F-111B survives: More effective USN carrier aviation

MacCaulay

Banned
Yes, Christ's second coming will be in the form of a laydown attack from the internal weapons bay. I know for a fact he could fit beause I stuck my head into the weapons bay of an F111G three weeks ago and throught 'Jesus, this is spacious'.

(Rim shot)

Well, He is the only one that could have turned the 'Vark into a shipborne fighter.

Some day (probably the 1st of April) I'm going to put this exact same thread in the ASB forum. And people are going to wonder why 3/4 of the posters are completely fine with it being there.

Brilliant, and therefore sigged!

Sweeeeeet. Thanks!
 
I wonder how the OP feels about being in the same company as one Robert Strange MacNamara: both seem to be still passionate believers in the F-111B. The Navy sure wasn't....the weapons system (AWG-9/AIM-54) was the only good thing that came out of it. The airplane itself was crap.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I wonder how the OP feels about being in the same company as one Robert Strange MacNamara: both seem to be still passionate believers in the F-111B. The Navy sure wasn't....the weapons system (AWG-9/AIM-54) was the only good thing that came out of it. The airplane itself was crap.

Well, that's the thing about the Phoenix. The missile was designed so that as long as you were launching that thing off a platform that wasn't falling like a damn rock, you'd be fine.
The Iranian use of their Phoenixes in the Iran/Iraq War bore that out. They were hitting Mirage F1s and MiG-23s at distances and angles that the Phoenix wasn't even designed to go after.

I've got no problem with the F-111 as an attack aircraft. Chains of Command by Dale Brown (his only good book, in my opinion) was an excellent demonstration of how that aircraft should and can be used an a fairly large variety of strike roles.

But this whole thing about turning it into a fighter...buh.
 
The AF and RAAF -111s were good at what they did-low level strike and attack, with the RAAF having a few Varks as RF-111 tac recon aircraft. But the F-111B as a Navy fighter?? Ugh, puke, retch. Blame it on MacNamara and his Whiz Kids....
 

MacCaulay

Banned
The AF and RAAF -111s were good at what they did-low level strike and attack, with the RAAF having a few Varks as RF-111 tac recon aircraft. But the F-111B as a Navy fighter?? Ugh, puke, retch. Blame it on MacNamara and his Whiz Kids....

There's some good footage on YouTube of an RAAF F-111 making an anti-ship hit with some sort of guided munitions against a North Korean ship a few years ago.

I think I've posted the link a few times, but I'll have to dig it up again.
 
F-111 weapons video was also frequent back in the '91 Gulf War. Their Pave Tack cameras gave some pretty good video, and if you remember the Libya raid back in '86, there was some video released as well. Mainly from the strike on Tripoli IAP's military section, and Il-76s eating Mark-82 Snakeye 500-pounders....
 

MacCaulay

Banned
F-111 weapons video was also frequent back in the '91 Gulf War. Their Pave Tack cameras gave some pretty good video, and if you remember the Libya raid back in '86, there was some video released as well. Mainly from the strike on Tripoli IAP's military section, and Il-76s eating Mark-82 Snakeye 500-pounders....

See? Maybe that's it. They see all these things, like the Aardvark footage of them bombing things and say to themselves...

"Hey! See how it blew the crap out of that airfield! And that transport on the ground! And that cargo ship? Where's all the footage of Eagles and Hornets doing that?" Then a light bulb goes on over there heads and they think, "Hey! Let's turn the the F-111 into a fighter!"
 
Take a look at some more from '91, and more recent conflicts (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003) and you'll find plenty of F-14B/D, F-15E, F/A-18, and F-117 video. The famous images from Downtown Baghdad in 1991, for example, were F-117 weapons video, as was Gen. Schwartzkopf's "luckiest man in Iraq" video of a jeep crossing a bridge seconds before a laser-guided bomb from a -117 takes down the bridge.
Why anyone thinks that a plane stressed for only 5Gs could be a decent fighter is beyond me, anyway. The EF-111 that outmanuvered a Mirage F-1 on the opening night of ODS had to be careful: they were stressed for only 5Gs as well, and too much manuvering would've overstressed the airplane. The only fighter mission the F-111B could've performed was Fleet Defense: any kind of air superiority mission was out of the question, period. And certainly no dogfighting.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Why anyone thinks that a plane stressed for only 5Gs could be a decent fighter is beyond me, anyway. The EF-111 that outmanuvered a Mirage F-1 on the opening night of ODS had to be careful: they were stressed for only 5Gs as well, and too much manuvering would've overstressed the airplane. The only fighter mission the F-111B could've performed was Fleet Defense: any kind of air superiority mission was out of the question, period. And certainly no dogfighting.

