busdriver

That I am ...it's been been 33 years since UPT graduation, 40+ years since I soloed during my junior year of high school at Clark AB. That pretty much seals the deal.

Very pretty Spinners. How about moving the Star & Bar to the side of the intake or the aft fuselage? Why? Well when you're flying formation with a camouflaged jet you need some reference to put the "light in the star" for station keeping. Either way, a very pretty piece of artistry.

Uhh 3 chutes... or 1

It is a good book. I really enjoyed John Lundstrom's two part First Team set.

If you're interested, besides Dash 1s and NATOPS manuals for every version, I also have Detail & Scale Five view drawings in 1/48th scale for ALL the US versions. Check that...no RF-4B, however the D&S stuff is from 1981. The B/N, J/S and G drawings are still hermetically sealed. Oh and I have the D&S and Color & Markings books for the US versions. I head out on a four day tomorrow, home for a day and a half, gone for five, then gone on vacation for two weeks. I can be reached at mspbusdriver[at]gmail.com

Another Sundowner beauty...

Nice busdriver. is your tail on skin or a decal? That is the work of the the one and only Sundowner...on skin...

Another day at the office

Low aspect Sparrow kill...loving Stary's SARCASM

daddyairplanes...send TK your email address... (see his Memorial Day thread)

Buggsy opined Norman Franks & Alan Benett did a pretty fair analysis in their 1997 title The Red Baron's Last Flight : A Mystery Investigated

Stuntman posited Yes please...

Nice Blk 15

The Eagle truly is King Kong WRT having a powerful radar. They could lock my little F-16A before I could generally paint them on my little biddy radar. Advantage Eagle. However...I felt pretty darn confident I could get to the merge if I was at low altitude (due to the V sub C notch in their radar). At medium to high altitude...defeating a face shot was problematic (was ACMI in your favor or not that day) did you "worm" effectively that day. Clear advantage to the Eagle, Tomcat & Hornet. LOL...I never met another viper pilot that felt inferior to a guy in another jet. The F-18A gave me the biggest trouble...but they had shorter legs than us, so if they were hauling a CL tank that day, and I saw that at the merge...boy my fangs were out. If they were clean...I'd probably die in the phone booth, groveling in a nose high slow speed rolling scissors. BFM against the Hornet was like BFM against another Viper. But then they'd bingo out and go home. Regarding the F-16 vs F-14...the Tomcat is the world's largest airspeed indicator. Meaning you knew his energy state immediately. In the F-16 our BFM problem was defined by a simple flow chart. 1) Am I inside his turn circle? If Yes...go kill him. If No, get inside his turn circle and kill him. That's not hubris or ego, that is simply the way we trained. Once AIM-9Ls & Ms became more plentiful our options improved. Again I am speaking strictly as a former A model (Blk 10 & Blk 15) guy. You had good days and you had bad days, and some days you got luckier. The F-16 would still be my choice to go to war.

Those are some gorgeous RF-4Cs...you probably already know that our inboard pylons were the Navy's LAUs versus the standard USAF C/D/E/G LAU. But gorgeous models none the less!

Bullethead's (how shall I phrase this...) misunderstanding of Airbus FBW system and logic is often found amongst airline pilots, but only pilots that have not flown a Bus. Kudos to FC for trying to illuminate and educate. It has been my experience that most american pilots prefer Boeing products. I really liked the 757. But I prefer Fifi (319/320). It seems to me pilots that love it the most are former F-16 guys/gals like me. We "get" the FBW logic of Normal >> Alternate >> Direct Law. My employer recently included stall recovery training during recurrent simulator training (as a direct result of the Air France crash). It requires us to "fail" two computers to get into Alternate Law, and we no longer automatically go to TOGA (exacerbates the nose pitch up and possible secondary stall). I am firmly convinced that years of flying upside down and pulling Gs makes this training less stressful for me than say a pilot with ZERO military fixed wing experience. Direct Law is scary for some folks, but when you explain that it's sorta like flying a DC-9 you see the light bulb come on over their cranium. My employer considers a DIRECT Law approach and landing to be an emergency, most carriers do NOT. I do not consider it an emergency. WRT Boeing -vs- Airbus...recently had a mechanical delay leaving CVG for SEA due to a scheduled overnight engine change. While we waited, two Boeing employees cornered me and my FO (co-pilot) to get the "real" gouge on the delay. One guy said he didn't like Airbus, that his 737 was much better. He was in fact part of the 737-900 team that is selling them to my employer. He was rightfully proud. When I asked if Boeing was putting the same ole, cramped and NOISY cockpit on the front of their shiny new 900, he sheepishly (think averting his gaze and sorta mumbling) admitted it was pretty much correct. "Ahhh, we're ahhh making a couple changes, but yes it's the same." Give me my QUIET, roomy cockpit with its side sticks, tray tables, and being able to see my wingtip (great for taxiing on congested ramps).

