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

  1. That's the bathroom on biplanes.
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  2. Good to know, Cliff!
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  3.  @WALTERBROADDUS  Is his opinion, as you said before.
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  4.  @Andrew-13579  I also subscribe to the "wasn't one" answer. In the 50s the USAF had interceptors and fighter bombers but dogfighting was not taken seriously at the time. Vietnam caused a shift in thinking and by the 70s the concept of an air superiority fighter was born, resulting in the F-15, a pure air-to-air platform that can intercept and dogfight equally well, and outperform any Soviet block fighter.
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  5. Kind of like the Grumman Cats, starting with the F4F Wildcat and ending with the F-14 Tomcat, and all the other cats in between: Hellcat, Bearcat, Tigercat, Panther, Cougar, and maybe one or two I've missed. Now Grumman is part of Northrop Grumman and the Navy doesn't buy their airplanes anymore.
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  6.  @CaptainLumpyDog  Pre C-19 all history is lost to the ages.
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  7.  @unclenogbad1509  I'm talking about a particular virus which we are all in the process of forgetting ever existed.
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  8.  @Wannes_  Part of that purchase was foisted upon the USAF by McNamara I was led to understand.
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  9. Such as?
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  10. 14:47 My dad served aboard USS Shangri-La and always talked about the Skyhawks. No way to tell, but possibly he was aboard the ship when this photo was taken.
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  11.  @enkinaser  TLDR toolbag
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  12. Fantastic movie, and very rare to see F-9's and Essex class carriers in a movie together.
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  13. @ Product guaranteed for the life of the customer!
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  14. I love the way these videos end, with silent historical footage of the aircraft in flight, like a distant memory, with no music.
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  15. If true it's a good example of the customer not always knowing, or at least not voicing, exactly what they want. They wanted something that would do everything an F-86 could do, but also be faster and climb better. What they asked for was something that was faster and better-climbing than an F-86, and that's what Kelly Johnson gave them. The F-104 is absolutely fast and powerful; even in 2025 it's totally badass if you want to race instead of fight.
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  16.  @lllordllloyd  "Snitches get stiches." - William Boeing, founder of Boeing
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  17. "Thanks, France." Tell me you're a Brit without saying you're a Brit (or maybe an American) lol.
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  18.  @paulfrantizek102  I like that idea. Not because I know what I'm talking about, but because the A-5 is so beautiful and the world could do with seeing more of them around.
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  19. The Eagle took battle damage without being shot down. It was even returned to service after repairs.
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  20.  @neiloflongbeck5705  If the only jets available are ground attackers which may also have guns and/or Sidewinders, then you send those. USMC Harriers are primarily attack jets but will fly CAP for an amphibious squadron when necessary (the latest AV-8B upgrades do have radar and are capable of carrying the AMRAAM even, though.)
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  21. Great video about an obscure jet that deserves to be remembered.
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  22.  @notapound  For another take, there is a documentary about the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile out there, where they describe a fly-off (or is it a shootout?) between the Sidewinder and the Falcon. The Falcon showed up at the airfield with a crew of technicians and required a lot of prep before flight, whereas the Sidewinder was much easier to handle by ordinance men arming the aircraft. The Sidewinder, of course, also requires a lot less electronic support from the shooting aircraft, doesn't even need a radar, and so it was easier to get accepted by the users. The Falcon later evolved into the AIM-54 Phoenix used on the F-14 Tomcat, and was reportedly very successfully employed by the Iranians against the Iraqi air force in the 1980s. Different tools for different jobs.
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  23. He fired three missiles in quick succession.
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  24.  @sohrabroozbahani4700  Look it up. It was a fighter designed to keep up with the B-70 Valkyrie bomber, at Mach 3 speeds. Never got built, but it was big, in the league of the A-12 and SR-71.
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  25. Split jetpipe became important for another Hawker product, the Harrier.
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  26.  @simong9067  Fair enough. Family resemblance is there, though.
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  27. IIRC the Sparrow was pretty successful in the 1991 Gulf War, having had 20 years of improvements to both the system and training of the maintenance and air crews. That was the last hurrah for the AIM-7.
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  28.  @thelettuceconsumer  I wonder what they'll call it when they hit AIM-9Z and run out letters. The current Hueys and Cobras flown by the Marine Corps are Z models.
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  29. Nobody ever considered a Gulf Coast invasion to be a threat. It was an exercise deigned to test theories and Louisiana just happened to be the area of the US chosen to play the fictional battleground. Nobody in Washington was ever worried about Cuban troops invading. Rather, they were worried about the spread of toxic far-left ideology in the Western Hemisphere, which represented a long-term threat to Western Civilization in general and to the US in particular. The US has always had a vested interest in suppressing malign influences in its hemisphere, a policy going back to the Monroe Administration (look up the Monroe Doctrine). China's current policy towards Central and South America show the foolishness of relaxing the Monroe Doctrine. All of your nonsense about how the US should sit idly by while neighboring nations become hotbeds of socialist dictatorships hostile to Western society can be safely ignored by thinking individuals.
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  30. I am loving this channel more each week. I have long been a fan of 1960s era Cold War fighter jets.
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  31.  @burtbacarach5034  Right, the bombers got faster after they dropped their bombs, but the gunship stayed heavy.
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  32. Check out Bruce Gordon's youtube channel. He is a Vietnam vet who flew the F-102, F-106, and in Vietnam the F-100. He has a more positive opinion of the AIM-4, as long as it is used properly.
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  33. 9:45 Intercepted not by a real fighter, but by a US Navy attack jet. LMAO.
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  34. That's a very Battlestar Galactica way of doing things.
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  35. By the 1920s it almost certainly was, "barrel of oil" as a unit has been in use since oil was first drilled in Pennsylvania in the late 1850s.
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  36. ACME bat suit, guaranteed for the life of the user!
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  37. It looks like a baby V2 with some extra thingies attached to it.
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  38.  @WALTERBROADDUS  Convair is now a legacy Lockheed Martin brand. The Atlas missile/rocket program was started in Convair in the 50s, became part of Lockheed Martin in the 90s, and became part of ULA when that company was created as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing in the 2000s.
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  39. I think it was a solid concept. A sort of gunship with long loiter time that is designed as an anti-airship platform instead of surface attack. I feel like this idea seems to come back every few years in a mutated form. I remember a proposal to arm a 707 variant with tons of missiles as a flying arsenal ship, which would answer calls from data-linked fighters that would do all the radar sensing. The F-15EX is a similar concept, when linked with an F-35. Then there was the idea of using a 747 as a flying aircraft carrier with several fighters aboard. And of course, the 747 laser gunship known as the YAL-1 which carried a giant laser to shoot down ballistic missiles at a distance. The YAL-1 might be the closest modern analog to the Nighthawk.
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  40. I remember clearly Chuck Yeager was employed by Northrop back then to sell the F-20, I think he was even on a magazine cover, or maybe a full page ad. He stated he didn't trust a naturally unstable aircraft that needed a computer fly-by-wire system like the F-16. While I love Maj Gen Yeager and he was certainly old school, that sounds like Northrop sales copy lol.
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  41. Back in the 90s I had the "Fulcrum" expansion pack for the Falcon 3.0 flight sim and I flew the heck out of the MiG-29. I don't know how well the game modeled things but the game's Fulcrum was hella powerful and fun to fly. It also came with a really cool MiG-29 poster which I still have. I always thought the Fulcrum was the best-looking of all the Soviet fighters. The airframe and engine seem to be well-designed, though built with the usual crude Russian quality control. I imagine with a Western avionics suite and HMI it would be a lot scarier.
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  42.  @WALTERBROADDUS  Uh, the uploader calls it a good aircraft in this very video.
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  43.  @WALTERBROADDUS  Yes, but your statement that nobody call it good is incorrect, and that is not an opinion.
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  44.  @WALTERBROADDUS  That's all well and good, but your statement is still wrong.
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  45.  @WALTERBROADDUS  His is an opinion, you made a statement as if it were a fact.
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  46.  @WALTERBROADDUS  Back at ya, cheers.
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  47. Cougars are pretty exciting to me, I think they are gorgeous looking airplanes.
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  48. The Starship tower catch landings remind me of the early 1950s VTOL Ryan X-13 Vertijet, which hung from a crane rig by its nose.
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  49. That photo at 9:46 is awesome. Perfectly captures that moment in history.
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  50. IIRC Blackbirds didn't zoom climb, but after takeoff and tanking they climbed to altitude in a supersonic climb, so they were already well north of Mach 1 before they even got to cruise altitude. As Brian Schul put it, they were faster than a rifle bullet while climbing.
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