mkellytx

An F-4J would be great, no slats, Pulse Doppler radar, full up air to ground capability and they were actually used in Vietnam. The SR-71 might be just about the only plane not able to drop/fire a weapon that might not get boring. Most of the reports say it was a handful to fly and very difficult to master. Sounds fun.

This incident: https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2972771&postcount=1

An Australian C model, they had fun toys, AGM-142, Harpoon, Pave Tack and supposedly they could do HARM's.

It does have a history with the Viggen...

Funny story, 7 July 1985 SAC received it's first operational B-1B, 83-0065 The Star of Abilene, the local news paper ran a big front page article about the arrival and spelled out B-1, but forgot the hyphen, hence the Bone was born, or at least that was the story the MSgt's told the Lt's back in the day.

Pity, it would be nice to have a J model or the British model with the pulse doppler radar and Speys.

The pilot side of both would get boring pretty quickly, all the weapons stuff is done by the navs or WSO's on both planes. Also, most people here don't realize how bad the BUFF's handling is, it is a hard airplane to fly (I used to fly the BUFF and did a 45 min handling qual eval once upon a time ago).

Yes, Oz retired theirs in 2009, USAF got rid of them to by more Raptors in the 90's.

Officers who arrive at pilot training in USAF aren't worthy of being called students, hence student is reduced to "studs". That carries over to Test Pilot School, where a large part of the syllabus is flying aircraft unfamiliar to the studs, which is why F-16 and F-15 guys would fly B-52's, but enough off topic. More potential challenges for the next plane to be a bomber: B-1B (Bone) - 4 crew, Pilot (P), Co-pilot (CP), Offensive system's Operator (OSO), Defensive Systems Operator (DSO) - Phased array radar (passive), , A2G, SAR, terrain following and A2A; plus some modes are interleaved - Complex flight controls, 2 channel Fly-by-wire (FBW) with manual reversion. Multiple stability augmentation (Stab Aug) modes SIS - Stall Inhibitor Systems, SEF - Stability Enhancement Function, Pitch Aug, Roll Aug, Yaw Aug, SMCS - Structural Mode Control System to name a few B-52 (BUFF) - 5 crew (6 ejection seats) Pilot (P), Co-pilot (CP), Electronic Warfare Officer (EW or EWO), Gunner (G - guns removed Oct 1991, seat remains), Radar Navigator (RN - the bombardier), Navigator (N) - Crosswind landing gear - Modeling the handling properties behind the tanker, the wing is large enough to interact with the tanker's vortex and the plane handles differently than when up and away Enough of reminiscing about bombers. The radar, multi-crew, engines, mitigate towards F-111, Tornado, or Su-24. Of the 3, one is no longer in service and much of the documentation is easily available. The main new tech would be auto TFR and the Pave Tack targeting pod (if the F model is modeled). I think the F-111 is an option, so is the Su-24, but not sure how much documentation is available for the later and if a license would be granted.

The difference in complexity between an F-111E and the Bone is big. The 1F-111E-1 is 419 pages (a great number for a bomber flight test guy!) and the 1B-1B-1 is 1436 pages. Good luck finding a -34 for the latter. Here's a link to the 1B-1B-1 1B-1B-1 The F-111 was pretty complex for a fighter at the time.

As nice as either of those would be, can't see either one getting made. FWIW I flew on the BUFF IRL, maintained the Bone and conducted flight test on both the Bone and BUFF. - The EWO station on the BUFF is marked classified - How to operate the DSO station on the Bone probably won't be public domain either - Both aircraft are very WSO/NAV centered airframes, pilots are bus drivers - The BUFF has terrible handling qualities (it was always really fun to watch the fighter TPS studs attempt to fly the BUFF on Qual Evals ;) ) - With FBW and Stab Aug off the Bone can be nasty also - The systems on both are way more redundant and complex than a fighter, fighters step to the jet 40-45 min prior to take off. We always stepped 90 min to 2 hours prior My guess is a Vark or Tonka

I've flown in formation a couple of times with two other bombers in formation...at the Edwards AFB airshow :pilotfly: ;) A Bone on one side and a Spirit on the other. I've launched plenty of two ship Bone formations and talked to plenty of BUFF drivers that went in as three ships. All depends on the mission and the number of DMPI's to hit. Most of the OEF/OIF/bomb the ME missions now are single ship on call ammo. Doesn't mean that if you need to hit 100+ DMPI's without alerting someone by deploying 2 or more fighter squadrons to a neighboring country that you couldn't send a 2-3 ship B-1/B-2/B-52 package in from CONUS with little to no warning...

