Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Not A Pound For Air To Ground" channel.

I remain baffled by the fact that so many early missile-only interceptors carried only 2 missiles. Even if such missiles had been 100% reliable (and 1st-gen AAMs were far from that), it seems like 4 missiles should've been the absolute minimum acceptable load. Especially since the main role of these interceptors was to prevent nuclear-armed bombers from penetrating the homeland.
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Chiba's KJ-2000 maintains the aesthetics of the disc-shaped radome (at a glance it looks like it's an A-50), but its radome is non-rotating and contains three AESA radars, each covering a 120° sector. Russia's A-100 is supposed to replace the A-50 and still has a rotating radome, but with an AESA radar in it. But as with many Russian vehicles, whether it will ever get past the prototype stage is questionable. A grand total of two have been built, one of which didn't actually have the new radar.
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@guaporeturns9472 Because with AESA radars, it's no longer strictly necessary to have a rotating radome to get 360° coverage.
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By all rights the F-14 should've survived at least into the 2010s, if not all the way to the present day. It was murdered by Dick Cheney.
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And then in the 1990s, Grumman as a company was murdered by Dick Cheney, who for some reason had a pathological hatred of them.
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@Matt_The_Hugenot Nonsense. The Super Tomcat 21 program that Cheney cancelled would have completely replaced the avionics and integrated the AMRAAM to replace the Phoenix.
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Given the shortcomings you mentioned about the Il-76 platform, and the fact that the A-50 didn't actually enter service until 1984, I wonder if they would've been better off installing the radar and associated systems on the Il-86 instead.
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They probably figured that the Blackburn Roc is already so slow, that making it even slower wouldn't really matter. (Actually, it might have been beneficial. Perhaps the floatplane Roc would've been slow enough that a Bf 109 would stall out when trying to match its speed.)
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@MM22966 He's asking if a pilot who crashes 5 times can be counted as an ace for the enemy.
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@Steven-k8t There would've been some delay, but they might have gotten a better outcome. As for the A-100, we'll see how long it takes for Russia to get that past the prototype stage. A lot of their projects are stuck in development hell right now.
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I had no idea that the original planned armament was 4x 30mm ADEN. That would've made so much more sense than 8x .50 cal. What doesn't make any sense is that when they decided the ADEN wasn't going to be ready soon enough, they didn't just go with an armament of 4x 20mm Hispano Mk.V like on the Gloster Meteor. Since that was already a proven weapon and already in use by Canada on the RCAF's Sea Fury fighters. This is also the first I'd heard of T-160 20mm cannons being tested on the Canuck.
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The F-5 really should've been given wider use in Vietnam. The use that it got (at least in American hands) was in the ground attack role and only by a single squadron, and this was done purely to boost export sales of the F-5 by making it combat-proven. The fact that it would've been able to out-dogfight the MiG-21 was never accounted for, because the USAF at the time simply didn't want a lightweight fighter.
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@mikepette4422 That's because SEPECAT was a joint venture of BAC and Breguet for the sole purpose of making the Jaguar. Which worked out well until Dassault bought out Breguet. Dassault as a company has always despised any designs that they didn't develop themselves, even if they own those designs.
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They didn't have computer simulations back then. They expected the control surfaces to actually work. I'd like to know what the roll rate was after they stuck a Cougar tail on it.
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And the previous "black mark" in his career having been that he reported the truth that the Air Force needed a dedicated close air support jet, and that simply using exist fighters for the role wasn't good enough.
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Yeah, that seems like a crazy idea.
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The F-14 should have still been going strong just like the F-15 is. But Dick Cheney had a bizarre pathological hatred of Grumman and cancelled the "Super Tomcat" program (what would've been the F-14E).
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Essentially, the reason the Falcon wasn't just replaced by the Sidewinder in the Air Force is that the F-102 and F-106 physically couldn't use the Sidewinder. Their internal bays physically couldn't fit a Sidewinder, since it's longer than the Falcon.
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@JTA1961 Just like Westinghouse's jet engines.
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The XFV-12 was another case of the Navy opting for exotic technology that turned out to not work. If it had instead been the Convair Model 200 that was funded for a prototype to be built, well there would've still been issues (auxiliary lift jets are inherently inefficient since they're dead weight during horizontal flight), at least the Convair 200 would've been able to take off since it relied on conventional, already-proven VTOL principles. And who knows, maybe they would've been able to develop it into a system like the F-35B uses now, where the lift fan is part of the main engine rather than being separate auxiliary jets. P&W started work on that system in 1986, which would've been just a few years after the Convair 200 would've entered service had it been chosen instead of the Rockwell design.
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Which is basically an A-50 except with AESA radar.
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The exact same blunder that's been made for the whole course of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The US and NATO have engaged in constant hand-wringing about offending Russia, instead of just giving Ukraine all the help they need at the very start.
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Given that one of North Vietnam's go-to fighters was the MiG-17, it seems odd that the Avon Sabres were kept on the periphery of the war instead of being sent MiG-hunting.
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@madkoala2130 Yes, Grumman got bought by Northrop. And the F/A-XX program is ongoing. Northrop Grumman seems like they're probably the leading contender. Because no way can Boeing handle both that program and the F-47. Giving Boeing the F-47 was basically a bailout, to make sure that the US wouldn't be down to just two companies capable of building fighter aircraft.
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