Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: US Fighter Designations Message-ID: <1990Aug5.042539.28495@cbnews.att.com> Date: 5 Aug 90 04:25:39 GMT Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 63 Approved: military@att.att.com From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) >F100: Super Sabre, North American. Nasty airplane at first but once > the bugs were worked out, our first fighter to go supersonic > in level flight became a very good aircraft. As an attack aircraft, rather than a fighter, however! The F-100 (this is not a Navy aircraft, the hyphen is mandatory :-)) was designed just a little bit before it became clear that fighters absolutely needed their own radar, and its nose was so full of air intake that no way could be found to add any long-range radar. It did have a tiny gun-ranging radar, only a few inches across, and even that made quite a noticeable bump on top of the nose. >F102: Delta Dagger? (I get this and the F106 backwards sometimes) ... >*** Yep. You got it straight. NASA is currently using one to study >*** lightning. They fly it into a storm and dare lightning to strike... Sorry, slight misidentification here. The NASA lightning-research fighter (it does other jobs too, including aerodynamics work on highly-swept wings) is an F-106. I think it's specifically an F-106B, the two-man trainer version. It is scheduled to be retired before too very long, as the costs of operation and maintenance are starting to be very high now that it's a one-of-a-kind aircraft. They chose it for the job primarily because it is a high-performance jet fighter with 100% non-electronic controls -- it's old enough to be all hydraulics etc. Not an easy thing to find nowadays; I'm not sure what the replacement will be. >F104: Starfighter, Lockheed.... While never achieving > great acceptance with the USAF, foreign countries gobbled them > up by the s***loads... A real triumph of marketing over common sense. The F-104 was designed as a completely uncompromised light air-superiority fighter, and converting it to a low-altitude strike aircraft with a heavy payload and sophisticated electronics produced a very marginal aircraft. Lockheed put enormous efforts into marketing and managed to sell it to a lot of NATO countries that should have known better. :-) Its safety problems have been somewhat exaggerated, and had a lot more to do with maintenance difficulties than with inherent aircraft flaws, but it was a hot, unforgiving aircraft with rather limited range and payload. >F111: Now that's funny...I can't remember the name of this thing... >*** Called the Aardvark. Very versatile... used as fighter, bomber, recon, >*** fighter/bomber, and I believe nuke bomber. Except for the EF-111 variant, it never had an official name; names were out of fashion at the time. The attempt to produce a fairly hefty aircraft that would nevertheless fit on Navy carrier elevators gave a short and stocky airframe, which caused problems with the USAF's absolute demand that it be supersonic at low altitude. (It would have cost much less, and probably been more successful, if they'd been willing to settle for high subsonic speed at low altitude, but the whole F-111 story is full of non-negotiable demands that the poor aircraft builders had to try to meet...) Since the USAF and Navy aircraft had to have different noses anyway, due to different radars, the obvious way to improve the USAF version's "fineness ratio" (roughly, how slim it is, which turns out to be an important number for supersonic performance) was to make its nose longer. And longer. And longer. Hence "Aardvark". Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry