MigBuster

Cool am off to see it Monday then

Could be a bit of everything - they wont tell us the real motivation As part of defense you still need to degrade the other sides means to throw bombs at you, you cant take out oncoming ground forces with A-A missiles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwo-fY3HHA8

http://theaviationist.com/2014/05/13/two-new-stories-baranek/ Two unknown Tomcat stories told by the former F-14 Tomcat RIO Dave “Bio” Baranek. Developed in the late 1960s as a multi-mission fighter, the F-14 Tomcat’s mission was to protect U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Groups (CVBG) from raids conducted by the Soviet bombers armed with long-range cruise missiles. On a typical sortie, the aircraft would keep a combat air patrol station located several hundred miles from the carrier. The loiter and radius advantage of the Tomcat were achieved thanks to its swept wings, which have been the greatest engineering challenge in F-14’s development, as explained to The Aviationist by a very special reader. “One of the most distinctive and memorable features of the F-14 Tomcat was its variable geometry wings” says Dave “Bio” Baranek, author of the book Topgun Days: Dogfighting, Cheating Death and Hollywood Glory as One of America’s Best Fighter Jocks and a twenty-year experienced Tomcat Radar Intercept Officer (RIO). Bio explains that the F-14’s wings were controlled by “a microprocessor known as the Central Air Data Computer(CADC) — world’s first microprocessor (designed and developed by Steve Gaeller and Ray Holt from 1968-1970 for the F-14A Tomcat). As Baranek explains, the variable geometry wings brought several advantages to the Tomcat: “At their forward sweep position of 20 degrees (the angle of the wing leading edge), they allowed the F-14 to have a relatively low landing speed, an important consideration for safe operations from an aircraft carrier. As speed increased, they would automatically sweep back based on indicated Mach number (IMN) to a fully-swept position of 68 degrees, reducing drag for high speed flight” (and also to reduce wingspan for aircraft movement and storage – Bio told us that on the flattop’s deck the wings could be swept back to 75 degrees in a position called “oversweep”). The F-14’s wings could also be manually swept, even if, according to Baranek, the Tomcat’s driver had to consider several factors since “The pilot could manually sweep the wings aft of the position determined by the CADC, but not forward of that position, as that could cause structural damage due to the tremendous lift it would generate. Manually sweeping the wings back could confuse an adversary by giving a false indicator of F-14 airspeed. But it also provided much less lift and less maneuverability, so it was a “tactic” or trick that would be used very carefully.” This last statement is confirmed by Bio himself who recalled exclusively for The Aviationist, the tale of a Tomcat’s driver who forgot the wing swept aft in the middle of a furball in the F-14 simulator. “One time in the F-14 simulator (the name of which was 2F112), we completed our planned work and still had time, so we were messing around. A very good pilot was flying, I don’t remember the RIO, and I was out at the control console. The pilot wanted to try to get out of flat spins by manually sweeping the wings aft. I don’t remember if it helped, but after he did it a few times we still had some time left, so he said, “Let me fight a MiG-21.” The operator set up the simulator and they started a dogfight. After about two minutes, the pilot said, “Wow, this is the best MiG-21 I’ve ever seen, I should have killed him by now!” Then I looked at a display that showed an external view of the F-14 and told the others at the control console: “Look, he still has the wings swept aft!” They couldn’t contain their laughter and told him, “Check your wingsweep!” The pilot put the wings in Auto and the engagement ended soon after that with a kill by the Tomcat.” Besides being a Naval Flight Officer, Baranek completed an assignment as Top Gun instructor at the Navy’s elite Fighter Weapons School (based at the then Miramar Naval Air Station), hence his chance to see how the F-14‘s swept wings could be used as an advantage during a real dogfight, also against more manoeuvrable aircraft. In particular Bio recalls an episode involving a Naval Aviator flying his 1 vs 1 Graduation hop against a Top Gun instructor flying a very particular adversary aircraft. Before telling the story, Baranek explains how a typical 1 vs 1 Graduation flight took place: “For the “Graduation 1 vs 1″ flight in the Top Gun class, instructors arranged for students to fight an aircraft whose identity would be unknown until merge plot. Everyone briefed against everyone, so it was legal. This was in the 1980s, and students didn’t know if they were going against an A-4, F-5, or something else. The set up was a 30-mile intercept, so you discovered the identity of your opponent when you could visually ID him, maybe 4-5 miles before the merge. To keep things interesting they sometimes arranged for an outside aircraft, such as a QF-86 from the Pacific Missile Test Center that would be flown by a live pilot for the event.” In the second half of the 1980s the Hornet drivers alongside with their then new F/A-18s, began to join Topgun classes and some of them believed they had a huge advantage over the bigger Tomcat during a real air-to-air engagement. “Around 1987, an F/A-18 pilot went through the Topgun class, and he kept trash-talking F-14s. He called them “interceptors” and bad-mouthed them at every opportunity,” says Bio. “Most instructors at this time had been F-14 pilots and RIOs, and they decided to teach him a lesson. So they had a former instructor participate in the Graduation 1 vs 1 secretly, and he was flying an F-14A. This Hornet pilot went out for his 1v1 flight, ran the intercept, and as he approached the merge saw an F-14 with wings fully swept. The Hornet pilot thought, “The F-14 is going 450 knots or more, I’m going to win.” So at the merge he pulled hard into the vertical. What he did not know: the F-14 had burned much of its fuel, so it was light. Plus, it was only doing 300 knots. At the merge, when the Hornet pulled into the vertical, the Tomcat selected wings to Auto, lit afterburner, and did a max performance turn into the vertical. Since the Hornet was much faster, the Tomcat ended up dead six on the Hornet at one mile and called “Fox 2, kill.” Following this first engagement “To get max training benefit from the opportunity they followed up with a regular one”but as Baranek recalls “the story was a big hit around Miramar, which of course was home to West Coast F-14s. It also reiterated one of Topgun’s main teaching points, which is credited to the Red Baron himself: “It’s not the crate, but the man sitting in it.”

