Will you be building it as an F1a?

Very convincing. There’s weight to much of what you say. On the other hand, I seem to recall that ‘buying British’ was actually quite a powerful thing in those days.

Are we not talking of the World Cup era, ‘Backing Britain’ etc etc? – this does not seem to sit too squarely with all the conspiracy theories and to me the whole thing smacks more of bungling and ****-up. We had a few before and we’ve had a few since, from governments of all colours.

Actually, scrapping British was more the game in the sixties. Try looking up all the home grown projects that were scrapped in that decade.

Still don’t see what the political gain would have been.

Politicians (of whatever colour) rarely do things that don’t carry a benefit for themselves.

It’ll still take a while before that is released to the public domain.
I’d go for political pressure from the other side of the water.

I swear…I have the uncanny ability to kill a thread dead in the water…..

I can’t even keep track of how many threads I’ve done that too…..for whatever reason….lol.

It can’t be for lack reason in your posts. I think you are right, the USAF will not go for an Airbus, even if it does offer more.

“Reliably” sounds well, but you know that the additional drag is a function of the Mach number, and as that I guess the 270 gallons refer to normal cruising speed. That external tanks use up half of their content “for themselves” is a rule of thumb, it is hard to calculate exactly. When the regime is changed from subsonic to supersonic, the allowance might increase.

Seeing as anything above cruise is likely to use up the fuel in minutes, I had assumed that. I am also aware of the drag rule, how to calculate drag and the effects of drag at transonic speeds.
The thing about the Lightning is that the difference between clean and normal load is very little. There are very few combat aircraft like that.

I’m well aware that it had many other limitations (not least fuel/range) but that didn’t stop it from being an impressive beast.

Apart from the range, the rest of the limitations centered around a lack of updates. It was originally thought that it would have a ten year service life so major modifications not even contemplated.

Well the Lightning actually has better climb performance than an F-15 which says a lot.
There are other areas where the Lightning didnt shine like carrying weapons over distance. 🙂

Actually, it has enough trouble carrying itself over a distance.
Average flight time for a T5, about 40 minutes. The rest weren’t that much better.

A couple my Victor bits. One is a compressor blade from XL232 after it’s demise on the runway. The other is the HP emblem fitted to the yolk