Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Not A Pound For Air To Ground"
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@Austin-cn8vh I think they reached that conclusion already in the early 1980s when F-16As were winning all the bombing competitions like Gun Smoke. The Fire Control Computer’s ability to precisely-compute impacts for the Mk.82, Mk.83, and Mk.84 made the F-16A Block 1, 5, and 10 into an unbelievably-accurate strike aircraft that didn’t need a Bombardier Navigator. USAF force structure and air planning left the high altitude bands to the F-15C and turned F-16s into little bomb trucks that could penetrate, strike, RTB, re-arm/re-fuel, and do it again with really high turnaround rates.
Once we did Block 40 Night-Capable strike integration, it turned the F-16C into a night-striker. Block 30 SEAD acted as shooters for F-4Gs, then Block 50 acted as sniffer/shooters to replace the F-4G, though they never matched the 43 RF sensor count the F-4G had, hence the Mild Weasel.
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@Whiskey11Gaming I wasn’t referring to the wind sweep mechanism, which was not very problematic as you said (though it still required a lot of inspections). I was referring to:
1. Slats
2. Spoilers
(multiple actuators, doors, hinges, arms, servo cylinders, hydraulic lines, splines, cogs, etc.)
3. Flaps (multiple servo cylinders, lines)
4. Rudders
5. Stabilators
6. Speed brakes
7. Variable intake ramps and doors for boundary layer management
There is a lot of hydraulic line architecture woven throughout that airframe to pressurize all of those actuators for those surfaces. Notice that I left out the deactivated glove vanes.
If you look at the fleet MMH/FH stats from 1972-2006, there was no difference in the 40-60hrs required when looking across F-14A, F-14A+/B, and F-14D. A lot of that was bathtub graph with the D model, but it never saw low hours even after they got the crews trained and equipped to maintain it.
F-15 doesn’t have any of those additional control surfaces and actuators, since there are no slats, spoilers, or wing sweep mech. The one thing the F-15 does have that’s different is the variable inlet cowl, along with the internal ramps and doors for boundary layer management. Grey Eagle mx hrs are typically in the 18-30hr range, so about half of what it took to wrench the F-14.
None of the F-14D improvements seemed to manifest in lower hours in the fleet, and the proposed ST-21 didn’t enjoy the benefits of EHAs, so I think it’s very reasonable to suspect it would have had similar mx hours as the legacy. Fiber Optic DFLCS could have helped with that, but the control surfaces required to get the landing speed down behind the boat are what they are on a 40,000lb empty weight bird.
Capability would have been awesome, though sortie gen rates would not have been what the Super Bug has I think. Also the 2-man crew requires pipelines for both, and it’s hard to keep seats manned as it is with single seaters.
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@KlipsenTube YF-16 had a gun ranging radar like that of the F-86, not a fire control Radar like in a modern fighter. It’s one of the main things the USAF corrected when we went to the FSD birds in the late 1970s. The FSD birds had black radomes for the APG-66. That basically became the baseline for Block 1 F-16A/B in 1977-1978. USAF had zero interest in a daytime dogfighter, and wanted a nice multirole lightweight fighter with single engine that could self-escort and hit ground targets between the FLOT and the MEZ, with quick turnaround times when re-arming and refueling. Not like F-4s, F-105s, and A-7s with their maintenance issues. A-7D was great since it had the best single engine combat radius record for decades and excellent bombing computer, Navigation, and HUD.
We quickly divested the force of F-4Es, F-4Ds, and A-7Ds as F-16s came off the line, and kept the F-4G as our Wild Weasel until it could be superseded by the F-16CJ/CG Block 50s.
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@BaconGold790 I spent my formative years at the USAF Flight Test Center in the 1970s-early 1990s, watching the YF-15A, YA-10A, YF-16, & YF-17 go from embryonic stages to advanced systems development, especially F-15C/D/E and F-16C/D Block 30/40.
I had access to things most will never know about the F-15, F-16, and A-10, and I never heard of or read anything about Pierre Sprey that I can recall.
These types of programs have huge teams of people in different sectors of design, development, project management, systems test, weapons carriage/separation/guidance, propulsion, sensors, avionics, Navigation, FLCS, E&E, structures, flight dynamics, maintenance, chase aircraft, instrumentation, Man Machine Interface, etc.
For any one person to come out and lay claims to anything just doesn't resonate well at all with me.
Big name test pilots are always first to mention the teams of people supporting the project, never taking credit for anything but the mistakes they made, or the opportunity to be in the seat for a milestone the team had worked hard to make a reality.
