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Not A Pound For Air To Ground
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Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Swing Wing Jaguar Was A Better Fighter Than People Think" video.
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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@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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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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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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@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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