Grmblmblmbl…. central fuselage 😉

Marcus wasn’t the only one who had access to Soviet airbases in Europe, you know. Here’s me at Gross Dölln.

Latvia had a red, diagonal left-handed swastika as it’s roundel in the interbellum. Not that they were really consistant with it though: some Latvian aircraft had a cross-like marking instead. On some aircraft the swastika (or cross) was on a white disc, while on others it was simply painted over the normal paint the aircraft wore. The pic shows one of Latvia’s Gladiators.

Estionia did use the swastika (the same one as the Finnish, but darker blue) as a national symbol between 1921 and 1940, but never had it as a roundel on it’s aircraft.

Yeah, you’re right Alex. It’s just that i can’t stand it when someone is trying to be more stubborn than me 😉

Although Sweden and Poland have regular exercises from highwaystrips or other dispersed airfields, many more countries have got at least some experience. The RAF tested a Jaguar from a stretch of motorway, and repeatedly had their Harriers operate from forward locations. In the East, Bulgaria also had at least two highway strips, and in former East Germany there were a number of highwaystrips and reserve airbases which were used during exercises regularly.

Here are some pics of exercise ‘DOBAS 1984’, where several NATO aircraft operated from a stretch of the German A1 Autobahn near Ahlhorn in northern Germany. German Transalls, Phantoms and Alpha Jets, Dutch F-16s, USAF A-10s and C-130s definately did partake in the exercise.

…and as Sens said the original prototype J-8 shows many similarities to the Ye-152 at first glance and to me that is only explainable if we consider that the firsts J-8 followed more the original Ye-152 concept even if the Chinese modified the aerodynamic data and aerodynamic concept of the Ye-152 much later in the design once the J-8 final configuration was frozen.

Nice theory, but we’ve got two pics of J-8 prototypes in this thread proving you wrong: the shabby looking 052 in the shack, and 053 (which i’ve checked myself as being a prototype) which is preserved in the Beijing Military Museum. These prototypes are, at least structurally, identical with production J-8 and apart from the canopy framing also to the later series of J-8I (which you can see up close at the Changping museum north of Beijing, in case you’re interested). There is no ‘final configuration’ for the sucknose-Finbacks: they always had the slender fuselage and all the other properties identifying them as Finbacks rather than Ye-152As.

The more bumps, the more i like. Nimrod MRA4 i like!