I knew there must have been some kind of plan! was shocked to see an IL-28 landing - and also a silver MiG-23ML

Any reason you got them? - they are not supported past Win XP Can you get your money back and Get Strike Fighters 2 Vietnam & Europe instead?

Reminds me of the A-10

Cats are a near perfect killing machine - the speed at which they can react is quite something - even against birds. Cool they made a scaled down version to keep as a pet.

Short overview of versions and operations in Astan - and many others http://www.ospreypublishing.com/store/Sukhoi-Su-25-Frogfoot_9781782003595

Well that's up for debate - as I said the F-16 with the ASQ-213 HTS (Weasel in a can) is what gives the F-16CJ/DJ/CM/DM the required avionics to replace the F-4G including the second man - you could argue on what was more effective. I think most F-16s could carry AGM-45 and AGM-88 - this doesn't make them WIld Weasels - e.g in Vietnam a multitude of jets carried and fired AGM-45 not only the dedicated A-6B / EF-4C/ F-100F / F-105F/G These days the only things a second man is good for seems to be..............

Despite whats its been through - Iraq likely has far more economic potential due to its oil industry.

http://combatace.com/files/file/8446-remove-the-red-planes-from-the-in-flight-map/

Good book - been a while since I read it though. Sounds like a hunter killer team - the F-4G was the primary SEAD platform in 91 - what were the F-16s carrying? A famous mission involved F-16A block 10s taking out SAM sites with dumb bombs - were supposed to have SEAD support from F-4Gs and area jamming from EF-111s. The F-16CJ Block 50/52 was the SEAD version that carried the HTS - this pod replaced the F-4G :) . I think but would need to check - in 1991 the newest F-16s in theatre were Block 40/42s. - not even sure there were any active F-16CJ squadrons.

