Posted on 08/23/2018 7:24:05 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
During both SALT I and SALT II negotiations the one airplane the Soviets feared most was the FB-111.
It was a superb penetration platform that could sneak in anywhere anytime and boom you before you knew it was there. The fliers loved it because of the relatively comfortable cockpit but they feared it because it could kill you if you gave it a chance. It was not overpowered by any stretch and if you got inverted with the wings swept your next of kin were notified later in the day.
If the terrain following radar (TFR) hiccupped, same deal. The next of kin wouldn’t even get your dogtags.
One F-111 that crashed was brought back in the back of a small pickup truck.
We had F-111As and Spark Varks at Mt Home AFB when I first got there. At that point the F-111As had rather severe flight profile limitations on them because of the age of the airframes. The EFs deployed to Desert Storm. FB-111s used to sit cocked on nuclear alert at Pease and Plattsburgh when I was stationed in Griffiss.
What I read is that General Dynamics blackmailed Kennedy into using them for both services
Their spooks spied on his affairs
I remember from my time as a middie on the Eisenhower; I was surprised to learn the F-14 had the highest trap weight of all the aircraft onboard, including the attack planes (A-6 and A-7), S-3 Viking, and Tracker. I think it even exceeded the lone EA-3B Skywarrior that landed during my month there.
My guess is that if you have a plane which carries a great load and has great performance and also meets the structural and performance requirements needed for cat shots and trap landings, then it's bound to carry even more and fly even better in a ground-based version where you can take out some of that added weight.
Planes that are designed from the outset to be both land and carrier based (or worse,designed for runways and then adapted to carriers) don't seem to turn out nearly as well.
Since the plan was to be operating at Mach+, ejection by traditional methods didn't give the crew much of a chance to survive.
There's a story of one pod landing, well, hitting, at over 30G's. Both crewmen survive with maybe some broken bones, including a vertebrae or two, but were able to walk out of the hospital.
All of which goes to show that Navy and AF fighter/bomber pilots are a special breed.
the Raven accompanied them for EW, plus they had the best FLIR targeting pod at the time, IIRC. Navy couldn’t execute the mission given the threats.
That’s basically what another FReeper said.
It was a 1950s USN strategic bomber that devolved into recon, EA, fueling, etc, becoming the heaviest aircraft routinely deployed on carriers, weighing in @ 68k.
Looking it up, to save weight, it had no ejection seats, being expected to do its intended combat thing at high altitude.
So, the A3D was referred to as "All 3 Dead".
Navy A6, A7 & F/A18s were involved.
Nope, but they do have a long coastline, and they liked having a twin engine fighter/bomber aircraft that had the range and durability to patrol that long coastline. They operated the F111 long after the USAF had sent theirs to the boneyard and chopped them up.
Funny thing, a buddy of mine in a former workplace was the last employee on the F111 program. His job was to go through storage, sort through all the stuff, and send anything useful to the Aussies. While he was going through the stuff, he found some boxes of swag, which is how I now have a F111 25th Anniversary RAAF mug sitting on my desk (with a half load of coffee).
(Not to mention some nice desktop models back at the house)
concur.
Yet the debate continues, as heated now as it was decades ago when the Pentagon introduced the then-novel concept of an “affordable” joint-use warplane.
. . . but note, Dear Reader, that the F-4 Phantom was a Navy plane before it was forced down the Air Force’s throat. It was not a joint development at all, and does not constitute a rationale for such.The F-16 and F-17 were designed to be “joint” but with the Air Force as lead. The AF selected the single-engine F-16 - and the Navy balked because it absolutely insisted on two engines. It not only rejected the F-16, it insisted on upgrades (read, weight increases) that turned the F-17 into the F-18. Not only that, it insisted on further increases in size which resulted in the "F-18E” which is basically an F-18 canopy with a different, significantly bigger aircraft under it (but with one design criterion being that it had to look like an F-18 so it could keep the same "F-18" moniker).
And even at that, the “legs” of an F-18E do not bear any comparison at all to those of the F14 (neither, FTM, would you expect an F-15 to have a comparable range to that of an F-14, since it has only about 2/3 the internal fuel capacity the F-14 had).
In the age of drones, it is possible to question how long air-air combat between manned fighter aircraft will be a thing. But while naval aircraft carriers remain used and useful, I would expect the Navy to incline toward more expensive aircraft than the Air Force does - for the simple reason that the more you pay for the spear, the less it pays to scrimp on the effectiveness of the tip of the spear. And a fully equipped and staffed aircraft carrier, along with its necessary defensive escort vessels, is one expensive spear.
During their first combat deployment in Thailand 1968 three 111's were "mysteriously lost". This was before my time but my contacts in the pilot community were very suspicious that it was TFR related.
Later investigation indicated that the leading suspect was malfunctioning horizontal stab actuators. Bad to have one stick in kharst country.
It's performance after correcting that was stellar.
Asked about the F-111, Grumman test pilot Don Evans replied, “It's a fine aircraft - as long as you don’t get in it thinking it’s a fighter."
Yeah like getting 50,000 of us killed.
Not only TFR, but advanced onboard digital computers to track multiple enemy threats and determine which was the worst threat. Like onboard digital computers powered by super secret integrated circuit technology.
An advanced environmental system for the pilots who were comfortably seated side-by-side in an ejectable pod. There were no ejection seats. Everyone went or nobody went until the ejection system was fired. The pod had a large drone chute to bring it and its occupants safely down to earth. Of course if you were outside the envelope, no ejection was possible and survivability was limited.
New swept wing technology for in-flight reconfiguration which enabled loitering at low altitudes and speeds and then accelerating to Mach 2+. at higher altitudes to escape.
The TFR (Terrain Following Radar) system enabled the aircraft to fly under automated control at high speeds following the contour of the terrain to escape detection by enemy radar. Pilots used to flying by stick puckered while TFR was engaged but it worked.
So many subsystems were onboard for testing during development there was barely enough room to house them. This was a new generation aircraft and everybody wanted this and that to be developed and added.
Some did not work and this lead to the belief that the aircraft was or was going to be an Edsel. Somebody came up with an idea to use an Apollo chute to recover from an stall/spin. It was a good idea on paper but it didn’t work. Scared the $hit out of the test pilots and was dumped before testing could be completed.
I could go on but the operational F-111 was a great engineered and well tested plane. Later the FB-111 was really a good plane. Either could carry a large amount of weaponry for it’s day.
Probably a range or ordnance issue. The F-111 has long legs and could reach targets that Navy jets couldn’t get to without tanker support. Also, there may have been a guided bomb available to the F-111 that A-6E’s didn’t carry.
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