favourite korean war aircraft

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I vaguely remember duck-and-cover drills only in my first-grade year, 1973-74. We moved to Iran in 1974, and by the time of our first return (we did two swings in Iran), in Oct 1977, the drills were gone.

By the way, when I was working at Disneyland in the early 80's, several areas still had "fall out shelter" signs in place in certain back-stage areas of the park.

I lived my teenaged years in San Luis Obispo county, California. As late as 1985 the county courthouse was placarded as a fallout shelter with the yellow-and-black tricone signage. It was a period when the Cold War was heating up again: SDI, Pershing II or SS-18 missiles being deployed, KAL 007 being shot down with a congresscritter aboard, that TV movie The Day After (remember that?) -- that sort of thing.

It was pretty creepy.
 

And just six years later the Soviet Union was dissolved and became a relic of history.

Quite the turnaround.
 
I always liked the looks of the Panther, maybe because I remember distinctly the Blue Angels flying Cougars overhead as they were landing at Sherman Field in Pensacola. Big drawback on the Panther was that it could not meet the performance of the WW2 Me 262 with the Banshee barely able to. These two aircraft kept the Navy on the side lines of the colossal air-to-air battles with the Mig 15 over Korea. Too bad the Navy did not buy the F-86 for the Marines and fly them off the land fields ala F4U. Maybe having the Marines able to take on the Mig 15 and they couldn't would have been more embarrassing to the Navy than the AF able to do so.
 
. Big drawback on the Panther was that it could not meet the performance of the WW2 Me 262 with the Banshee barely able to. These two aircraft kept the Navy on the side lines of the colossal air-to-air battles with the Mig 15 over Korea.
Dave that's wrong - the F9F was faster, flew farther and had a higher operational ceiling than the Me 262 and of course was more reliable. I think armament was about the same. I think you'll find the same for the F2H and it carried more bombs. The F2H and F9F were outperformed by the MiG-15 but still managed to shoot some down. I few posts back I posted a story about an air battle where an F9F driver shot down 4 MiG-15s, the whole incident hushed up for many years.
 
Do you remember the the title of that post? I like to read it.
 
Ah, yes, the old mistake, knots for mph! However the point is unchanged. The F9F-5, F2H-2, and the equivalent AF F-84E, were obsolete for the air war taking place in Mig alley, and were regulated to second string missions. As for F9Fs shooting down Mig 15s, a couple of Mig 17s were downed by A-1s in Vietnam. I would be surprised if the F9F, F2H or F-84Es participated in any fighter sweeps in Mig Alley, post Mig 15.
 

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