Would need to see some charts from manual supplements really - only French manual I have is for the M2K - but no performance data alas From an aero point of view the Mirage F1 is missing some major features seen on modern lifting tail designs, and although it has canards the Viggen is a different design from the modern euro canards.

I have seen no information from those tests to determine configuration, version or the speed range that was tested. The US did publish in the 1978 HAVE PAD test program under 10,000ft msl from M0.95 to 730 KIAS the MiG-23MS acceleration was superior to all US jets flown against it - don't have a list of the US jets evaluated though. This likely wouldn't hold true for different speeds or altitudes - especially where the wing was unswept - because of the relatively poor T/W ratio the acceleration would likely come from the aero properties with full wing sweep. In the tested regime its going supersonic where parasitic drag really kicks in and affects acceleration far more than in the subsonic regime. Its still patchy what year (or if) Israel fitted internal ECM (such as Rapport III ) into F-16As. This GCI guidance dependence thing seems to apply mainly to the PVO as far as the USSR went - the VVS seem to have been a lot more flexible.

Is this celebrating a few thousand years of French Girls?

How would you define failure? The Russians seem to have been quick to mothball them after the CW - but its combat record is defined by export countries with indifferent equipment, tactics and strategy. It was probably adequate for a "3rd Gen". but in regards to how it flew - a pilot who flew the "Crocodile" and the later MiG-29 would suggest the 29 was on a different planet. US pilots that flew the MiG-23MS claim it was not forgiving to fly (although possibly didnt fly with stab augs on). The MLD was a lot better than the M/MP but still only F-4E type performance - expect they had no problem ditching them all for 29s. In its intended Cold War role - there were lots of them and they were very fast - and could have been effective depending on tactics etc. Does this include the ground attack MiG-23B/BN/BK as well?

Who knows http://combatace.com/topic/59521-trackir-4/ http://combatace.com/topic/70460-facetrack-noir-with-sf2-series/

Allegedly of course.................

