Ohhh. Good.

[kham]

huddisplay.jpg

By lex, on April 6th, 2006

Place this in the category of: “Probably too good to be true, but worth sharing nevertheless”

The correspondent who sent it my way said that it represents what it appears to: A HUD camera freeze from of an FA-18 of some flavor in a “position of advantage” over a USAF F-22 Raptor.

Little things. Like gunning an Air Force guy in his high tech gear. They just mean so much.

You have to understand this about fighter combat: Killing someone with a missile? Just business. Killing him with a gun? Now that’s personal. How can that be, you ask? Dead is dead, right?

Wrong. If you get shot with a missile, you got beat. You get gunned, you’ve been owned. A missile has a guidance loop, a processor, a logic board – it can be defeated. A 20mm round is brutally insensate, a mere bludgeon, with high explosive incendiary effects to go along with its kinetics. You cannot argue with it, you cannot decoy it, you cannot, once fairly beaten down, get out of its way.

Which somehow puts me in mind of as story from when I was stationed over in Japan. The USAF had a F-15 Eagle squadron in Kadena working “with” another USAF F-16 squadron in Korea. Now, much as there existed a good-natured rivalry between the FA-18 community in the US Navy, and their F-14 counterparts, so also did a rivalry exist between F-15 pilots and F-16 jocks. Except you could probably leave out the “good natured” part. Because in the Navy, anyway, after a moment or two’s reflection, one brand of pilot would actually cross the street to piss on the other, if in fact he was on fire.

Because of the service.

Less so in the USAF, was my strong impression. It all came from the hauteur with which the Eagle drivers, accustomed to raining long-range death from way high above viewed the mud-moving Viper pilots, no use at all in a stand-up fight, but given to pretensions. The F-16 guys on the other hand, were all too accustomed to seeing beat-down F-15s in the HUD cameras with the gun pipper on them to give much more than the back of their hand to the self-regard demonstrated by “Ego” pilots. They went at each other hammer and tongs. And that was just in the O’Club.

But anyway, the aforementioned Korea-based F-16 squadron maintained what we in the Navy refer to as a “Hit Log.” It’s basically a notebook used to record any illustration of buffoonery or mischance committed by any of the squadron’s pilots – a way of recording their misfortune for posterity. So that later generations could laugh at them too. The JO’s of that particular squadron were wonderfully descriptive – one could almost say inventive – and loved nothing more, when not gunning Eagles, than roasting their own comrades in tiny, crabbed pen.

And the Japan-based F-15 squadron, out of Kadena, happened to have one of the USAF’s first female fighter pilots – a real novelty at the time, and a source, for reasons I will not go into here, for much added fuel to the intermural fire between the two fighter communities.

Briefly: You should know that in a missile duel between Eagles and Vipers – at least in the old days, before AMRAAMs, when it was Sparrows and Sidewinders only (and only the F-15 carried the longer range Sparrow) – there was no contest: The Eagle is a wonderfully designed air superiority fighter, capable of going high and fast and carrying a lot of heat. But if an F-16 were to survive somehow to the merge with an Eagle, and if, at that merge the Eagle guys didn’t bug the hell out as fast as they could go, well: Foxes in the henhouse. For a hard turning, “I see you, you see me” fight, a stripped-down F-16 is hard to beat.

For an Air Force guy, anyway.

Which I know was all a long walk to this small house: In the debrief of a “many vs. many” F-15/F-16 engagement, one of the Viper jocks somehow managed to find himself in a position of disadvantage with respect to an Eagle flown by the previously mentioned female fighter pilot. In short, he got gunned.

By a girl.

There was HUD tape to provide the graphic evidence which proved to all those ears that had, in the midst of the fray, been unable to process her dulcet tones calling the hapless Viper jock dead, and out of the fight. Run along now.

Cos’ you don’t have to go home, but you can’t. Stay. Here.

Well, unfortunately there were several other things to debrief in the mission, while all of the Viper jocks but one squirmed in their seats like schoolboys held late on Friday afternoon. And the one who wasn’t squirming looked like he was pondering the best way to die, if he couldn’t manage to become invisible. Finally the debrief ended and there was a mad rush to the exit, with two or three getting stuck in the door, each trying to be the first one to memorialize this never-before envisioned feat in their hit log: One of their own, an F-16 jock, gunned by a chick (their words). In an Eagle.

Ohhh. Good.

[Mynock]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_ ... -22_Raptor

In December 2005, the USAF announced that the F-22 had achieved Initial Operational Capability (IOC).[170] During Exercise Northern Edge in Alaska in June 2006, in simulated combat exercises 12 F-22s of the 94th FS downed 108 adversaries with no losses.[35] In the exercises, the Raptor-led Blue Force amassed 241 kills against two losses in air-to-air combat, with neither loss being an F-22. During Red Flag 07-1 in February 2007, 14 F-22s of the 94th FS supported Blue Force strikes and undertook close air support sorties. Against superior numbers of Red Force Aggressor F-15s and F-16s, 6–8 F-22s maintained air dominance throughout. No sorties were missed because of maintenance or other failures; a single F-22 was judged lost against the defeated opposing force.[N 4] F-22s also provided airborne electronic surveillance.[171]

Can't argue with results.

[kham]

It reads like an ad for Lockheed and the Pure -O2 types Oh, I am certain it's a great fighter. If only they built more of them

[nachtjaeger]

Yeah. It's going to suck if history repeats itself, and the story goes that "It took five J-10 fighters to take down one F-22, but the Chinese always had that fifth J-10." For what these gollywog high-tech marvels cost, we could have filled the skies with constantly upgraded F-16s.

Funny- we go with all this computer and stealth tech- but we've had the technology to build seriously awesome aircraft for decades. Yeah, Dale Brown ("Flight of the Old Dog") is a fiction writer- but his EB-52 Megafortress concept is entirely doable. Hell, we've had the technology to build SHIELD's helicarrier from Marvel Comics since the '70s. That's just a HUGE quadcopter. A molten salt reactor ('60s) would be light, compact, and provide the heat source for the externally heated turboshaft engines (1950s.) Effectively unlimited range and endurance, like a nuclear submarine. If we were an Evil Empire, we could build fighters powered by direct air cycle nuclear reactors built right into the engines. Speed limited by friction heating, range limited by the endurance of the flight crew. (It wouldn't take an Evil Empire because they would kill the pilots or ground crew or poison the air, but because of the public's Radiophobia.)

It reads like an ad for Lockheed and the Pure -O2 types Oh, I am certain it's a great fighter. If only they built more of them

[kham]

Not to focus on non -high tech stuff, but you REALLY need to read THIS

And you can thank the current administration and it's collection of retarded dicksucking fools for this. Marine Aviation is roughly equivalent to the Soviet Air Force, circa 1996. Mission Accomplished, BOINGO!