Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "Dark Skies" channel.

  1.  @kschleic9053  The other way around. People involved in the OA-X program knew this would be a criticism raised against turboprops, so at Green Flag exercises the OA-X aircraft were pitted against Marines with Stingers. Allegedly, they couldn't get a lock. It makes sense. The turbine that powers the prop takes out so much heat from the exhaust, and prop wash itself mixes the exhaust with incoming air. And it is known that after the initial Stinger kills on Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan they responded by changing tactics but also installing diverter plates in the exhaust to help mask the heat signature. Meanwhile their jets were forced to fly higher. Soldiers on the ground jokingly started calling them "cosmonauts" for refusing to fly inside Stinger range.
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  2. The USAF brought back the Bronco to provide support for SOCOM for a year, but retired it again due to the cost of maintaining ageing aircraft.
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  3.  @oc3694  "Insurgents don't use helicopters and shit" - Yeah, but you do realize that many times the boots on the ground were essentially stuck waiting for helicopters to deal with the insurgents, right?
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  4.  @DefinitelyNotEmma  There's often unofficial names. The Thunderbolt II is the Warthog. The Super Hornet is the Rhino. The Strike Eagle is the Mudhen.
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  5. I had to look it up, when he was born it belonged to the Russian Empire. So he was Russian-American rather than Ukranian-American.
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  6.  @Markle2k  but the F-8 was the last "intended" to use the gun as the primary armament, those fighters you mentioned use missiles as the primary weapon and the gun as a backup. So it is indeed called "the last gunfighter" in aviation circles.
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  7.  @richardpatton2502  "Pilots love the A-10" - Show me a pilot who doesn't love his machine. "Soldiers love the A-10" - Emotional attachment should not be a priority. "Generals and politicians absolutely hate it with a passion and yet...it keeps coming back" - Because the programs to replace it were killed. "I think the only problem with the A-10 is that it doesn’t make enough money for the powers that be." - It made 5 billion with the Boeing wings contract. Keeping old airframes flying is deceptively pricey. "There’s no true replacement for it" - Already been replaced for the most part. 11% of CAS missions since 2014. The rest are performed by Strike Eagles, Hornets, F-16s, B-1s, etc.
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  8.  @bigblue6917  "The problem with reliance on stealth is that once they find a way to defeat it, and they will, the aircraft such as the F-35 is vulnerable." - If stealth is defeated, any non-stealth aircraft is too dangerous to fly and will be immediately grounded.
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  9.  Adam Lannerd  "I don't see how anyone could dislike the A-10" - It was outdated nearly 30 years ago when the Iraqis shot 7 down and damaged 13 to be written off, forcing the USAF to call for the grounding of the A-10. It was developed because of politics, because even though the A-7 was one of the best CAS aircraft in Vietnam the Army's fetish for getting men killed in helicopters pressured the USAF to take in a slower, less capable aircraft so that it could escort helicopters. Plus the A-7 was sort of the Navy's baby.
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  10. Except that most aircraft now are multiroles.
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  11.  @gregpeabody8536  No, there's a loud minority of contrarians that think the YF-23 should have won.
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  12.  @donaldsalkovick396  moving canards are a thing, yes.
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  13.  @ilikeskies  George Washington's place of birth was British America.
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  14.  @gregpeabody8536  Funny, it's easy to find the mentally ill. They always think they're being stalked by trolls whenever they see a dissenting opinion. I don't use my real name online because you don't need to know it. I don't need to know your name, Greg. In fact, maybe your name is John. And you're hiding behind fake screen names. Who cares? Stop being paranoid.
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  15. Considering that the Brazilians are paying 150 million per Gripen I don't see the "cost effective" part.
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  16.  @martkbanjoboy8853  most people focus on air to air, and most American losses came from AAA and SAMs.
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  17.  @atomicskull6405  the USAF did not cancel it. Lyndon Johnson having ties to Bell probably did a lot more to get it canceled than the USAF, which had already agreed to not influence rotary wing purchases. Plus the courts determined that there was no overlap of capabilities between the A-10 and the Cheyenne.
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  18.  @WillCarter1976  I don't know how to even start. Literally everything you said is incorrect. Strategic bombing has given way to precision strikes. Air power is absolute murder on the modern field. What about that engagement a couple years ago in which like 30-40 special operations in Syria killed 80 Russian mercenaries and 200 Syrian fighters or whatever without suffering a single fatality simply because they had air support? This was also seen in the last century, for example the Rhodesians with very few people killed 2000 insurgents simply because they had a bird in the air dishing it out. In 1991 Desert Storm was decided by air power. The Navy's power projection comes from the aircraft carrier. How is the air force fighting irrelevance when the main fighting power of the Navy is aircraft? Cruise missiles alone can't do the job.
