Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Favorite Jet Fighters:

The F111 only had one tail

or vertical stabilizer, to be more precise

Cockpit was a side-by-side configuration. Twas a capsule that jettisoned instead of ejection seats.

Why is the F-111 designated with an F-fighter when it didn't have gun, or did it?

It was M61 compatible in several variants but I never saw one with a cannon in two deployments.

Was the M61 a pod mount?

No I believe it was internal...

For the F-111 defensive meant light both burners and head for the deck. I don't think short of a B-1 that anything could hang low and fast with them for long.

Saw HUD footage from an F/A-18 on the Fallon range once, he rolled and pulled down onto the F-111 who tapped burner and by the time the Hornet was even close the 111 had 500 kts of airspeed on the Hornet and egressing out of range.

During Desert Storm an EF-111 got jumped by an Iraqi Mig-29. The pilot selected "hard ride" on the autopilot and 200' and the 29 flew into the ground trying to convert on them. Air Force, who hates tactical EW, didn't give them a kill.

I don't know if a Brit was involved, but as a result of efforts to sell parts to Iran all the F-14s made it to the front of the line for destruction at Davis-Monthan. Except for a few in museums, they are all gone.

A mod installed a M-61 internally in the "bomb bay". It had a blister for the barrels to shoot under the plane. The F-106 (or some of them) had a M-61 installed where the center missile rail was and extended down to shoot.

Uh-huh. Sure it was.

Awesome pic, Pugs...

Close.
Outclassed as a blanket statement is not quite fair or accurate:
While lacking in turn RATE, it outclassed the migs in other areas such as climb/dive rate and of course much better missile armaments. Bottom line, don't get in a low altitude turning fight with Mig 17s, 19s or even 21s, unless you know WTF u are doing. Once we remembered how to FIGHT and not just intercept, our kills ratios were significantly higher than Migs. Yes, TRAINING was a big component. The Navy F-4s NEVER got a gun whilst the USAF F4-E variant and follow-ons did.

Overall it was a SUPERB airframe and an especially good fighter-bomber, outclassed is a bit of a stretch.

Thanks, Jorge... I was about to reply in the same frame of mind, but you did a better synopsis with fewer words.

IIRC it was that experience with the F4 (and possibly other fighters) in RVN that convinced the powers that be that guns really weren't obsolete, a thought that had some vogue in the late 50's and early 60's when those same PTB figured heat and radar guided air to air missiles had supplanted any need for close in gun fighting.

I think the air-to-air missiles of that era also let the F4 down as well..

I suspect the early kill ratio would have been a lot better had those things gone bang when/where they were supposed too!

Red Flag...

Just the AIM-7s. Pete, DISMAL kill ratio of about 7%. The AIM-9 though, was a sure killer.

The F-4 will never win many awards as a knife fighter, but as Jorge points out, it had its virtues. Their problem in early Vietnam was that they had an interceptor mentality with systems that simply were not reliable enough to be effective. Then, when they did end up the knife fight they did not have the skills to optimize their system and deny the North Vietnamese MiGs theirs. When it comes to dogfighting, the person matters much more than the aircraft. I've watched old A-4Fs beat the crap out of every 4th gen US fighter. A good friend of mine, who learned from the best ACM pilot I ever witnessed, took a T-45 and on a couple of occasions beat 4th gen fighters during the TopGun graduation hop. Talk about humble pie! That's a flight where you all brief in an auditorium and are given a rendezvous point, a frequency to talk on and time. You have no idea what you will fight. There is everything from MiGs, most of the USAF fighters, a P-51 and/or Corsair and training jets parked on the ramp and taking off at the same time. It's a blast! Pilots today do much less pure BFM training than we did in the early 90's and before. Quite frankly, with AIM-9Xs and JHMCS, you don't need to. Taking the JHMCS and HOBS missiles off the table, if you have two equally bad sticks, the result will be some random outcome based on the maneuvers they happened to perform. It's when you have two equally excellent pilots that a little extra thrust, a little extra turn rate, a little extra high AoA controllability all start to make a difference.

A total of 452 Sidewinders were fired during the Vietnam War. 80 NVAF aircraft were shot down (or 88, depending on the source).

612 Sparrows were fired in VN, resulting in 56 60 kills.

Yes, the AIM-9 performed better. Sort of.

When I was a kid I always wanted to become an F-15 pilot. Of course, growing up in Canada that was pretty much impossible as the go to air force jet up here was the CF-18.

I know it's an interceptor, not a fighter, but I'll throw the Avro Arrow into the mix simply for patriotic reasons. Of course, they never saw active service.



SS