"Most pilots shot down didn't see the enemy coming"

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I think the F-22 or F-23 would have been cheaper by long shot if they had purchased more instead of the F-35.

Price drops with some volume and we only bought a few F-22's. Bad choice.

To me, the old B-1 was and is a great ground attack plane ... fast, caries a LOT of weapons and is quite stealthy in its's own right. I cannot see the reason to have a single engine attack plane that costs what the F-35 costs. It doesn't make sense, but I hope it at least works in service since it appears we are going to do it regardless.

I've been involved in some F-35 parts and I seriously doubt a 50 year life. I'll be amazed if problems with the horizontal tail don't crop up. I know one of the issues with it, and nobody wanted to solve it unless the effort got funded by somebody else. To date, I don't believe it has been solved. Money sink is right.

But I hope it is a money sink that works when we start flying it operationally for real.

One other thing, there ARE some real innovations on the F-35. If one control surface gets disabled, it is entirely possible the pilot won't know it except for a warning light. The software can take the rest of the controls and compensate for battle damaged controls. I bet at least SOME people will get to find out about it sometime and will praise the extra expense that brought them home. Of course, battle damage to the engine might preclude that since there is only one. Hope the hit is a grazing one ...
 
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Well, I suppose, in theory, planes shot down by the F-35 won't have seen it coming.

Actually, I think if the enemy sees it coming the F-35 might be in a spot of bother.
 
Gents, keep in mind the F-22/23 and F-35 are two different animals. The F-22/23 were designed as air superiority fighters with a strike capability added as an afterthought. The F-35 was designed as a strike aircraft from the very beginning with "some" air-to-air capability.

From Wiki...

"The JSF program was the result of the merger of the Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter (CALF) and Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) projects.[2][3] The merged project continued under the JAST name until the engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) phase, during which the project became the Joint Strike Fighter.[4]

The CALF was an ARPA program to develop a STOVL strike fighter (SSF) for the United States Marine Corps and replacement for the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The United States Air Force passed over the F-16 Agile Falcon in the late 1980s, essentially an enlarged F-16, and continued to mull other designs. In 1992 the Marine Corps and Air Force agreed to jointly develop the Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter, also known as Advanced Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (ASTOVL), after Paul Bevilaqua persuaded[5] the Air Force that his team's concept[6] had potential as an F-22 complement, stripped of the lift system. Thus in a sense the F35B begat the F35A, not the other way around.

The Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program was created in 1993, implementing one of the recommendations of a United States Department of Defense (DoD) "Bottom-Up Review to include the United States Navy in the Common Strike Fighter program."[7] The review also led the Pentagon to continue the F-22 Raptor and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet programs, cancel the Multi-Role Fighter (MRF) and the A/F-X programs, and curtail F-16 and F/A-18C/D procurement. The JAST program office was established on 27 January 1994 to develop aircraft, weapons, and sensor technology with the aim of replacing several disparate US and UK aircraft with a single family of aircraft; the majority of those produced would replace F-16s. Merrill McPeak has complained that Les Aspin's decision to force all three services to use a single airframe greatly increased the costs and difficulty of the project.[8]

In November 1995, the United Kingdom signed a memorandum of understanding to become a formal partner, and agreed to pay $200 million, or 10% of the concept demonstration phase.[4]

In 1997, Canada's Department of National Defense signed on to the Concept Demonstration phase with an investment of US$10 million. This investment allowed Canada to participate in the extensive and rigorous competitive process where Boeing and Lockheed Martin developed and competed their prototype aircraft.[9]"
 
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DerAdlerIstGelandet said:
Lets try and get this back on topic. If that's possible...
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Yea, this thread has been extremely hijacked!

If anyone has ever flown in a GA aircraft, you will find that it could be extremely difficult to see other aircraft in the distance, especially if there's any kind of haze or thin stratus. I don't find it unreasonable to say 80% of pilots shot down never saw their demise coming. Now having had an opportunity to fly mock dogfights, I would have to say if I was to fly in WW2 combat, I would avoid a dogfight at all costs, boom and zoom and the minute I lost advantage I'd "bug off." It sounds cowardly but its actually the way to fight and survive. As Von Richthofen said;

"Find the enemy and shoot him down, everything else
is nonsense."
 

Especially if the aircraft is painted any shade of grey.

We actually started painting ours from green to grey in Iraq because it made them so much harder to see.
 
I'd say that in WWII, there was very little possibility of anything like rear warning radar, so manual scanning of the sky behind you and especially behind and below and upsun was obviously not done as well as it should have been considering the loss rate to first-pass attacks by surprise.

One point I've wondered about but never really investigated is as follows. After D-Day, when the Allies were on the continent, did we move radar sites forward some dsicrete distance behind the front lines or did they stay on the coast of Britain as they were in 1940? If we advanced them, I'm wondering if there were any initial attempts to warn various fighter and bomber groups of impending attacks by enemy fighters from the radar operators.
 