Well, jeez...that poor F1 was just too busy for it's own good, anyway, you know?

He was chasing the RF-111 and dodging an Eagle. No wonder a smashed into the ground.
 
Actually, both the F-15 driver and the EF-111 crew felt that the late and unlamented Iraqi F-1 pilot fell victim to target fixation. He was so fixed on the EF-111 that not only did he ignore the F-15 that was getting ready to kill him, but he ignored his altimeter reading on the HUD.....speed and altitude do kill not just by themselves, but in combination, too. For a while the AF credited the EF-111 crew with a manuvering kill, but later gave it to the F-15 guy. I actually met the EF-111 pair at the NAS Lemoore air show in 1992: pretty decent pair of guys, and you knew what kinds of questions that they could answer and what not to ask. The one thing they regretted was that their Spark Vark wasn't HARM-capable like the EA-6B parked next to them was.
 
That ship was the Pong Su, it dropped off 150kg of smack in the bush near Lorne, where I was working at the time. It was all very exciting. After they found the first 50kg of smack all the local stoners were combing the bush hoping to find their own piece of paradise, but the Feds found the 75kg buried treasure first.
 
Requirements for carrier aircraft and land based aircraft are very different. It is much easier to go from a carrier a/c to land a/c (like F4 &A7) than the other way around. Add that to the fact that All multirole a/c are compromises, and the F-111's failure to be useful for the Navy is obvious. BTW since you are not going to be dogfighting in this theoretical "fleet defense" role, why not hang some phoenixes on E-2's?

Seriously though, while the F-35 does have a lot off commonality, the differences between the USN version are signficant.

Another McNamara special, the flying Edsel.
 
Well, that's the thing about the Phoenix. The missile was designed so that as long as you were launching that thing off a platform that wasn't falling like a damn rock, you'd be fine.
The Iranian use of their Phoenixes in the Iran/Iraq War bore that out. They were hitting Mirage F1s and MiG-23s at distances and angles that the Phoenix wasn't even designed to go after.

Let's bear in mind though that that's only according to Tom Cooper, who is just a tad bit of an Iranian fanboy, and isn't backed up by other sources so far.

sloreck said:
BTW since you are not going to be dogfighting in this theoretical "fleet defense" role, why not hang some phoenixes on E-2's?

Actually there was a Lockheed proposal that one-upped even that. P-3 with E-2 radars and 10-12 Eagle missiles (the predecessor to Phoenix). CL-520 was the company designation.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Let's bear in mind though that that's only according to Tom Cooper, who is just a tad bit of an Iranian fanboy, and isn't backed up by other sources so far.

Good point. It's one of those things where you're kind of stuck with no one else to base it off of, except for how the war turned out and one's own logical assumptions.
There isn't a whole lot in those books that one can just look up from direct sources, but the Phoenix was an amazing weapons system. I'm willing to bet that it could do the things they were talking about.
Cooper did have a slight habit in those books, however, of seemingly crediting every single attribute of the Tomcat, Phantom II, or their ancillary electronic systems to the Iranians' amazing prowess, and not to the Americans that built the things.
I mean, past 1982, I'm willing to give the Iranians the lion's share of the credit. But before that, the Americans were the ones that built the airbase at Isfahan for the F-14s, they provided them with the Phoenixes. All that.


Actually there was a Lockheed proposal that one-upped even that. P-3 with E-2 radars and 10-12 Eagle missiles (the predecessor to Phoenix). CL-520 was the company designation.

The sad thing is that there's a twisted logic to this: it's the shotgun approach, only with active homers.

I just don't want to think about shooting a shotgun where the shell costs about $1 million a grain.

Though I suppose if they've got an anti-ship version it wouldn't be that hard to make the mod...
 
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