The most beautiful jet fighter ever made

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That's seriously cool..
I'm really jealous,, lol..
For how long did you fly the F 16 ??
What else have you flown ??
There are others here on this forum that have flown seriously cool aircraft..
I don't seem to get to ask them much about their careers though..
There is a super nice man I deal with, he's in Canada..
He spent 20 years flying a favorite of mine,, the C 130 Hercules..
Now he's an instructor of some sort on that aircraft..
Very cool. The Herc is great. Yeah, I’ve seen several others here - we lurk all over the place. I’ve been in for almost 19 years. After the T-37 & T-38 in pilot training, I went to the F-15C. I flew that for about 3.5 years, then moved to the F-16. Most of my time is split between those two planes. I’ve been lucky enough to fly about 40 different aircraft while in the Air Force. Most of those are just a handful of flights though. I’ve managed to log time in about 60 different types of aircraft on the civilian side, so that’s been great too. I owned a VariEze about 20 years ago and an RV-6 until 6 years ago. I love it all! With retirement coming up, I’m still trying to decide what I’ll do next. Rockets...definitely lots of rockets.

I have always, since childhood been intrigued by the wonder of flight..
Me too. Flying is amazing!
 
There is a super nice man I deal with, he's in Canada..
He spent 20 years flying a favorite of mine,, the C 130 Hercules..
Now he's an instructor of some sort on that aircraft..


Teddy

Teddy, can you share his name? I wonder if I know him / flown with him? (Rockets, not planes..) I'll assume he flies with ORG..
 
B-1 cockpit:

B-1-cockpit.jpg
 
B-1 Lancer while beautiful is no fighter jet. It is strategic bomber. :mad: :facepalm::eyeroll:
But... If you want my opinion of a beautiful "multi-role fighter" that covers partially the role of strategic bomber missions, and still totes A2A short range IR missiles with agility for side by side cockpits. SU-34.
nQSIUz4.jpg

Yeah it's Russian... Deal with it. Matlab coding is sexy all by itself especially when it does a useless cobra.
 
B-1 Lancer while beautiful is no fighter jet. It is strategic bomber. :mad: :facepalm::eyeroll:
But... If you want my opinion of a beautiful "multi-role fighter" that covers partially the role of strategic bomber missions, and still totes A2A short range IR missiles with agility for side by side cockpits. SU-34.
nQSIUz4.jpg

Yeah it's Russian... Deal with it. Matlab coding is sexy all by itself especially when it does a useless cobra.

Are they chasing aliens? Wierd light upper left.

M
 
I grew up in the '80s and spent a lot of time on the PC flight simulators, especially the Microprose ones. My favorite fighter is the F-15, without question, followed by the F-14. I remember being exceptionally annoyed when the film Iron Eagle came out -- I think I must have been ten years old -- and found out that it featured the F-16, not the F-15.
 
Are they chasing aliens? Wierd light upper left.

M

Allegedly it's a Syrian Op. And that appears to be a reflection of the weapons store and one of the MFD configuration panel with a blur of cautionary indicators, left pilot's right knee up one. It likely has all the aircraft status engines/autothrottle managment of a civilian variant with additional .mil addons in weapon selection prior to firing. Center MFD has waypoints loaded. These Ruskies were loaded for tanky kind of a bear or bunkers likely. Don't see any RWR active so maybe it was calm before the storm so to speak. Blue dim lighting for easier map reading on pad kneeboards etc/nightvision compatibility is my guess.
 
I grew up in the '80s and spent a lot of time on the PC flight simulators, especially the Microprose ones. My favorite fighter is the F-15, without question, followed by the F-14. I remember being exceptionally annoyed when the film Iron Eagle came out -- I think I must have been ten years old -- and found out that it featured the F-16, not the F-15.

@Rapp, I was born in 92, but father flew huey slicks in Nam for US Army. Grew up reading every freaking book like wright stuff or other test pilot stories. Solo'd as a teen. Played a lot of IL2 Sturmovik through hyperlobby with F4U Corsair, actually I taught all the carrier ops for a online squadron. Had one nutty online game mission with squadron of sink a destroyer in game at night with night navigation 4+ hours over dark sea then find a 200ft spec in ocean to land again. Hands were physically dretched with sweat on an X-52 hours into it with a damaged plane low fuel, finally saw the carrier again, all set on maxed settings, the ship was shooting a small boat or I'd sure I would've missed seeing it, no lights on, and I'd snagged the third wire, sunk the enemy ship, plane half blown to hell and leaking fuel. Eagles of War was squadron name, we all disbanded late teens due to growing up. Basically you could set up missions so hard. Everyone hated LA-7 it hardly ever stalled, common online threat. Couple of 20mm hits and thing would go down. .50 cals felt like bb pellets on those, lol. We stuck with A2G drop 3 x500lbs and eight rockets on enemy airport from corsairs then wreck with 500-3000 rounds ammo on takeoffs/enemy CAP flights. American planes always took teamwork to win. And we wouldn't let up until kick from server. Kill the AA guns and well it just got more fun for strategic bombers to carpet bomb like acres upon acres. Servers hated us, lol. One guy Whamo would do P-38 and 10 rockets, then launch rockets at runway behind plane as it just got off runway/ground then explosion splash would kill it. Server admins actually laughed and said that was fair. The WW2 sims were hard from lack of all the modern aids, at best a bunch of unguided free fall bombs/unguided rockets. And deflection shooting in turn fights+teamwork. Timers and a printed map with a lot of thinking required. Started with MS95 as a tiny kid. FS2004 with a bunch of payware planes from Carenado were a joy for actual realism training, useful flight school aid.