Yes, mobile radar stations were deployed on the Continent after D-Day.
Even when pre-warned, and moving into position to evade, or counter a known attack, it was still possible to get bounced and shot down, without seeing the approach of the enemy.
On 18th August, 1940, Gerhard Schopfel of JG 26 did just that - shooting down four Hurricanes in three minutes!
The Hurricanes were from 601 Sqn, had been warned of the approach of the varied formation, with enemy fighters up-sun, and were commencing a turn to face the threat, when Schopfel dived down out of the sun, and dropped them all. One survivor, who baled out and survived, knew the Bf109s were there, but couldn't see them, even though he searched in the sun during the turn.
 
Beware of the Hun in the Sun indeed.

I believe polarized sunglasses became avialable in 1936, at least in the U.S.A., and I wonder if they were issued to WWII pilots. It will make an interesting search ...
 
The Luftwaffe gunsights had a retractable sun-lens...

If I remember right, some U.S. pilots had "Raybans" issued to them. My Mom has an original pair stashed away somewhere with other family memorabelia...there is also a pair of tropical USAAF goggles with green tinted lenses in that stuff, also.
 
I have always understood that anti glare sun glasses using polarised lenses were available to aviators, at least in the US, from 1936.

The Ray-Ban brand appeared slightly later but I think before the war.

Cheers

Steve
 
Glider said:
I could never understand why gliders are normally white. A stupid colour for aircraft that fly close to each other often close to clouds
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White reflects a lot of the heat from sunlight away. With a lot of gliders made from composites now, you certainly don't want them to get too hot on the airport apron.
That's why a lot of aircraft are white, with stripes.

When I was at NKP Thailand, there were black CIA ( or whoever) A-28s ( T-28s), i've seen a groundcrew member demonstrate how he could slow fry a egg, on the wing on a hot sunny day. Heard of others doing the same on the olive drab flat surfaces of APCs, Jeeps, Hueys. There's nothing like getting in a dark colored aircraft that's been sitting on the ramp in the sun all day. You feel like you're breathing in a furnace.
 
stona said:
I have always understood that anti glare sun glasses using polarised lenses were available to aviators, at least in the US, from 1936.

The Ray-Ban brand appeared slightly later but I think before the war.

Cheers

Steve
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A little history on the Bausch Lomb "Raybans" from ray-ban sunglasses


The pair Mom has is still in it's issue case and has a USAAC ID and inventory number along with the manufacturer name, it's from about 1939.
 
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You are correct but it is allowed to change the underneath of a glider, the lower half of the Fuselage and paint designs on the fin. Personaly I suggested that we did this to our DG 200 using green as the basis but the other members wanted it to stay white, so white it stayed. I should add that it was an expensive change so I didn't blame them.

Our older Club K13's were blue and red and a private Skylark was a Yellow so we did try where we could
 
You could paint the undersides like the Ta 152s, or Doras that were detailed to protect Me262s in the RTB and landing phase.
But i'm sure that'd be a little too wild for most of the gliders owners. And reds are the most expensive colors.
 
wuzak said:
Rear warning radars were fitted to British and German nightfighters, and also to RAF night bombers (at least to the heavies).

Not to s/e fighters, though.

Monica tail warning radar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Didn't at some point Bomber Command pilots become suspicious the the tail warning radars were being detected by the Luftwaffe, and actually aided the night figters finding them. Were they right or wrong ?
 
tyrodtom said:
Didn't at some point Bomber Command pilots become suspicious the the tail warning radars were being detected by the Luftwaffe, and actually aided the night figters finding them. Were they right or wrong ?
Click to expand...

They certainly did....it was called Monica and the german "flensburg" passive detection system was used to track down British Bombers using it.

Monica was a range-only tail warning radar for bombers, introduced by the RAF in the spring of 1942. Officially known as ARI 5664, it operated at the boundary between VHF and UHF frequencies of around 300 MHz. It was developed at the Bomber Support Development Unit in Worcestershire.

Unfortunately for the RAF, the Germans quickly developed a passive radar receiver, Flensburg (FuG 227), which was used by Luftwaffe nightfighters from spring 1944 onward to home in on bombers using Monica. On the 13 July 1944, a Junkers Ju 88G-1 nightfighter equipped with Flensburg accidentally landed at an RAF airbase. After examining the Flensburg equipment, the RAF ordered Monica withdrawn from all Bomber Command aircraft.

Monica was also used by the U.S. Army Air Corps as the AN/APS-13, where - known as Archie - it was also used as the radar altimeter for the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

British nearest equivalent equvalent (operationally at least) to Flensburg was Serrate. Serrate was quite effective, but in 1944 British ECM measures (principally "window) had become very effective. this effectiveness had an unfortunate side effect....downgraded german radars also meant downgraded Serrate interceptions, and from January through to September, Mossie intercepts dropped right away because of that effect.
 
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