Afraid the BBC went for something a bit more contraversial!! Dien Bien Phu: Did the US offer France an A-bomb? Sixty years ago this week, French troops were defeated by Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu. As historian Julian Jackson explains, it was a turning point in the history of both nations, and in the Cold War - and a battle where some in the US appear to have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons. "Would you like two atomic bombs?" These are the words that a senior French diplomat remembered US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asking the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, in April 1954. The context of this extraordinary offer was the critical plight of the French army fighting the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu in the highlands of north-west Vietnam. The battle of Dien Bien Phu is today overshadowed by the later involvement of the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s. But for eight years between 1946 and 1954 the French had fought their own bloody war to hold on to their Empire in the Far East. After the seizure of power by the Communists in China in 1949, this colonial conflict had become a key battleground of the Cold War. The Chinese provided the Vietnamese with arms and supplies while most of the costs of the French war effort were borne by America. But it was French soldiers who were fighting and dying. By 1954, French forces in Indochina totalled over 55,000. At the end of 1953, French commander in chief Gen Navarre had decided to set up a fortified garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in the highlands about 280 miles from the northern capital of Hanoi. The valley was surrounded by rings of forested hills and mountains. The position was defensible providing the French could hold on to the inner hills and keep their position supplied through the airstrip. What they underestimated was the capacity of the Vietnamese to amass artillery behind the hills. This equipment was transported by tens of thousands of labourers - many of them women and children - carrying material hundreds of miles through the jungle day and night. On 13 March the Vietnamese unleashed a massive barrage of artillery and within two days two of the surrounding hills had been taken, and the airstrip was no longer usable. The French defenders were now cut off and the noose tightened around them. It was this critical situation which led the French to appeal in desperation for US help. The most hawkish on the American aide were Vice-President Richard Nixon, who had no political power, and Admiral Radford, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Also quite hawkish was the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was obsessed by the crusade against Communism. More reserved was President Eisenhower who nonetheless gave a press conference in early April where he proclaimed the infamous "domino theory" about the possible spread of Communism from one country to another. "You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly," he said. "So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences." Saturday 3 April 1954 has gone down in American history as "the day we didn't go to war". On that day Dulles met Congressional leaders who were adamant they would not support any military intervention unless Britain was also involved. Eisenhower sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warning of the consequences for the West if Dien Bien Phu fell. It was around this time, at a meeting in Paris, that Dulles supposedly made his astonishing offer to the French of tactical nuclear weapons. In fact, Dulles was never authorised to make such an offer and there is no hard evidence that he did so. It seems possible that in the febrile atmosphere of those days the panic-stricken French may simply have misunderstood him. Or his words may have got lost in translation. "He didn't really offer. He made a suggestion and asked a question. He uttered the two fatal words 'nuclear bomb'," Maurice Schumann, a former foreign minister, said before his death in 1998. "Bidault immediately reacted as if he didn't take this offer seriously." According to Professor Fred Logevall of Cornell University, Dulles "at least talked in very general terms about the possibility, what did the French think about potentially using two or three tactical nuclear weapons against these enemy positions". Bidault declined, he says, "because he knew… that if this killed a lot of Viet Minh troops then it would also basically destroy the garrison itself". In the end, there was no American intervention of any kind, as the British refused to go along with it. When France lost control of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos nearly 60 years ago, hundreds of people who had served the French colonial system - and were at risk of persecution - were rehoused in a disused army camp in south-west France. It was meant to be a temporary home, but some are still there. The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606 disappeared, 4,500 more or less badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000. In this year marked by two other major anniversaries - the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and the 70th anniversary of D-Day - we should not forget this other battle that took place 60 years ago. In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in French Algeria - the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu". This putsch brought back to power Gen de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt. A memorial in Dien Bien Phu commemorates the French soldiers who died there It was also in 1954 that France began working on its own independent nuclear deterrent. For the Vietnamese, however, Dien Bien Phu, was only the first round. The Americans, who had refused to become directly involved in 1954, were gradually sucked into war - the second Vietnam War - during the 1960s. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27243803

Well it provides some good recent photos and an air show at least.

3rd parties would be best putting out FC3 aircraft first and then develop them into hardcore as a later release - would agree with that. FC3 would have been hardcore about 10 years back.- then came A-10A & BMS (with 8 years spent on the FM alone in BMS case). FC 3 probably sits about 75% on the hardcore scale now.

Damn - was shocked the Q-313 stealth jet was not flying this year - maybe next year The traditional military parades at mausoleum of the Late Founder of Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, south of capital Tehran saw the flyover of several warplanes, including the legendary F-14 Tomcat. On Apr. 18 Iran celebrated the National Army Day with a traditional and interesting flypast of most of its active warplanes. Eight formations for an overall 27 aircraft took part in the aerial parade: not really “massive” as some Iranian media wrote, still an interesting opportunity to see the majority of the IRIAF (Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force) fighters and bombers in the air. The flypast featured F-5F Tiger, F-5E Saeqeh, FT-7N, Mirage F.1EQs, F-14A Tomcat, F-4E Phantom, Mig-29UB Fulcrum and Su-24Mk Fencer divided in 8 formations. One of the formation was a mixed flight made of a Mig-29UB, an F-4E, an F-14A, a Mirage F.1BQ-3 and a Su-24Mk. As highlighted by a member of the ACIG.org forum, both Mirage F.1BQ-3s were carrying F-5E/F external fuel tanks thanks to domestically designed and manufactured underwing pylons. Obviously, no sign of the famous F-313 Qaher stealth jet. Along with the fixed wing aircraft, 26 helicopters of their Iranian Army Aviation performed their flypast which included AB-206Bs, AH-1Js, Bell 214As and CH-47Cs. http://theaviationist.com/2014/04/20/iran-stages-massive-aerial-parade-with-f-14-f-4-mig-29-and-several-other-warplanes/

On patrol over eastern Europe and armed to the teeth