Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire most "flyable" cold War transonic jets?

Lots of interesting discussion here. Folks have brought up a few planes which I had not become familiar with.

I was expecting you to write eloquently of the A6. Another of my favorites since reading Stephen Coonts' novel 35 years ago. Although the craft would be prohibitively expensive to maintain and fuel in civilian hands.

The F-100 had an adverse yaw problem - worse on takeoff. With a swept wing, if you use aileron at low speeds, the wing with the down aileron creates more lift but also more drag, and as that wing gets pulled back, its swept angle causes it to lose lift while the other wing is advancing and getting more direct airflow, so it has more lift. The result is that if you try to roll left, the plane actually rolls right, and the more you push the stick over to "correct" that, the problem gets worse. You can actually snap roll just a few feet above the runway. And that's fatal. F-100 guys had it drummed into them to never use aileron on takeoff, only rudder.

The "Saber Dance" video happened when the pilot got too slow, pulled the nose up and immediately got "behind the power curve" where there simply isn't enough thrust to overcome the near-stalled drag. In that realm, the adverse yaw threat also appears, and you are essentially doomed from the instant you haul back on the stick. As that guy was.

I was trying to keep it focused on cold war and transonic so the F-11F Tiger, barely supersonic in a shallow dive, filled that bill. As well, I had a professor at Navy PG school that flew them and he said it was a dream to fly with balanced controls, great visibility and pretty much no faults other than very short legs.

Coont's book, Flight of the Intruder, came out when I was in college and right after I had been accepted to AOCS so that clearly made me focus on it as where I wanted to go as an NFO. It was all going that way through flight school and I ended up in the right track as a Tactical Nav then came winging day. #1 guy got his first choice, Intruders in Oceana and the rest of us (13) got sent to Prowlers to fill a class at Whidbey (via three months at Corry station for basic EW training). Turned out to be a great platform and career but one can never say the Prowler was great flying airplane. The nose extension for two more crew for the mission as well as the ALQ-99 pods and such made it a nasty beast to bring aboard the ship (the Tomcat was perhaps worse) and if you flew it to the edge of it's envelope, especially high AoA los speed, it would bite. We lost a lot of them, almost half that were built, in various mishaps.

I always thought it would be cool to have a 4-seat A6 to fly around. My dad's time in 'nam probably had some influence on that

There was - I flew the station wagon variant the EA-6B. A pic I took of my lead with two CT-33's over San Clemente.

CF-105 Arrow
Good resale value

If we want to roll into non-jets. The OV-10 Bronco would be an awesome backcountry plane that you could cover some decent distance in too @ 225 KTS

That's awesome.

I love all variants of the A-6. Super cool plane.

I seem to remember that during WWII, the non-combat deaths among pilots (mainly training) was a very high percentage of the total pilot deaths. Can anyone speak to the accuracy of that?

I always thought it would be cool to have a 4-seat A6 to fly around. My dad's time in 'nam probably had some influence on that