Section 6 of the Dash 1 only has a small Note about the small tail Blk 10 being more prone to deep stalls/departures since it operated at a more aft CG and more prone to Yaw departures with external stores (especially assymetric stores). Since the SF2 flight model does NOT replicate the extreme ranges of the F-16's envelope, I would not bother with tweaking anything. Honestly, how would you know what to tweak? Cheers

From the fuzzy recesses of my brain, I don't recall any differences between flying the Blk 10 and the Blk 15. Without pulling out my Dash 1, I recall the significance of having a bigger elevators was primarily during out of control recoveries and using the MPO switch to rock the airplane out of its pitch hang up (the nose kinda bobbing up and down while spinning). I can't recall any noticable difference between the Blk 10s I flew in RTU and the Blk 15s I flew at Kunsan or Moody. Just looking at my Dash 1, there is NOTHING in it suggesting a significant difference in handling. One other place to look is my F-16 MCM 3-3 which is a collection of unclassified phase manuals rolled into one. Standby...

We also had Angle of Attack (AOA) indexer lights above the glareshield, when the donut in the middle was illuminated you were pulling optimum AOA, at the same time the aural tone in your ear was nice and soothing. During an approach to landing (around the final turn or on a straight in) the donut was your target AOA, it also happens to be optimum maneuvering AOA. As you exceeded optium AOA (19.2 units in the hard wing F-4) the V above the donut came on (both at same time meaning slightly slow) and if you continued to pull only the V illuminated...think of it as telling you to point the nose down ("Unload for Control" was the name of the film put out to all F-4 RTUs/RAGs). And by now the aural tone was a rapid fire (looking at a Dash 1 it says the "your AOA is too high, you're too slow" tone was 20 pulses per second with a frequency of 1600 Hz.). Above 22.3 units AOA the nosegunner would feel his left rudder pedal shake (think rapid fire chattering). The rule of thumb a new AF Phantom guy learned was, when you hear the beep, use your feet. When the AOA aural tone started (at 15 units) that's when you centered the stick laterally and used your rudder pedals to roll. So around the final turn in the overhead pattern you smoothly pushed on the rudder pedals to control the radius of the turn. During BFM...say during your gun defense when the Gomer was trapped about 1500 feet in the saddle, stomping on the rudder pedal (with the stick snuggly pulled full aft) would get your out of plane maneuver. The F-16 on the other hand...no aural tone, no pedal shaker. We (some guys) put our feet flat on the floor and hooked our toes under the rudder pedals during BFM. Otherwise you simply rested your feet on the pedals, but pedal pressure was always light. It was most definitely something different. But not unlike they way we flew the T-38. You had to be cautious with rudder inputs at high AOA in the T-38. Once a UPT grad got to Fighter Lead In, then he/she was taught to use their feet more.

It's always Top Gun Day when you fly with me. Especially when I get an ex USN First Officer (co-pilot). Invariably as our A320 intercepts the Localizer and starts down the Glide Slope (on autopilot) I'll look over and utter those immortal words, "Gutsiest move I ever saw Mav." Or if it is apparent to both of us that we're high (perhaps starting our descent late from cruise) then that calls for the obvious "do some of that pilot s**t..." Back to the books, I've got two days in the box "doin' some of that pilot s**t..." Talk me through that Loss of Pressurization + Emergency Descent procedure Goose.

When I first saw a picture of an RQ-170 I concluded, "Hey that's a low observable UAV designed to operate in high threat environments ." The Iranians first claimed they shotdown a drone. Now they claimed they hacked its control link. To my untrained eyeball, they've shown they have an RQ-170, one without a whole bunch of battle damage. I certainly don't know the cause of this loss. I'll go out on a limb and say none of us KNOW the cause. I would be surprised if an asset designed to operate in a high threat environment did not have an autonomous capability (autopilot, preprogrammed profiles) impervious to MIJI (meaconing, intrusion, jamming, interference). I can see where folks would make that assertion, but it's not at all clear to me that is the logical conclusion.

So what was your point? UAVs crash. The US Air Force UAVs using pilots that graduated from UPT have had more crashes than US Army UAVs that use an autoland feature. Indeed...unencrypted video feed was hacked. Personally, I would be reluctant to extrapolate passive interception with the ability to override control of a low observable, high-altitude UAV. If you linked to a report of insurgents taking command of a Predator or Reaper and employing their weapons against US forces, then I'd think you'd be on to something. Here's my point. For you to suggest that using UAVs in high threat environments is not smart, clearly IMO misses the entire rationale of having UAVs.

Ack! I think it's very smart.

My money is on some internal glitch, and perhaps some backup algorithm (perhaps after running out of gas sprial down and perform a soft field forced landing) was the cause. Hacking the datalink would be an amazing feat. Interesting none the less.

I question your air combat acumen. Iran may indeed have the latest and greatest counter-drone measures. Or perhaps some queertron in the drone's circuits caused it to go tits up and it simply crashed, with the Iranians surprised as sh*t at their good fortune. But to assert that drones are somehow ineffective in high threat environments based upon this loss is simply uniformed. If you are so inclined (to learn more on this topic) you might read William Wagner's suberb book about drones during the vietnam war titled Lightning Bugs and other Reconnaissance Drones. What would you be saying if Iran was parading a captured US pilot around for the media? Iran may have the talent to reverse engineer or exploit the captured technology, but they don't have a human being to try to exploit. Iran is seen as a budding nuclear threat, sending a UAV to gather imagery is vary smart IMO.