Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The backbone of the RAF for nearly 40 years | Panavia Tornado" video.

@Jon-es-i6o The problem with all the fighters is they were all brute force devices, while Concorde was designed for 1 task. Concordes ceiling was 60,000ft while the Tomcat was 53,000ft which is still damn high. Best story I ever heard on the Concorde was back in 1987. One of the Concorde pilots became the first ever pilot to log 10,000hrs at supersonic speed. I heard it from a tug pilot at our glider club who was also a commercial pilot with friends in the USAF. When I queried that there must have been others he threw it back at me that I was studying aerospace and should know how hard it is to fly that fast. Among his USAF friends they knew of no pilot with more than minutes outside of a couple of programs (SR-71, X-planes, B58, etc...) At that time that 1 Concorde pilot had more time at supersonic than the combined total of all USAF pilots excluding the SR71 pilots, because nobody had any idea how much they did. Its one of those things that still blows my mind is how little time fighter pilots have above Mach 1. Its mainly because it serves little purpose other than to escape. Plus it thermally stresses the airframe so it adds to maintenance costs. Go look up how much the Concorde and SR-71 used to stretch at those speeds.
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@Wallace Carney I here that answer very loud and very clear. When I first graduated and landed back in Australia with my fancy degree from a top shelf American college I was greeted with the news the RAAF were not going to build its new basic trainer in Australia from an Australian design and instead were buying Swiss Pilatus PC-9s that didn't meet ANY requirement listed in the RFP. It became Australian official policy and doctrine to get everything made somewhere else. The truly stupid thing is as a nation you lose that skill set and getting industrial skill sets back is damn hard.
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I'm Australian and the RAAF has purchased the EA-18G Growlers which are the Electronic Warfare variant of the F-18F Super Hornet. Why didn't the RAF redevelop the Tornado into something similar? I have a degree in aerospace and I know wings and the life of wings tends to define aircraft life times more than anything. Why couldn't they drop the swing wing for a fixed wing (saving weight) and load the plane up with electronics as needed. One of the biggest issues with any new plane these days is just getting the airframe & wing designed and then making it just fly as needed. The whole start from scratch thing is just so damn expensive. You could simply tweak what needs tweaking and re-task the airframe, which is basically what they did with the EA-18 Growler? I just curious on your thoughts?
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@Jon-es-i6o I'm well aware if the speeds they could do and well aware of why that became less of an issue with the generation of jets that followed. As part of a high school careers thing I interviewed an aeronautical engineer who worked on F111s. It was circa 1981/82 and I asked why there weren't any 3 engine fighters a 'la the Battlestar Galactica viper? His answer was they would be worthless because they couldn't carry enough fuel. Going supersonic in almost anything except a couple of planes is so fuel consuming that the plane is a glider in minutes. He told me the F111 on full afterburn drains its tanks in around 4.1/2 minutes. Its one of the things that made Concorde so extraordinary. It wasn't that it could go Mach 2 it was that it could do it for a couple of hours. It was why supersonic air travel died - the fuel cost is so high. Drag like lift is a squared law. Double the speed means 4x the drag. Its why commercial planes fly at 35,000ft the air is so thin the drag drops back down.
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@Jon-es-i6o Actually I heard they called it the 3 second plane because they have about 3 seconds to correct anything or the aerodynamic forces can turn it into confetti. I did aerospace so I understand how those inlet nozzles work. In basic terms they move back & forward so that the shock wave just touches the lip of the nacelle. If the shock doesn't intersect either inside or outside there's significant loss of power. Its a bit like a 2 stroke engine in having a narrow power band and its what makes supersonic flight so tricky. I heard a pilot once describe what he called "losing the shock" as in the shock detaches from the nacelle lip. Because the engines are out in the wings it puts a huge yaw on the plane and they have only seconds to correct it or its confetti time. The more I find out the more and more I am impressed by Kelly Johnson and his skunk works team. Back in 86 when the whole do we or don't we replace Challenger debate raged on. Kelly Johnson said "NO, lets spend the money and do something better." He was ignored and these days I really wonder "What if the decision makers had listened to him."
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@Jon-es-i6o That's sad but not unexpected. I guess the question should have included doing similar to the GA-18. They are new airframes based on an old but updated design. What of they built new airframes (with some updates) to do other roles? The airframe is sound the aerodynamics are sound the behaviour of the plane is sound - take advantage of that. Its a similar argument to the current options of the American F15. Its a sound plane that works and can be adapted for other roles, which they are pursuing. Why not do the same with the Tornado?
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@Jon-es-i6o Yeah on KJ. It still grates me to this day that he was ignored after Challenger. Where might we have been now?????? On being able to touch an actual SR71 I don't know whether to applaud or hate. I feel like that guy in Life of Brian chained to the wall calling Brian a "Lucky Bastard"
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