MiG-31 wasn’t the first aircraft to have a data-link either. Iraqi MiG-25s which did seriously commit to an attack were generally shot down. Harassment at long range and then running off was more common. Amazing how the Iraqi MiG-25 has almost acquired some sort of mythical reputation thanks to Wikipedia.

Anyway the point is there not all data-links are created equal. The data-link on a MiG-31 certainly wouldn’t be passing along anything useful for engaging targets on the ground for example.

Does anybody know if JAGM-F will include a new motor and other changes? JAGM in its current iteration is basically a Hellfire-R with dual-mode seeker.

The MiG-23 could accelerate like a demon and could pull 8.5Gs in its lightened form. Not great at BVR and miserably short legs but I think it’s a tad underrated in a dogfight.

Maybe the F-14 would have been a better choice *if* the Japanese were willing to pay for better engines than the TF30s. But chances are that would have made it significantly more expensive than the F-15 they did buy.

Tornado would have been okay but it would still suffer from mediocre performance at high altitudes. Not ideal if they ever had to try to intercept MiG-25s.

Gerard what’s the story behind that F-15 with 12x AIM-120s? I don’t recall seeing a F-15 with that high-visibility orange since the early testing days of the program and it has turkey feathers on the engine nozzles. Yet the AIM-120s and FLIR pod mark it as something much newer than that.

Eagle do you have any more details about the F-15 using the Falcon family of missiles? I assume they were the same variants as deployed on the F-106?

What makes you say they are the same CFTs used on the F-15E?

Never heard of the Su-24 having any sort of speed advantage over the F-111. About the only thing that could catch up to a F-111 down low was a MiG-23 (if it didn’t run out of fuel first).

The Su-24 was more-or-less Sukhoi’s “ideal” strike aircraft for that time and successor to the Su-17 series which started as a quick way to incorporate variable-sweep wings into an existing design while new designs were still being worked on.