Wanted to fly for a living but ran out of $$$ plus bad economy furloughed my father like 2005 ish for five years. Wound up studying engineering for college for about six years with some failed classes, always retook them, but god so boring sometimes compared to flight which well I never regretted a second of lol. Modified DCS World the SU-25 free simulator to run F-15E/F-16 before they had patched that a bunch with SU-25 cockpit. You could layer Air defense and modern threats in a mountainous region and make a hard task about 25x more intense, some ways I felt it was harder than the WW2 sims due to threat engagement distances so realistic, you had a printout of all the ranges, weapon systems in an AO, because it narrowed the attack profiles into valleys to have long enough view times to lock all the modern gizmos due to terrain blocking line of sight on mavs/targeting pods. Newest russian missile frigate on sea targets like swatted 60+ B-52s loaded with AGM-84s and 86s dropping entire payloads in saturation runs, from different directions, I was horrified. Beat it by depleting missiles on ship no joke with well more allied missiles far off. LOL. All those Russia jokes and mother of god... A wall of missiles, accurate, long range, and ouch. If mobile ground SAM only the -65E laser maverick would lock. F-15E carried enough CBUs and Mavericks to knock out light naval fleets, but a pig to fly when you wanted a turn fight. It liked high speed zoom and boom. Stable platform though in sim. F-16 felt like never enough fuel, but a per joy point shoot unleash 12x mavericks or a few GBU-12s... Fried an ol' PC with a nivida on it. The campaign missions ground attack were horrifying realistic and always had not impossible, but very thought intense ways to attack or certain death would result. Radar AA threats and had to rearm to drop those, but usually it was best to avoid all AA and help the allied ground grunts get objectives. Bad weather made SAM avoidance nill impossible because you had to see the units through obsolete targeting pod forward looking... This dork is 20/20 corrected. Doubt the AF would let me fly, the exams paperwork wise felt easier... Army seems open minded.

Flight sim rants... Good times yet wasted tons of hours I don't wanna think about. Perhaps months/years of life gone. Hahaha.

If I had to pick a beautiful sounding fighter jet. F-4E hands down with J-79 engines, heard a restored one at an Airshow. Dad was having happy flashbacks, and the chest was vibrating thousands of feet away on a slow flyby. He had a story how one did a victory roll right over the heli bout 100ft off nose and wacked a bunch of AAA nests that no one else even briefed on next to a treeline they were told to drop several platoons of troops onto. His unit, started picking own flight routes after that screw up. Joke was later somebody had sent them to an AA practice range by accident.
 
Flight sim rants... Good times yet wasted tons of hours I don't wanna think about. Perhaps months/years of life gone. Hahaha.

I'll never forget this one.... SubLogic's FS1 for the Apple II. You can't get more epic than this: [video=youtube;uvvfJ60gIf0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvvfJ60gIf0[/video]
 
The inertia of the sims always seemed off. You could set up in a Cessna 152 in a sim, shut the engine off, and it would bleed airspeed relatively fast. While in real life you could glide for seemingly a lot longer enough to overshoot a planned emergency site or do 2-3 patterns worth of gliding from a few thousand feet up from the energy involved. The potential going kinetic energy was more than you would originally estimate during the forced landing training scenarios. STOL operations were hard because the controls were way way way more mushy at slower speeds due to the way the airflow around the airfoils affected control surface inputs at certain angles of attack requiring even more control input on yoke. Sims were always a twitch here nearly instant feedback seemingly, and such a slight input required even at low speeds near flare etc, and dad well hated sims... DCS had modeled the ground shock tube reactions of landing gear over terrain was felt realistic, imho. Dad and his buddies weren't Bob Hoover good, but they did roll a Baron once against all advice before sims existed. Once was enough, any negative G's would've snapped a spar. Light civil twin, different designation in .mil. Before do a barrel roll Meme existed... It was an Army bird, not any FAA regs broken. Overseas... Hahah. Dad in flightsim, TWITCH.. TWITCH.. MEEP STALL.. CRASH... GOD D@MNIT.. Has photos of Huey rotor 2ft from Navy catwalk on a wall in a pilot crashpad out in a farm house. And a stupidest grin on face. ROFL... Yeah no... I miss flying already dang it... I remember when MS95 only had blue and brown textures and as kid said so what. Didn't know there was worse. Dad spoke of cardboard floppies and no sims at all at Rolla in 70's as mech engineer post nam. His first sims were like metal cutouts with instruments in them, all IFR, and some old fart WW2 type shaking it yelling and a dunk tank thing. He's hated sims since. Hahaha.
 