People with Sprey's attitude and persona would not fit in that environment. His comments on these programs are bizarro world compared to what we actually were doing.
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@BaconGold790 The teams I saw on the various Combined Test Forces consisted of:
Program managers with decades of experience in aerospace technical fields. A lot of these are military veterans from previous wars and conflicts who never mention their service.
Engineers who were very quiet mega-geeks, namely mathematicians, structural, electrical, mechanical, chemical, and computer science engineers.
Technicians who operate and monitor equipment, ground and airborne work stations, instrumentation, data entry systems, life-support systems, and other hands-on technical task sets.
Mechanics and maintenance personnel consisting of active duty, DoD civilians, and contractors from the companies.
Test pilots consisting of active duty senior Air Force and Navy pilots, as well as retired military pilots working for the contractors.
Administrative personnel. I’m sure there are a bunch more I’m not recollecting right now.
I can’t think of where a guy like Pierre Sprey or even Boyd would fit in there. You don’t want really cocky guys as test pilots. Test pilots are some of the most humble because they have thousands of hours already, and learn to fly about 20+ different airframe types in TPS. We had the USAF TPS right there at Edwards AFB.
Everybody works together to meet program milestones for the defense of the Nation, not promote themselves. It’s a large team of teams.
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@Whiskey11Gaming I got the MMH/FH from month-by-month stats from 1973-forward. That data was available. I’ve tracked MMH/FH, CPFH, MTBF of various systems, and related topics since about 1984. I was on the Air Force side initially, but we worked on some systems common with the Navy, namely AIM-120 and a certain advanced self-protection suite. On the F-15 CTF, we worked on APG-70 capes expansion, which cross-pollinated to APG-71.
Regardless of F-14 model, they were 40-60hrs during its service life. On a recent podcast, the pilots and maintainers said 50hrs was the magic number they were always trying to stay under, so it took a lot of people as you can imagine to generate sorties.
Yes on F401-PW-400. I’ve seen figures in then-year dollars that indicated they spent at least $360 million on it for the panned B model, without ever adopting it. It was suffering the same problems as the TF30, namely compressor stalls and blades letting go, AB unstarts, etc. If you had one stall behind the boat, asymmetric thrust and adverse yaw would be worse than the TF30. It would have been great for the other 99.99% of the flying time due to raw performance (28,000lb in AB x 2), but that one critical stage of flight in the pattern could have resulted in more airframe losses. This is my best guess as to why it wasn’t adopted.
That burned up a ton of the budget for the F-14, so it got stuck with the TF30-P-412A for a while. There were only supposed to be 13-17 F-14As built.
Navy was dead-set on the A-12 replacing the A-6E, which would have made a very capable Carrier Strike Group, but that was a boondoggle due to immature composites production capability. Airframes would have ended up with varying internal cavity volume, which would have been a nightmare for assembly and mx.
ST-21 would have been an amazing multirole in capability, but I haven’t seen much that would have reduced the mx burden. The EHAs used in the F-35 control system could have solved a lot of the hydraulic issues, but didn’t exist at the time. RCS reduction was something the services had committed to back in the 1980s for all new designs, and ST-21 had a huge RCS like the F-14. Cavity resonance in the intakes is no bueno, hence the NATF plans.
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@VectorGhost YF-23 & the proposed F-23A were very long aircraft, YF-23 at 67ft 5" and the F-23A would have been 70ft 5". That was to increase the fineness ratio for supercruise and accommodate an additional forward weapons bay.
F-14 was 62ft 9" long for reference.
To navalize the YF-23, you would also need folding wings, increased bulkhead dimensions, a tailhook, enlarged landing gear, all of which adds significant weight.
You would then need to spiral back into the design to create enough lift for that, and low speed handling behind the boat, meaning wing and lifting area re-design.
Looking back at Naval fighter and attack aircraft contractors, Northrop had no experience in that space, so there would have been a learning curve.
Short story is that the YF-23 was a land-based design that already had a lot of program risk just for the Air Force.
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@ One of the biggest mistakes amateurs and enthusiasts like Sprey made was assuming that BVR missiles are employed with the expectation of 100% pK. Especially back then, the AIM-7 in a fighter flight vs fighter flight, BVR missile shots are initially posturing shots to establish who is offensive. This was a missile designed to shoot-down non-maneuvering bombers, adapted to shoot down fighters in a very widening employment envelope.
