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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: How many F-15's does Saudi Arabi have?
Message-ID: <1991Jan18.000946.4852@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 18 Jan 91 00:09:46 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.021437.23060@cbnews.att.com> <1991Jan17.051241.26063@cbnews.att.com>
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Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: randy@ms.uky.edu (Randy Appleton)
>15 F-5b's
>63 F-5e's
>10 RF-5e's
>22 F-5f's
>45 F-15c's
>17 F-15d's
>
>The thing that strikes me most is the number of different modles they have.
>You'd think that they would standardize on one model of F-5's, one model of
>F-15's, etc.

The differences are not as large as they look.  About half of them are just
single-seaters (F-5E, F-15C) vs two-seaters (F-5F, F-15D).  You have to have
the two-seaters for training, but fighters designed to be single-seaters
often have poorer performance in the training variant, so you don't want
all two-seaters.

The F-5B is much older than the F-5E; those are probably 20-30-year-old
aircraft held over in secondary roles.

The RF-5E is a specialized recon variant of the F-5E:  the whole nose is
different, redesigned to hold cameras.  So you really can't get rid of
them either.
-- 
If the Space Shuttle was the answer,   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
what was the question?                 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry