For Tom

Tom, as to your question of why i think adding a FBW system to Mig-23 is interesting is purely my speculation. To my knowledge, Mig-23 have tremondous amount of thrust at high speeds (thanks to it’s not-a-turbofan engine), but it’s airframe is a swing wing that can’t pitch at high speeds due to the aerodynamic center problem that we’ve discussed. By adding FBW (by this i mean make the plane unstable)…then, what you got is a low drag high speed air superiority fighter that can also manuever well. As for low speeds, the Mig-23 have as much an advantage as the F-14, if the flight controls were done right…again, the FBW. Well, it’s an old airframe anyways…just curious about it. I’ve always feel that it’s a cool plane.

you’ve mentioned somethings about force/pressure, i assume you mean what does wing loading have anything to do with manueverability..well, it’s common saying that a fighter plane wants to be as low wing loading as possible while a strike aircraft wants it heavy. Well, that’s actually a “derived” assumption… a heavy mass (inertia) makes it damp better versus external forcing…meaning a heavy strike aircraft flying low (dense air) will shake around more if it’s too light. What does this gotta do with wing loading. Well, wing loading is weight/surface area…if you compare two identical planes but different weights, then wing loading goes up…actually, it’s the weight that matter here for inertial damping, but the surface area also matters for aerodyanmic damping. It just happens that for low wing loading:

Low weight means easy to change the acceleration vector of the dyanmics.
High surface area means more aerodynamic force.

It just happens that both create low wing loading (vice versa)…while low weight have more to do with dyanmic stability while high surface area have more to do with static stability (relatively).