That became more true when we shifted from SARH to data-linked active seeker BVRAAMs like AIM-120. The hardest fighter to intercept with AIM-7Ms in ODS was the MiG-25PD, since it could just accelerate away from the fight much of the time. It’s very hard to pull an interceptor like that into NEZ parameters, and the Iraqi MiG-25PD pilots were probably the best in the world, had excellent counter-APG-63/AIM-7M tactics. They knew exactly when to crank, dive, offset, re-attack, or egress. Someone clearly had been passing F-15 community tactics and weapons employment metrics to them, or they extrapolated it from their days fighting F-14As and F-4Es from Iran.
Pierre Sprey’s comments on the F-35 had no relation to reality, especially when it comes to maintenance and availability rates. You’re talking about a Radar and massive sensor clustered system that has 5 MMH/FH fleet avg for the A model.
We would be lucky to see 11hrs with the Viper, not including all its pods and certain ancillary systems that are critical for its mission profiles. F-15C would do 18-35 MMH/FH.
The biggest factor in F-35 availability rates is trained pilots on schedule and spares. Break rate is way less than a Viper. It’s a maintenance dream.
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@TheJacobshapiro The F-16 doesn’t use hydrazine for an APU because the F-16 doesn’t have an APU. It has a JFS with 2 bottles that are used to pressure-up a hydraulic start motor. Depending on Density Altitude, the pilot usually selects START 1 on the JFS panel for normal start-up procedures. For a hot day with thin air, it might be necessary to select START 2, where both bottles power-up the JFS motor.
The F-16 JFS is hand-pumpable by crew chiefs/mx personnel, or pilots through the Left MLG bay. It’s a pretty cool system that doesn’t need an external power generator or to rob fuel, and is very compact/lightweight.
Hydrazine is something totally separate and for the EPU, not related to engine start-up procedures. The EPU provides FLCS hydraulic power in the event of engine power loss, so the pilot has time remaining to perform a dead stick landing. The hydrazine cell is located on the right side of the fuselage, opposite of where the gun is on the left. Hydrazine provides instantaneous pressure for the hydraulic system without any combustion. Very interesting system if you dive into it some time.
I am not aware that either of these systems played a role in the selection or non-selection of the F-16 for Finland, Australia, or Canada. They may have, but I just don’t recall it. Landing gear and intake locations were considerations for austere basing, as is the F-16’s landing characteristics. It does not like to be put down, whereas you can precision-touch down with the F/A-18 exactly where you want. F-16 gets ground effect pretty bad due to its lightweight and lifting body design with the LERXs, even with EFTs and pylons.
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@newdefsys The ratio of influence from the USAF and USN into the design, development, and modernization of the F-16 and F/A-18 vs guys like Boyd makes Boyd almost a footnote. Same with the influence on systems capability and weight growth. A lot of people have a hard time imagining that thousands of air planners and pilots asking for important capabilities could ever out-weigh the ideas of a few men from a bygone era.
If you look at how the F-16 went from Block 1, 5, 10, to 15, then 25, then 30, 40, 50, and now 70, all the weight and capabilities growth are directly attributed to war-fighters. Per Boyd, the 1978 Block 1 F-16A had too many avionics and extra capabilities that he would have felt were unnecessary in his 1969-1974 years. Per requests from every USAF Fighter Squadron, it needed more. Same with the NATO MSIP partners in the F-16 program.
Now look at the F/A-18A/B to F/A-18C/D, then the Super Hornet. Super Hornet pilots who flew the Baby Hornet will tell you how much more relevant and capable the Super Hornet is for air combat.
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@ I still fondly remember the TRS-80 days. The main things that changed with electronics as you referenced were solid state components, as well as the processing and memory power that allowed look-down/shoot-down with ground clutter rejection. APG-63 had excellent clutter rejection and single target track, multi-target track, target-sort capabilities that allowed a single pilot to have better man machine interface than a 2-Crew Phantom or even a Tomcat.
Especially after Bekaa Valley of 1982, Sprey should have shut his hole. After Desert Storm in 1991, he had zero arguments, but got louder instead. AIM-7M ruled the roost in ODS with high pK even as we were replacing it with AIM-120A. AIM-120A got first employed by a family model Viper (meant for VIP rides) against a MiG-25P with solid state electronics as its first kill over the Southern No-Fly Zone right after ODS.
Even in 1976 if you looked under the Radome of an F-4E vs F-15A, and in the cockpits, it was a major shift in pilot interface. The mech-scanned Radar of the F-4 looked like something designed in the 1950s. The HOTAS arrangement in the F-15 pit was a result of F-4 guys complaining about bad systems arrangement and the inability to stay TGT-focused.
F-16A pit was a big step up from the F-4 as well, but somewhat dumbed-down from the A-7D. Once we went to the F-16C pit with the dual MFDs, and the F/A-18 with its MFDs and moving map display, it opened up a new era in MMI.
