer to the A-7 in terms of it's mission profile with a little bit of F-4 thrown in for good measure, mostly meant for various kinds of attack missions, but capable of defending itself in a knife fight if need be and doing a repectable job at CAS if called upon as well. Interestingly enough all the aircraft the F-35 is slated to replace took on the A-7's mission when they went into service.

  9. Posting this in two threads because it's appropriate to both:

    http://www.airliners.net/open.file/1286859/L/

    Even cooler than a vapor shockwave, is a sheer distortion shockwave (also much harder to photograph). And no, this ISN'T photoshopped.

    What sucks is that it's very difficult to see the effect without a telephoto lens, and believe me I was looking for it this year. This photo was taken on Saturday though, when I watched the day before the weather was even more conducive to vapor production (though not for my comfort it was fracking cold that day!)

  10. Lots of things:

    Possible storyline for the movie (WARNING, possible spoilers ahead): link

    If true, a response: link

    I think Ellison's response is fairly solid proof that the Guardian of Forever story that was leaked isn't the actual story. With the amount of lawyers involved in any Hollywood production I seriously doubt they would have overlooked this before starting principal production.

    Also in other news Harlan Ellison, though a talented writer, is a crank and an ass.

  11. The bulge just in front of the F-18's canopy is its gun.

    Other than that, I don't know the answers.

    I think he's referring to the boxy structure just behind the gun. Pilots and maintainers call it "the pizza box" because it's where they store their pizzas.

    Or it's a stealthy housing for the IFF "Bird slicer" antennas, whichever sounds more plausible.

  12. I've been following the F-15 situation for the last few days. Is there any more word on what they think is the issue with some of these F-15's?

    I know part of the reason why the F-16 Fighting Falcon's are manufactured with a mix of either GE or P&W engines is so that if the GE engined F-16's are grounded it doesn't neccessarily mean the P&W F-16's have to be grounded or vice versa.

    Everything I've heard is structural fatigue, not engine trouble. I know there have been wories about the tail section for a long time and it's actually led to a some flight restrictions (limited to 7.5Gs as opposed to 9). David, being the F-15 fan that he is, might be able to elaborate.

  13. As requestied by David I've switched the running discussion on military procurment from the Aricraft vs Super thread over here.

    I do understand your particular point. But on the balance, when talking about economics, I don't think it's at all clear that the civilian arm of the government has a better understanding what would be best going forward. The more logical thing to have done perhaps is to fix a budget, and then let the service arms negotiate a solution based on their requirements. Instead of having every local congressman push for their piece of the military spending pie, that I think is where more of the waste comes from.

    You could do that but as Noyhoser has pointed out you'd just be trading one kind of mismanagement for another. To use a more recent example (and one that I've used before) the Tomcat community kept the Navy from developing what could have been an excelent strike fighter by insisting that no one hang bombs on thier pretty F-14s.

    Really the soloution for civilian mismanagement of the military is to elect better civilians, making a government organization less acountable to the poeple is never a way to cure mismanagement. Vote for better congresscritters, or donate money to elected officials and PACs that better represent your views. Otherwise I'm reminded of that old H.L. Mencken quote about people in a democracy getting the government they deserve.

  14. Nice point---people keep talking about how much the F-22 is, but don't seem to realize that due to inflation, the F-15 costs just as much. (Makes me wonder---so was the F-15 back in the 70's seen as "horrendously expensive" as the -22 is now?) The F-15 was in response to the "MiG-25 threat", and they tried to get as many built as soon as possible. Yet now we have Super Flankers, which unlike the MiG-25 really are amazing planes that are a serious threat to our air dominance, yet they say we don't need -22's...

    Ah but the only country who owns true "Super" Flankers in any significant number is India, who's such an intractable enemy that they regularly fly exercises with us, and are looking to buy several hundred fighters from us. Everyone else have either an easily overwhelmed handful of Su-30s or a larger number of vanilla Su-27s. China has Su-30s but not many and without nearly as good an avionics fit.

    Like I said earlier if all you talk about is the scary bogeymen of Flankers and Terrorism and China (oh my!) we're not going to get many F-22s, because well none of them really warrant Raptors. People will just say "well we can just upgrade our F-15s to deal with those easily and fly 'em for a hundred years like a B-52." If on the other hand you point out how we can't just keep flying our current F-15 fleet, and how much new F-15s cost, all of the sudden buying much more useful Raptors for a little more makes more sense.

  15. Defencetech has been flogging this article for a while. The funny thing is that it's very shortsighted. While it hasn't been of much use in Iraq it was downright pivotal in the rest of the most recent conflicts we've been in. Hell in Kosovo airpower was easily the deciding factor (with the barest hint of the use of ground forces finally tipping things over).

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