The charlies recently got retired from the fleet. I’m imagining that the Blue Angels are likely going to switch air frames fairly soon.
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Yeah… I spent the last week re-learning about the F-16. I’d forgotten how much I’d forgotten.
God damn the F-16 is an amazing piece of technology. I think it’s the most elegant looking airframe of any fourth gen fighter.
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Is the F-35 good now? The last thing I can remember hearing about is was they could put weapons on it, or take off, but not both.
I never thought the F35 was going to be a dud long term, not a bad aircraft. The issues I have with it are the political and planning and development issues that made it into a trillion dollar project. Throw that much money at something and it’s sure to get good eventually.
The opposite example is now what NASA have done with their new commercial manned spacecraft for delivering astronauts to the ISS. Fixed cost instead of cost plus. Two companies both providing a solution to the same problem. Turns out for the cost of one shuttle launch you can get two entire space craft development cycles.
If the X plane competition hadn’t had a single winner, I’m pretty sure there would be now two planes flying, both with similar capabilities, and for way less money.
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The F-16 is amazing when you look at what it was the first to do.
- First fly-by-wire aircraft. This means that instead of the stick being directly connected to cables and pulleys (perhaps with hydraulic support) to the flight control surfaces, the stick instead goes through a computer (a 1970s era analog one of all things, at least in the earliest models) which then interprets the inputs to move the control surfaces. Of course, this was necessary because…
- The F-16 has relaxed dynamic stability. Now, most planes are designed so that if you let go of the controls, they will at least tend to stabilize to something resembling straight and level flight, adjusting for wind conditions, etc. Not the F-16. It was designed to be inherently unstable to the point where it was impossible for a human to constantly move the controls enough to keep it from falling out of the sky. This is where the flight control computer comes in: it does all the frequent adjustments necessary to let the pilot focus on the general idea of getting the plane to go in the direction he/she wants it to. The advantage of this design is vicious maneuverability and since then it has been a standard feature on all modern fighter aircraft and some non-fighters, like the F-117 (which was unstable more due to its early generation stealth shape than any desire for extreme maneuverability).
- The F-16’s original stick didn’t move. It was just a pressure sensitive device that was rigid as the steel (aluminum?) rod it was mounted on. Later models were given sticks with a little bit of give as pilots preferred at least some feedback when they moved the stick.
Its original concept was cooked up by a group of renegade (at least for the US military) Air Force officers nicknamed the “Fighter Mafia.” The nickname was given to them by one of these officers who happened to be of Italian descent.
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Flying again, there is a GCI on!
They do still use them for conventional bombing. If anything, it sounds like cost is the main reason they’re not used much:
Side note: William Langeweische, the author of that piece, writes excellent long-form articles about aviation and disasters. Had a really good one about the sinking of El Faro, a cargo ship.
William Langewiesche is also the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of Stick and Rudder, considered to this day one of the finest books ever written on the fundamentals of flying airplanes.
Aviation runs in his blood.
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Night flying…
They’re running out of people to fly the really fast aeroplanes.
My solution. Just have less flying death machines. Then you won’t need so many pilots.
Question for the sake of clarification, the death machines, for the pilot, or as more of an export operation?
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We probably still need the death machines. The world isn’t exactly stable at the moment.
The problem is the same problem with teachers and spies. The people who would be good at it aren’t allowed to do it or wouldn’t be compensated enough to even consider doing it.
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Do we need as many? Half as many is probably fine. Could use the savings to pay the teachers and spies more.
The nature of air warfare means we need a lot.
Not enough pilots means the US doesn’t rapidly acquire air supremacy in any conflict. Without air supremacy, a lot more people die and war descends into combined arms attrition and protracted engagements.
It takes a lot of planes to achieve true air supremacy. Drones can’t do it yet. Every hour that goes by with contested skis means pilot losses in a real war. Having fewer pilots means you lose more pilots.
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Other countries don’t have as many. What if there’s war and we don’t help them? They’re just fucked and they don’t care and are willing to risk it?
Europe is probably only as stable as it is due to the complete air supremacy of the US military. Same with certain parts of Asia…
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I’m not gonna say what the president says, that they should pay more. But I will say, let them send us pilots.
I think the US needs to pause the whole discussion around whether the rest of the world that relies on our military might should pay more for the privilege.
Right now, the industrialized world relies on us, and for better or worse we are responsible for that level of stabilizing military power. I don’t want to change the status quo until after we defeat fascism in our own country.
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You got a a partial chicken and egg situation. Cutting military expenditures could very well pay for some quality education, free college for everyone?, that would go a long way towards eliminating domestic fascism.
Also, if the country is headed in a bad direction, probably better for it to have less military might, not more.
Anyway, what I was saying. Some of those countries have mandatory conscription Finland, South Korea. Let them send us pilots.