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  19. It's not really secret, NATO inherited many MiGs and Sukhois when former Warsaw Pact nations joined.
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  20.  @johngalt2506  He confused him for his son Trudeau, Canada's PM.
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  21.  @ilikeskies  For example John McCain was born in what today is Panama but because the military base was US territory he was born in America. This isn't complicated. At the time Sikorsky was born in Russian territory, making his birthplace Russia. Cities have changed hands through history. If you're talking about a historical figure you don't say he was born in Istanbul, Turkey, you say he was born in Constantinople.
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  22.  @richardpatton2502  "Do you believe CAS will be ultimately left to other platforms?" - Already has been, for the most part. "Should a dedicated replacement to the a-10 be built?" - At this point, why? The only thing unique about the A-10 is the smaller danger close radius of the gun versus bombs/missiles.
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  23.  @andrewtaylor940  "heavy ammo and payload at low altitude" - There's zero advantage to that. "low attack speed" - Which is a negative. "stay above them a long time concentrating support fire" - the loiter time is a big plus but the A-10s niche is uncontested air space. Which means that tankers could make up for the inferior loiter time of faster jets. "Its judt it fills a specific niche that has not been duplicated. " - But could have, and the projects were canceled.
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  24.  @richardpatton2502  "But on your latest explanation on the software and reverse engineering. How confident are you that perceived enemies like Russia do not possess that info already?" - One one assume that as soon as enemy contacts started reacting to radars being turned on, they'd simply change the algorithms so that the frequency hopping becomes unpredictable again. Besides, if you were so assume that Russia broke American crypto there's a whole lot of more pressing issues that have to be addressed before stealth. "The Skyraider was supposed to be obsolete in Korea but when Vietnam came around there they were, down on the dirt." - You look at footage of cops flying the relatively "low and slow" helicopters and what do you see? FLIR. The mechanical eye sees more than you can with the human one. If you're gonna fly a modern turboprop like the A-19 Super Tucano like you'd fly a Skyraider, you're doing something wrong. For example the A-7 was a formidable bombing platform. But if you look at video from the time (this is a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8lVoK_APac) you can see it's not all sunshine and rainbows. You will either have to be queued about target information or you have to acquire it visually. The latter is much harder when you have to observe a pitched battle and mark your own targets. From my limited research the A-7 only got FLIR in 1978 and that was in the Navy, with the ANG A-7s only getting it in 1988. So, in the end there's nothing wrong with the machine, it's the human inside that limits the capabilities. You give the human machine eyes to see the target without requiring low and slow passes, and you solve the problem. "Also, this kind of air support is very good for morale on the ground, which importance is frequently and systematically ignored..." - If the morale gains come from using an inferior platform then we have to question if morale is even a reasonable goal. Are troops meant to see an air show or effects on target?
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  25. ​ @WillCarter1976 "Why wait till an enemy strike gets near coastline when a carrier launched sortie can intercept" - This is beyond nonsensical. That's like keeping your entire team on the opponent's side of the field assuming nothing gets through. Not to mention that it would essentially open up an avenue through the arctic. The Navy can handle national defense, as long as the Canadian Air Force defends the northern border. "The fact the the Air Force is the most over-educated and underutilized" - Underutilized, despite of the fact that air power has been critical in the GWOT.
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  26. @Cloud Burst 117 17 to 1 at Red Flag.
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  27.  @peterterpstra4038  the USSR didn't exist then
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  28. The US sent F-22s to Syria.
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  29. The "brains" made a "stealth" aircraft with exposed fan blades, rivets/screws, huge panel gaps and round engine covers.
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  30.  @msnpassjan2004  the government accountability office slammed the USAF for buying too many A-10s. Please stop listening to the people who told you that because they are/were liars who wanted to sell books.
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  31.  @NOLAgenX  "actually you are wrong about politicians hating the A-10. It’s the one smart thing that politicians have done in the last 50 years." - Ironic. The A-10 should have been retired after 1991. Politicians fawning over an aircraft that was outdated by the 1980s is exactly the type of stupid crap they do, but because of the memetic potential of the A-10 people people actually think it's smart.
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  32.  @NOLAgenX  "no other plane can loiter around the battlefield in a COIN type CAS role" - in a COIN environment you have tankers which are not in danger of easily getting brought down. Either way, turboprops like the Super Tucano seem to have good enough combat endurance. "it has proven itself to take way more damage and abuse and still return the pilot home than many of our faster jets can" - Both the F-15 and F-16 are on record as being able to return home with half a wing gone. One F-15 made it home with a wing ripped at the root. Meanwhile in 1991 the USAF had to pull the A-10 away from the Iraqi Republican Guard after 7 shot down and 13 written off due to battle damage. The aircraft was outdated by the 1980s. The bloody nose it suffered in 1991 should have been the wake up call.
