renhanxue

I would have done so if those chapters had been in the binders I got to see at Krigsarkivet. They were not, though, and as far as I understand it it's because they haven't been sent to the archives (or they could just be misplaced, the collection of secret publications seems to be in a bit of a mess with regards to sorting - in one of the AJ 37 SFI binders I found a 30-page document detailing basic fighter training procedures for fighter squadrons equipped with J 35D and J 35F, and I have been unable to get a satisfactory answer as to why it was there). I've requested to have the AJS 37 SFI declassified too though and the missing chapters might turn up there. No answer yet, however, and it could take months before I hear anything. Yeager hated the Viggen and spent a whole interview (in Flygvapennytt or possibly in Flygrevyn, IIRC? - I think it's reproduced in one of the Viggen books too) being salty about it, probably because he was exiled to the back seat in the SK 37 despite being Chuck f'in Yeager. I'll try to find it, it's hilarious, he just goes on and on and on about how awful it is.

As far as the original AJ 37 goes, it's only missing rb 75 (Maverick) and the autocannon pods, I think. Both countermeasure pods seem to be pictured. Note the rb 04 on the centerline pylon - I don't think it can be fired from there. At least on the AJS 37 it can't. The rb 28's on the outermost pylons are shrouded in mystery too, they weren't used normally and I'm not even sure if the wiring for them was in place on all aircraft. Now, for the AJS 37, you're missing the bk 90 and the rb 15. And newer Sidewinders, I guess.

It costs you literally nothing to ask, and without asking you will never find out if your speculation is correct. Even if rejected a declassification request five years ago that doesn't automatically mean they'll reject it now. In fact, it might even be declassified already and all the people who asked for it are just sitting on their copies. I've seen that happen many times in Swedish archives. I also think you overestimate the value of the data. Flight manuals are covered by the lowest classification grade and they have to be read by a lot of people which makes them inherently insecure. Thus, they rarely contain anything spectacular, and the Iranians have had their Tomcats (and a flight manual for them) for like 40 years now.

5525 liters of reabensin MC 77 (JP-4/Jet B) internally, 1250 liters in the drop tank. These figures are the usable amount of fuel, not the total volume of all fuel tanks. JP-4 weighs about 6.36 lbs/gal on a "standard day" (presumably ISA), which is the same as ~0.76 kg/liter, so 4200 kg (9260 lbs) internally and 950 kg (2095 lbs) in the drop tank, very roughly speaking.

What risks are you envisioning, exactly? Early 70's microwave technology that predates solid state electronics is so outdated at this point that it's really only interesting to museums. You can find basically all the technical principles in off-the-shelf textbooks. You never know what can be declassified until you ask, but what you can be almost certain of is that it won't be declassified if nobody asks for it. Try FOIA'ing some user's manual or technical documentation from the first production version from the late 60's/early 70's, it won't cost you anything to ask and it's easy to do, especially if you know the title of the publication you're looking for (try asking some old Tomcat pilot for likely manual titles). It's actually pretty remarkable what you can get declassified these days, I've seen a lot of odd stuff pop up from the archives in recent years.

I'm a historian. I'm interested in verifiable facts, not hearsay, and I'm not particularly convinced by Cooper's work as an accurate account of the "experiences of an entire air force", as you put it. The thing is, kill counts and personal accounts are notoriously unreliable. Personal stories can be very engaging reading and a good source for how the people involved thought of themselves afterward, but as an accurate account of what actually happened, they're close to worthless. You see a similar situation in WW2 history, where until the last decade or two the accounts of German tankers stated ridiculous kill counts were accepted as fact, but when the Soviet archives were opened it turned out they had frequently claimed to have destroyed more tanks than were physically ever there (and of course vastly more than the Soviets themselves counted as lost). It's not even necessary to have any intent of embellishing, it's just that the fog of war is a very real thing. A kill is easy to claim, a loss is very hard to avoid noticing. You need access to the accounts of both sides and a serious comparative analysis to make claims based on reality. This is true but has nothing to do with the actual Pk of the BVR shots that were taken. The Sparrow performed very poorly overall in 1971-1973 (Pk of around 11% with 276 shots taken) and of only 28 shots made BVR, two (2) resulted in kills. Please read Higsby's paper for the details, he goes over everything you mentioned in detail. Even in the Gulf War, with AWACS and 90's Sparrows and all that jazz, only 24 kills resulted from 88 AIM-7 shots taken, resulting in an overall Pk of 27% (BVR details uncertain, see Higsby for details). For comparison, 12 Sidewinders in the same conflict resulted in 8 kills. Uh. I guess if you want to call official USAF statistics "not facts" I guess you can do that, but it's unlikely to contribute to the discussion. I cited the paper as support for my position on Cold War era BVR in general, not for the Phoenix in particular. Since the only account of the Phoenix in combat outside those two anecdotes already discussed is Tom Cooper's, it's obviously impossible to make any meaningful statistical comparison; hence my argument is based on BVR in general. The only confirmation is Cooper's, as far as I can see. If the confirmations are based on CIA/US intelligence reports the page certainly does a remarkably bad job of stating it. The page cites Cooper and some apparently expat Iranian web sites of dubious character, most of which are dead links. If you happen to be sitting on a FOIA'd CIA report on this I'd be highly interested in reading it, though - it'd be very interesting to see the facts.