It's a great read. Of course one of the very best books on this topic is "First In, Last Out, Stories by the Wild Weasels" which is published by the Society Of Wild Weasels and edited by Col. Ed Rock. Lot's of gouge there for defeating SAM's

China Lake and Edwards, would love to virtually return to my old stomping grounds or drop virtual bombs on things I bombed in real life :pilotfly:

Don't forget his last one "Fighter Pilot, The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds" great read. Ed also used to post prolifically on rec.aviation.military in the old text based internet. Kindle/Amazon also has a lot of good F-105 memoirs. "First In, Last Out, Stories by the Wild Weasels" is also a great read. Funny thing, I sat next to one of the contributors to the last book on a flight from Houston to Chicago back in May a couple of days after re-reading the book. Best flight ever that I wasn't wearing a flight suit...

Mattebubben, Real life the Mirage can also do a split-S from pretty low. It's been ten years, but when I was doing flight test one of my test pilots went to the French TPS for his field trip and had one the instructors pull a split-S from 2,500 ft or so if memory serves. So, the 500 m sounds possible for the Viggen.

This is where a good RWR comes in handy, as mattebubben's said repeatedly. So, one possible way that happens is that the APG-65/73's on the Hornets and Harriers does act like a flashlight in an dark room telling everybody where you are. Provided the RWR is very sensitive and has the right software it can detect the radar, before the radar has enough returns to detect the F-5. Next, put the radar on the 3-9 line and drive past the Hornet/Harrier's gimbal limit while losing some altitude. Once there the RWR should still still be in a side lobe and have enough signal to give an accurate bearing, now the F-5 can start to turn in. Staying low makes the F-5 harder to spot visually and the Hornet/Harrier easier to see against the sky, once visual drive to the target's blind spot, get behind their 3-9 line and pop up.

About hot pits, I was always a bomber guy so we ERCC'd (Engine Running Crew Change), but all the former fighter guys I used to work with would say 20-45 min depending on air frame and load out, truck or in-ground. A Viper taking two bombs and 9,000 lbs of gas closer to 20 min, the Mud Hens taking 4-10 GBU-12/31/38 and 18,000 lbs of gas maybe 45-60 min. Cheers

The A-37 would be great. Real life I logged a couple of hours in the Tweet sim and the left seat of the actual aircraft. Also, I flew with enough TPS grads who spun the A-37 to know that it would be a fun ship to fly. FWIW, they got plenty of combat hours in SEA and South America, surely something interesting could be done with the bird.

It does and it's about 12' long, which is still pretty short. A number of -135's have pods under the wings for probe and drogue. FWIW mostly the Navy tankers are there for emergency gas if a pilot bolters one too many times.

I'd agree with you up until the RIF's in the mid 90's, after them the better talent voted with their feet. Since the mid nineties name an AF Cat I program that wasn't over budget. I personally ended my career on a program in a Nun-McCurdy breech, not fun. Hindsight is always 20/20, if we a near peer conflict in the last 15 years we'd be talking about how we should have kept the Intruders and Tomcats.

The Vark would be great, definite buy. As good as the Bone could be it will never happen, too much of that aircraft won't be public domain. I spent 6 years maintaining and testing them, more than anyone I'd like to see it.

We only afforded the MLU's because we couldn't afford their replacements. At least you kept your requirements reasonable and could afford replacing a good portion of your tac air fleet and still have money left over for a bunch of Arleigh Burke's and Virginias. Despite the super bug's perceived or real short comings they for the most part met the thresholds and did so on time and under budget, the same couldn't be said about us. We threw ours away on B-2 and F-22 and don't have a lot to show for it. Best analogy is if you guys had gone high end again after the A-12 saga and were forced to make the A-6 soldier on another 15 years. Totally agree about the landings, but a surprising number of bases in the sandbox are pretty close to the gulf. We had our share of corrosion also. Don't get me started...

Not to mention a JDAM lofted from 50 kft at 1.5 Mach has a range greater than 20 nm, that's good enough to defeat a lot of single digit SAMS. That can be nice at times...

The last three years of my military career were as an acquisitions puke, driving a desk, building hours towards my 5,000 hr PowerPoint badge;) All joking aside the Navy acquisitions path during the late 90's has some merit, they went with good enough (F-18E/F) and replaced a lot of tired iron. The AF went with best and got 187 Raptors and are now on the 2nd or 3rd mid-life update of the Viper, Mud Hen, Eagle... A good question would be if the higher marginal cost of the higher performing A-6F and Super Tomcats would justify their performance advantage over the Super Bug, but that's a big counterfactual... That said, the range of the A-6E would have been nice to have in A-stan.