Here found some old sim vids of squadron. I flew the one with the yellow lightning bolt and 07 on it.

Close calls 2
[video=youtube;LIJN2rxWiUA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIJN2rxWiUA[/video]

Close calls 3

[video=youtube;tUbC9PvrXEA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUbC9PvrXEA[/video]

Carrier Flops 1, the original.

[video=youtube;odFUCgIb0Hc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odFUCgIb0Hc[/video]

Sorry YouTube has removed 2 and 3.

Carrier Flops 4, a collection of screw ups.
[video=youtube;_EQQz6PIH-g]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EQQz6PIH-g[/video]

And now I'm gonna get yelled at for de-railing a jet thread. IL2 had collision detection down compared to the civil sims which had a entire bubble for hit detection like FS2004 then a green/red crash label.
Carrier Flops 5, by this time the squadron had grown and there was HSFX/JSGME mod support for jets which made the carrier ops more explosion filled.
[video=youtube;E29h5BYzEEk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E29h5BYzEEk[/video]
 
That would have been fun to fly.
Well, actually, according to Milton Thjompson's book At the edge of Space the X-15 flight program, the F-107 had several inconvenient issues which he describes on pages 9 and 10 in accounts of being chase pilot while Forrest Peterson flew the F-107. As well as flying the 107 to evaluate the 107 they at some point modified the 107 to include a side stick controller planned for the X-15.
 
Well, actually, according to Milton Thjompson's book At the edge of Space the X-15 flight program, the F-107 had several inconvenient issues which he describes on pages 9 and 10 in accounts of being chase pilot while Forrest Peterson flew the F-107. As well as flying the 107 to evaluate the 107 they at some point modified the 107 to include a side stick controller planned for the X-15.
Inconvenient issues in YF airplanes can be fun. :)
 
And while not a fighter, I have a soft spot for the T-38. I live about ten miles south of Ellington so I often see them on approach. They “fall” fast. :)


Sent from my iPhone using Rocketry Forum
 
Well the F-5E Tiger II is the T-38's fanged brother. I always liked those aggressor paint schemes.
 
----View attachment 323294----I know at least one M-21 was lost launching a D-21 on a test . I believe the D-21 separated and then came back down on the M-21 , breaking her back! The LCO lost his life. The D-21 never really was a successful venture. There were some carried by B-52's but by all accounts it was a dead end. There are films on Youtube--the amazing thing about them----they were filmed by an A-12 in formation at Mach 3+ !!!!

That's correct.

A guy that I am honored to call my friend, flew the A12 for the CIA out of Area 51. He does a presentation of his time flying the A12, and talking about Oxcart. I filmed his presentation a last year, and put it together into a video. If you've got about 1.5 hours, you can watch it here:

[video]https://youtu.be/MGdxpqqsHl8[/video]
 
I have always been partial to the Red, White, & Blue painted version of the F-16. Thank you to all of you that have served in our fantastic armed services.
View attachment 323150

I'm a little partial to them also. I hosted them at my airshow in 2015 & 2017. :)

22181261_10212542935502863_910401809073928211_o.jpg


(That's me guiding Thunderbird 8 to his spot after he arrived for the 2017 Aviation Roundup)
 
It's OK by me if this thread transitions to a more general "fixed wing military aviation" photograhic "milporn" thread. Like this:

image


image


image


image
 
N00bs...

z2kehkdrtslyn8fzkhjf.jpg


Plus the Air Force is cool because, once they get funding for a base, they put in the Exchange, Bowling Alley and Golf Course, then go back and ask for more money for runways 'n stuff.

Go Navy!
 
N00bs...

z2kehkdrtslyn8fzkhjf.jpg


Plus the Air Force is cool because, once they get funding for a base, they put in the Exchange, Bowling Alley and Golf Course, then go back and ask for more money for runways 'n stuff.

Go Navy!
Plus, while being juicy targets in war just like aircraft carriers, at least air bases can't sink! (No slam intended). Go Air Force... and Navy!
 
Very cool ! Wonder why doors for landing gear have the scallop shape ?
 
I've always been partial to the looks of the Saab Draken. Rather futuristic looking for the 1950s.

800px-AIRPOWER16_-_Air_to_Air_SK35C_Draken_%28color%29.jpg
 
+ 1. One of my favourite toys as a 6 yr old kid was my Saab Draken. The Swedes came up with some striking hardware designs - this, the Viggen, the S-Tank etc
 
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