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@christophergagliano2051 The A-10A was already a non-survivable platform to 1970s-era Soviet SAMs and AAA. USAF conducted extensive anslyses on the new generation of SAMs at the time and determined A-10s would be sitting ducks both in USAFE and PACOM, with limited capability to employ weapons meaningfully.
The Fulda Gap mission profile was understood and recognized within A-10 squadrons in Europe as a suicide mission, with best-case being shot up and limp back to the West, get into another and repeat.
They moved to retire the A-10A in the 1980s, but were blocked from doing so. Desert Storm experience with A-10A/OA-10A was whitewashed to validate a poor decision to keep it, without telling anyone that General Horner actually grounded the A-10s due to losses and fatality rates it was suffering down in and around the Kuwaiti border region.
It's too slow, with no sensors to see the battlespace at the time.
Su-25M is more survivable than the A-10 because it has power, and those have been shot down for sport throughout their operational history in Africa, Central Asia, Middle East, and now Ukraine.
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@shi01 The A-10 was really built for Vietnam. It was like an A-1 Skyraider on steroids, and would have been perfect for CAS there in support of Cobras and troop carrier helicopters, fire bases in-contact, LRRPs, SF A-Camps, and Infantry units tasked with taking ground.
The ZSU-23-4 already started being fielded in the later days of Vietnam, which shredded Skyraiders and any other light aircraft. A-10 would have been the only thing that could carry ordnance to bust it and maintain visual for re-attack.
Once the Soviets started fielding newer mobile SAMs in the 1970s and proliferated them throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, the A-10 became obsolete other than a nice CSAR and limited COIN AOR platform.
We definitely made a strategic error building over 700 of them.
71% of the A-10 budget should have gone into more F-111F, EF-111A, and Strike Eagles.
Same for the pipeline for pilots. We wasted a ton of human capital manning-up A-10s, and continue to do so.
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@ They did everything they could at the time to make it as lightweight as possible with that huge wing area and added fuel and ordnance space, but they didn’t have a motor that could generate even 1:1 T/W at the time.
The GE-powered XL was obviously much better with thrust at 28k if I remember, but still gutless. Test pilots said it handled like a Cadillac, but once you turned, all your energy was gone, nothing like a Viper.
It was a concern of theirs since they were used to that insane F-16 sustained turn rate. I still think for what the USAF has used F-16s for, F-16XL makes more sense as a bomb truck and D/SEAD platform.
In the F-15/F-16 fleet mix era, USAF has operated under the premise of F-15Cs providing higher altitude OCA/DCA while Vipers run bombing sorties down in the lower bands. The F-16XL had 17 hard points and missile rails. Even half-configured with A2G ordnance, it could carry 12 500lb class bombs and 6 AAMs, namely 4 AIM-120 and 2 AIM-9s.
It needed an F119 motor and total fuselage redesign to make it powered right, which didn’t exist yet.
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@dumdumbinks274 The TF30 was notorious for letting blades fly from the high pressure core, compressor stalls, stagnation, and low MTBF. The only thing it had going for it in the A-7 was it was non-afterburning, and pilots didn't make tons of crazy power setting inputs like in BFM.
USAF fixed the A-7 by specifying what became the A-7D, which had the Allison TF41-A-2. USN saw that and got the A-7E.
A-7D and A-7E were much better aircraft than the A-7A/B/C.
The TF30 had all sorts of issues in the F-111A-F, and F-14A.
A substantial portion of total airframe losses in the F-111 & F-14 were due to TF30s exploding or catching fire, power loss during critical stages of flight, and adverse yaw caused by loss of one side (F-14 especially).
They got it mostly worked out in the later models with late Block F-14As and the F-111F.
F100-PW-100 & -200 had a lot of the same problems and caused USAF to launch the engine war between P&W and GE, resulting in F100-PW-229, and F110-GE-100/129/400.
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@katout75 I watched it happen. If you look at the YF-16 cockpit, it was bare bones. They went through different gunsight and HUD iterations within YF-16 #1 & #2, then the FSD cockpits were significantly different with Radar on center panel and SMS on left main panel.
That got nailed down into Block 1, 5, 10, and 15 with little changes along the way to the stick, some switch locations for B model control handover if I recall.
I had the -1 with all the fold-outs, updates, TOs, and changes. I built my own full-size mockup in the 1980s of the A model Cockpit.
The most interesting of them all was the AFTI F-16, which we had at ED. It went through a ton of changes as well, a lot of stuff from it went into F-22 & F-35.
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