#plane shaming

Probably the cushiest assignment for ground crew not assigned to firefighting or EOD, since you knew those fuckers only had to make it to the end of the runway and self-immolate. A good time for all the crew chiefs and specialists to kick back and catch up on the news, reading by the firelight provided by their own aircraft. Genuinely Boeing’s best idea: an aircraft whose reliability problems 100% weren’t the problem of the people whose job was aircraft reliability!

Anyone pissing and moaning about the cost of modern combat aircraft need to understand that creating the Superfortress, the world’s first and, for awhile only, nuclear-capable bomber, cost more than the Manhattan Project. Seriously, the A-bomb set the USA back $2 billion, but the B-29 was a $3 billion endeavor. And it wasn’t off to a great start, either. Its biggest technological hurdle was its engines, which loved to catch fire. The disastrous beginnings of the B-29 were so expensively bad they are part of history lessons taught to the basic trainees of a branch that didn’t exist at the time, the US Air Force.

They built 1430 of the fuckers. They claimed to have downed 542 enemy aircraft. With a win-loss ratio of 0.38, jet fighter aviation was off to one hell of an auspicious start. That might seem unfair since the Allies made a point of destroying them on the ground, but when you’re so high-maintenance you can’t get out of bed to defend yourself, that’s your problem, buddy.

People can make excuses -mostly blaming Hitler- for the failure of the Me 262, but every single wunderwaffe supposedly would’ve performed better if not for Hitler. I blame the History Channel for this line of thought. I think that those people forget that without Hitler, these mad science projects probably wouldn’t have existed to begin with. It’s worth remembering that the engines were bleeding-edge tech in an experimental area of aviation, which is to say, they were complete and utter fucking trash. 

Lockheed took a look at the Corsair’s ability to go really fast but not to land on aircraft carriers, nodded, and said: “we can do better.” The result was an interceptor that went really fast and could barely land on conventional runways.

Of course, that’s not what literally happened, but it may as well have been. Looking to build a small, simple yet high-performance aircraft, Kelly Johnson embarked on a project that would essentially be a boon to the enemy of whoever flew it.

Lockheed had a fetish for T-tails after WW2, and the Starfighter was no exception. The problem was that the thing went so fast, a pilot ejecting normally would hit the tail when flying at high speeds. To solve this, instead of building a more robust ejection seat, they made the ejection seat fire downwards. Completely useless at low altitudes, this system resulted in the deaths of 21 USAF pilots. Eventually it was replaced with an upward-firing ejection seat, and ultimately a zero/zero one, finally making it possible to survive a bird strike that killed the engine on takeoff.

A variety of mechanical problems with the F-104s led to still more fatal accidents, and as US Air Force enthusiasm for the Starfighter waned, Lockheed looked to sell it on the International market. To help smooth things over, Lockheed began a habit that would last decades: Bribing foreign officials to buy their shit. The West German government bought the F-104 virtually sight unseen, much to the dismay of Erich Hartmann, who advocated buying test models before committing the Air Force to the F-104. He correctly identified the Starfighter as a fundamentally flawed and unsafe fighter: The F-104 would go on to kill more Germans than Audie Murphy.

Its combat record was abysmal. The F-104 lost every air-to-air engagement it was unfortunate enough to find itself in, from Vietnam to Pakistan, until the Taiwan Strait Incident, where a flight of four Taiwanese F-104s shot down two Chinese MiG-19s. Even so, one F-104 managed to disappear without a trace.

Ah, the result of the height of the intercontinental pants-shitting contest otherwise known as the Cold War. You see, a long time ago, the US Air Force wanted a weird airplane called the XB-70. The idea was to make a high-altitude, supersonic nuclear bomber. They flew some test flights, and ultimately decided that increasingly lethal SAMs and interceptors made the concept non-viable. However, the Soviets caught wind of it and immediately shat their pants. They developed the MiG-25 Foxbat specifically to counter the XB-70, which was never put into production. However, once they realized the XB-70 wasn’t going to be a thing, they were already in too deep in the Foxbat program and started fielding the stupid fuckers.

The MiG-25 is designed to do one thing: Fly really high, really fast, and shoot big heavy bombers. That’s it. But, the US, NATO, and their allies didn’t know that. The first introduction they had to the MiG-25 was when an Israeli F-4 Phantom spotted one on radar, throttled up to investigate, and was promptly left in the dust as the MiG nope’d the fuck outta there.

It was the US’ turn to shit their pants. As far as the west knew, they were dealing with God’s gift to combat aircraft: A fighter that could exceed Mach 3, turn on a dime, shoot impeccably accurate missiles BVR and gently seduce and fuck your mom using your dad’s tears as lube at the same time.

Obviously, this was unacceptable. The most perfect fighter jet ever created would have to be designed to counter this weird Soviet science. The ensuing efforts left us stuck with the Fighter Mafia and Pierre Sprey, so obviously it was a complete disaster.

Except for one thing: It brought us the F-15. Designed for pure air superiority, the fucker could pull 9 G’s, break the sound barrier flying straight up, had an excessively powerful radar to get the most of the godawful AIM-7 Sparrow in BVR engagements, refined the HOTAS concept… it was basically the Mary Poppins of air-to-air: Practically perfect in every way.

