Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire This is one for all you Fighter Pilots, Opinions please

Pugs,
Is the F-15K a significant improvement over the E model in terms of performance? Reliability/maintence?

Casey

F15beeper,

Thanks for shedding light on that.

John

No idea, we have in the past used foreign buys to amortize the purchase of our own technology. The F/A-18's the Kuwaitis got paid for all the US Navy fighter to fighter data link upgrades on our Hornets so who's to say.

Allen

I love discussing this stuff, but it makes my head swim.

The last time I watched a bomb go from fighter to target, I was in a Cessna, and my most sophisticated vision tool was the Mk-1 eyeball. No, actually, we had and used 7x50 binoculars sometimes. But you try looking at the ground below you through binos for a few minutes, while you also fly the plane. Makes you damn near puke from vertigo.

Lessee here...Navigation technology? Paper maps drawn with 35-year-old data. Communications technology? Short-range, line-of sight radio and "secret" code words. Precision weapons? gravity bombs and unguided rockets - they hit Earth every single time, guaranteed.

We left that field of battle just as the bad guys were getting their first shoulder-fired IR missiles. Good thing. Against them, we had a life expectancy of about a minute.

Yep, Know an Air Force Col who, on what was supposed to be his last flight and turned out to be his last flight in country got bagged by an SA-7 in his OV-10. Spent about 8 months as a POW.

We've learned. I had a little something to do with AMSTE and it's flat incredible. Bomb moving targets in any weather from well above the AAA and manpad threat. Here's a press release, although I'm not a Grummie I'm on the research side.

http://www.irconnect.com/noc/press/pages/news_releases.html?d=32497

I had one of nasty little boogers miss me, Pugs. Passed well between my left wingtip and me, and just ahead of the leading edge. The saving grace was that I was too close to him for it to arm and track. If the silly so-and-so had just tracked me a half-minute, I'd likely not be typing this.

How close? Well, the red star was torn off his helmet, he had acne and a chipped front tooth. Thought it was an RPG until I talked with intel and described the white doughnut aft of the launcher and white smoke trail. Intel guy got real quiet - but his eyebrows were talkin'

Keeping US type aircraft ready to fight can be a real challenge for most other nations. They are too high tech and maint. intensive for most other countries, but they do very well if you have the pilots and maint. guys to keep them fighting.

If you do not have these resources buy from someone else.

Anyone that thinks that some other countries can not produce a great "gunfighter" and its pilot is fooling themselves. A high tech long range multipurpose fighter, the pilot, and crew to exploit its full capabilities with some reasonable readiness rate may be a different story.

The Russkies sent us home drying our eyes from many international aerobatics (my area,rather than fighters) competitions. Pilots and planes are a challenge but the whole package of pilot, plane, avionics, targeting, weapons, maint., and logistics is what eludes most of the rest of the world.

Fireplug

Rocky, how can I get your books man, I see references all over a couple of forums I am on? PM me. Thanks, Les

Ummm, Les? My sig line?

Yep, I had to laugh at that one. Soviets, Russians (I don't care what you call them they are all just targets in my view) still train with antiquated low initiative GCI-heavy (Ground Control Intercept) tactics and when left on their own, they fall apart. Speaking of falling apart, MiG-29s (as is most Russian stuff) while very simple, is mostly garbage, (although they do put some good stuff out once in a while like the AA-11 "Archer", their version of our Sidewinder) the average lifespan of a MiG-29's engines was around FIFTY hours before a complete ovehaul was required and that was published in the unclass world years ago.

We need to keep our industrial base going and like others alluded to, the spare parts logistics train and updates are the Achilles Heel of any weapons systems and not even the Israelis had or have the technology/industrail base to keep their F-15s/16s up without us.

Russian and especially Chinese stuff is mostly garbage. I'm still active duty and if I'm not worried, neither should you jorge