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  33.  @rtrThanos  "RCS doesn’t matter once your radar is turned on to search and track targets" - modern stealth aircraft are able to turn their radar on by masking their emissions as background radiation. Basically only the emitting aircraft knows the specific frequency hopping so unless you somehow capture enough shot down aircraft to reverse engineer the software you won't be able to decrypt the hopping sequence. Passive radar/RWR will not understand it's being "painted".
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  34.  @mattbite  so a person makes a video about ONE airplane and now he's too nationalistic? Shouldn't the people demanding other unrelated nations to be mentioned be the nationalists?
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  35. In the movie one of the SAMs crashes into the party HQ and detonates. The CO later chastises Dafoe because a children's hospital was hit by collateral damage. Dafoe defends himself by saying it was the party HQ. The CO says he knows it was, but the media are reporting it was a hospital.
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  36. They are durable when you have a thousand planes to pull parts from. Individual aircraft themselves are finicky. I think MiG-29 engines have half the hours of a Western fighter jet engine. So a MiG will need twice the engine replacements in its service life. If you can't get new engines, they're difficult to maintain.
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  37. No need to be salty, Russia had every chance to get the Su 57 right and what did they do? Allowed it to remain vaporware.
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  38.  @johnteeling4679  That's not necessarily true. The VariViggen and VariEZE designed by Burt Rutan are canard controlled aircraft made to be homebuilt and use mechanical linkages for the controls, not a fly by wire computer. What happens is that on modern fighters the canards are not placed to prioritize maximum stability but to allow quick departures from stable flight. So the canards are controlled by flight computer and move on their own. On the Rutan designs the canards are placed for stability.
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  39.  @ratherbefishing4225  Early jets using canards had stability problems, but these were solved with the close-coupled canard design. So it's not as simple as saying "canard jets are unstable" because it all depends on the design and intent. Rutan designed a propeller canard aircraft for stability and it was successfully flown with a jet engine until the unfortunate crash caused by build defects. Adding a jet engine does not suddenly make canards inherently unstable, but early jets with canards had design issues that could only be dealt with by changing the design or computerized flight control.
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  40. @J the morale argument is absolute hogwash because weapons that target morale just send insurgents running to their dirt bikes and go back to their normal lifes until they decide to attack next week. You target their morale, they come back. Target their bodies, and they'll be a red smear on the ground. Forget morale.
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  41. Hello Glavset, still haven't got your morguilization papers?
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  42.  @ProjectFlashlight612  but the nickname "the last gunfighter" is still valid because it was the last designed to use the guns as the primary weapon. The narrator simply forgot to add that "primarily". It's extremely common, it's almost a game to find the mistakes in these videos.
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  43. There's a cover on the seeker head, it doesn't look like that while in operation.
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  44. There's around 170 F-22s in flying condition and we already have a replacement lined up. Stop coping.
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  45.  @Nightdiver20  the issue is that stopping communism by propping up an unpopular puppet head of state didn't work, and the destruction caused by the war turned many people against foreign occupation.
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  46. F/A-XX babeeeey!
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  47. It was occupied by Russian troops during the Tsardom, thus making it part of the Russian empire. It was made the capital of the Ukranian Republic after 1917.
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  48.  @VangelisKontogeorgakos  You're too focused on binary concepts. Air to air isn't just dogfights. A MiG-25 that fired a R-40 shot down and killed a Navy pilot in 1991. He was flying a F/A-18. The claim that X aircraft cannot shoot down Y aircraft because Z reason is simply not a good argument. It's not just about the tools, it's about the situation and skill. Sure, a F-15 can evade a missile. Is the pilot aware a missile has been fired? Many shootdowns occur because the pilot is not aware there's an enemy in the area, not as a result of a 1vs1 fight.
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  49.  @acidbot666  It works doesn't mean it works well. Combat in Syria? Doing what? Sight seeing? In Ukraine? What munitions did it use?
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  50.  @demomanchaos  Does the F-15 do Mach 2.4 with external tanks and weapons? "The electronics package on the F-35 are good, but it isn't going to be winning many turning fights" - If you have the situational awareness you don't get into turning fights in the first place. Even the Red Baron knew to always come from behind/blind spots and preferably with the sun on your back so that the glare would make it impossible to see the dot in the air getting closer. "It can't match the F-22 in air supremacy" - Because it's not meant to. "it doesn't even belong in the same paragraph as the A-10 in terms of ground attack capabilities" - The A-10 already had its job taken over by F-16s, Strike Eagles, B-1Bs, even B-52s. Stepping outside the realm of manned USAF aircraft you also have drones, the F/A-18, the Harrier, Apaches, etc doing CAS. Almost every aircraft does CAS now. Other countries use F-16s, Dassault Rafales, etc for CAS. The A-10 is not unique or special.
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