Except it was, and still is, a maintenance beast. The radar and computers were too advanced for its day. The highest failure component was the mechanical radar antenna in the nose, something that experts identified as the part that should be replaced with an AESA as soon as possible. The Air Force took one look at the cost of doing that, shat their pants, and settled for some other, less relevant improvements. The F-15 is finally, some 30 years later, receiving AESA radars, most of them going to ANG F-15Cs and the rollout is supposed to be completed at some point in the 2020s, IIRC. Remember, the Air Force is the smart branch.

Because, you see, the F-15 never came cheap. Its first flight was only 3 years after the F-14′s, and I’ve gone over what a turkey the F-14 was. The thing might as well have been made of solid gold for how much it cost. The US realized they could never afford enough of the things to take on a real air brawl with the Soviet Union, and started looking for a low-cost alternative to pad the numbers. They wound up selecting the F-16 as the preferable missile sponge for the Eagle. Sorry, Viper fans, it’s true.

The real punchline is that the MiG-25 could only exceed Mach 3 for a brief duration, would require both engines being replaced upon landing if it did so, and was so heavy and stupid its turn rate was competitive with glacial movement.

Nowadays the F-15 derives its reputation almost entirely from the Israeli Air Force, the source of the majority of its air-to-air kills against walleyed douchebags born into officer positions, and the infamous “flying home on one wing” story. In the US Air Force, driving an F-15C is considered a career killer, because for the most part, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS have precisely zero aircraft to speak of. Good luck squeezing combat hours out of that. If you drive an F-15E: Congratulations, you’re in what’s arguably the best CAS platform we’ve ever had, and all your thunder will be stolen by the A-10 and AC-130 thanks to kids raised on Desert Storm memes and Call of Duty. Meanwhile, the Air Force can’t be bothered to maintain the fuckers properly as they’re stuck with ever-mounting budget cuts while still shoveling money into the F-22 and F-35 programs.

On that note, the F-15 has grabbed headlines for spontaneously falling out of the sky. It’s almost like you can’t ignore things like airframe hours, the need for real spare parts, and adequate maintenance manning.

The big fat fucker everyone loves because it can fart like Cartman from South Park?

Sure.

The TFX program was a joint effort between the US Air Force and US Navy that spawned the F-111, which gave neither branch what they really wanted. Faster and heavier than the Navy wanted, they could never get the naval -B variant to work quite right and wound up dumping it altogether in favor of the F-14. Both variants retained the side-by-side cockpit the Navy asked for in a goofy capsule that separated from the aircraft and parachuted down, rather than using ejection seats like God intended.

The Air Force, not having to worry about such mortal concerns as “carrier landings,” and “deck space,” had better luck getting the damn thing to work. Great at strike missions and not much else (until the EW variant came along), its best accomplishments are hilarious: using high speed pop-up maneuvers to fling dumb bombs over hills at enemy installations without warning or exposing themselves to return fire, taking an extremely long trip from England around France to bomb Libya, and diving to escape an Iraqi MiG only for the hapless yokel to chase too hard and crash into the desert.

The only reason to fly a Harrier is because your navy has decided it can’t afford a real aircraft carrier, or you’re the infantry belonging to a massive navy that can financially support your delusions of grandeur of being a separate branch (but not massive or silly enough to give you a real aircraft carrier). “The Navy’s Army needs its own Air Force” and all that. Or because you won a Pepsi contest that Pepsico had no intention of honoring. Because it’s just a stupid ad, you dip.

The Harrier is the plot of Spec Ops: The Line in aircraft form. Everything it does makes everything worse, with far-reaching consequences nobody involved could’ve foreseen, and none of this would’ve happened if they’d just stopped.

But on they marched, and for what? A combat jet that can take off and land sorta-vertically? Who cares? The sucker didn’t even have radar until the late 1980s, and even now it’s a version of the Hornet’s radar that’s been obsolete since then. Useless in a dogfight, capable of light strikes at best, the Harrier is the most expensive way to deliver CAS slightly faster than a helicopter ever conceived.

If you’re going to make an aircraft-carrier based fighter, job one should be to make sure your fighter can take off from and land on carriers.The Corsair had an amazing tendency to fuck up an otherwise perfect landing by bouncing into whatever it wanted to: the ocean, the island, deck crew; anything but the arresting wires, basically. If landing wasn’t necessary, the Navy would’ve had an incredibly expensive field day with B-25s during WW2.

But, as the saying goes: Taking off is optional; landing is mandatory. The Navy rightly realized they were dealing with something that was going to need a lot more development to meet their most basic needs, and in their proud naval tradition, dumped their discarded toys on the Marine Corps, who didn’t need to worry much about carrier aviation at the time. This was two years after the sumbitch’s first flight. It’d been in development since 1938. Four years of development, two years of flying the thing, and they still couldn’t make it work with aircraft carriers.

People bash modern aircraft for their long development cycles, but at least we aren’t in a hot shooting war, for Christ! The Corsair had a two-year head start on Americans getting nervous about the idea of naval war in the Pacific and still needed years of development during the war to do its one job. The Navy finally decided Vought had sufficiently un-fucked the Corsair to allow it to grace its decks once more in April 1944, after some six years of development, field and combat testing. It still missed the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and as a result, these proud carrier fighters spent most of their naval career on anti-kamikaze duty.