Yeah, that gets claimed a lot but I have never seen it convincingly documented. The only source I am aware of that states it worked great for the Iranians is a single book by Tom Cooper, who seems to have based his account entirely on a few interviews with a few Iranian pilots. Who, as we all know, certainly have no reason to embellish their own successes (/s). Cooper has also gotten a lot of flak in other books for being very, uh, liberal with his sources. The fact is that in every single reasonably verifiable attempt to use the AIM-54 in combat has resulted in either a) a miss, or b) the booster never igniting at all. This is nothing unique to the Phoenix, though. Cold War era BVR was really bad. In fact, I would go as far as to say that in general, all BVR missiles from before around the mid-1980's (and the advent of reasonably miniaturized digital electronics) were universally almost useless in the real world, at least if you actually tried to use them BVR. They could work reasonably under very specific controlled circumstances, but if you actually tried to shoot something down with them, you missed. A lot. Up until the Gulf War, the number of verifiable BVR shootdowns ever in the entire history of aviation could be counted on the fingers of one hand (there were four (4)). The Phoenix was contemporary with the Sparrow that had a 7% kill probability BVR in the later half of the Vietnam War, and it was designed to shoot down huge bombers flying in straight lines at high altitudes. It is downright unreasonable to expect it to do anything more than that with any sort of success. If you don't want to take my word for it (and actually even if you do take my word for it), I strongly recommend reading this paper by Lt Col Patrick Higsby, USAF: [ame=http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/11/09.pdf]Promise and Reality: Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Air-To-Air Combat[/ame] .

In reality the Viggen only ever had one offensive bomb option, the 120 kg sprängbomb m/71. It was carried on a mount which took four bombs per pylon; max four mounts for a total of 16 bombs. It's a HE-frag bomb which can be fuzed for either contact or proximity detonation. Retarding parachute optional, minimum arming time around 4 seconds after drop. The same bomb mount could also be used for lysbomb m/71, a parachuted illumination bomb.

pictured: canards at work edit: or if you want to see it in motion, most of this video should do nicely: [ame] [/ame]

we need splinter camo for dogs, it doesn't blend in at all (from an 80's recruitment folder for flygbasjägarna)

Of course it isn't.

The JA 37 airframe is actually subtly different from the AJ 37 in a few ways. It's about a decimeter longer, it has a different tailfin, the pylons and elevon actuators are different, it has a bunch of data link antennas that the AJ lacks, it has a different drop tank and a conformal gun pod. It also has a different engine with a bit more dry thrust than the AJ 37's. And as Skjold points out, basically all the avionic systems are different in the JA 37.

I recently saw a former Lansen and AJ 37 pilot relate this anecdote and I figured I might as well stick it here: The target for an all-E1 strike would pretty much always be some kind of representation of a Soviet invasion fleet. 48 or 56 aircraft isn't that many by international standards but gathering up from all the different bases at low altitude while radio silent must've been a pretty interesting experience.

I got around to translating a bit more of the seminar on the development of the JA 37's avionics. The previous parts are here and here.

The Viggen in its natural habitat (a JA 37, though): [ame] [/ame] Landing and taxiing within the first few minutes, then some "dead air", takeoff again at around 16:30.

Yep. If you want to pre-set the thrust reverser to automatically engage on touchdown, just pull the reverser handle while in the air. When there's weight on the right main gear, it'll start closing the hatches, but if the nose gear doesn't compress within one second it'll abort reversing until the nose gear compresses. There's also an extra failsafe that prevents the reverser from engaging if the landing gear switch is in the "landing gear up" position.

All makt åt Tengil, vår befriare! "Befriare" translates to "liberator". AI B-24 to go with the F4U?

Also, the AJ 37 wasn't designed to operate alone at all. The usual tactical unit was four aircraft, so you'd usually split the payloads up and not all aircraft carried countermeasures.

There's a system called TILS (Taktiskt InstrumentLandningsSystem) which presents directions (both turn and glideslope) on the HUD. See SFI part 2 chapter 1, page 154 and on. The manual mentions that if the desired landing strip isn't preprogrammed in the computer, you have to enter the runway heading into the computer yourself, which hints that the TILS beacons were portable.

Hasslösa was one of the E1 bases, yes. This thread has a wealth of discussion of which base was the "home" of each squadron - the last post is of particular interest; I'll quote the most relevant part: Two relevant documents: [ame]http://www.flyghistoria.org/flygbas/Fortv_Rapport_2007.1.pdf[/ame] [ame]http://www.flyghistoria.org/flygbas/Fortv_Rapport_2006.1.pdf[/ame]

This page claims 540 chaff packets and 28 flares in Kapsel B but who knows if it's accurate.

Yep, exactly. You can punch target latitude/longitude coordinates, cruise altitude and dispense altitude in on the data entry panel. Normally you'd want to pre-program it on the ground, though.

The rb 04E is completely autonomous and you can't influence its target selection from the aircraft. You set its targeting mode on the ground, not from the aircraft while in flight. You can set it to either single or group mode, where single mode just locks on the first target it sees and group mode is supposed to split missiles among a group of ships (exactly how this works is not clear from the flight manual). Alternatively, you can set it to home-on-jam or normal (single or group) plus home-on-jam as a backup (I think - that last one is from a secondary source, the original flight manual just says it has "two alternative homing modes"). Once you launch it, it goes off and does its thing no matter what you do. It stands to reason you can't lock it on targets because at typical launch distances (20 km, ish) the missile's flight altitude of 8-12 meters is well under the radar horizon from the target, so even if the aircraft handed a target over to it, it couldn't keep a lock on it during its flight.

"Fixtagning" means updating the inertial navigation system's position by checking the distance and bearing to a known target with a known location (usually a radar reflector or beacon).

Speaking of the RWR, does anyone have a satisfactory explanation for why there was so much hush-hush about it? Unlike most other components on the aircraft which were named according to their purpose, the RWR was given the cryptic designation "device 27" (apparat 27) and its main component is called "unit L". Why so circumspect? Surely a RWR wasn't that spectacular technology in the 60's.