You’re right of course. I’ll probably be taking a look at the book in a few weeks, but i have to restrain myself since the particulair aviation bookstore here in the south of the Netherlands tends to suck my wallet empty in no time. And it’s impossible to resist if your sister lives five minutes from that shop…

I have only seen a few parts of the Aerofax MiG-19 book yet, so i could well be wrong. I would be surprised however if they got the J-6A/B/C and J-6I/II/III/IV/Xin right, especially since the J-6C for example is NOT equal to the J-6III. The Chinese really messed up their Farmers during the Cultural Revolution (yes, that is a pun 😉 ), including the designations: using them twice, not issuing designations to new variants… Absolutely terrible. Yefim Gordon did both the WoF and the Aerofax, but what he did re the J-6 in WoF doesn’t give me high hopes for the Aerofax book.

There was a decent article in one of the earlier Wings of Fame, and there is a good Aerofax book, although i think both have some mistakes concerning Chinese variants.

Originally posted by SOC
The wreckage is obviously sitting to the rear of a HAS or revetment, you can see it to the right in the picture, and is clearly near the perimeter fenceline. Are the taxiways and whatnot paved? No doubt. Is this poor FOXBAT sitting on one? I don’t think so.

Nope, i think you can see the edges of the hardened surface of the dispersal in the lower left corner of the pic, above the nosecone. It was definately on a hardened surface.

And it’s definately a PD model, i’ve added a blown-up detail of a 1980 MiG-25PDS conversion. It matches 🙂

Here’s one 😀

It’s a shame the U-2 (an old one, not of the U-2R/TR-1/U-2S breed) in the museum at Duxford was demodified from a two-seater. 56-6692 used to be an instructional airframe at Abingdon, after being the first two-seater conversion.
Here it is as it was when new…

Here as the twin-stick, SOC might remember it like this:

And here it is nowadays crammed up in the American Air Museum at Duxford.

The whole USAF-goes-jump jet to me looks an awful lot like a ploy to keep the STOVL F-35 alive. With the Marines air squadrons integrating more and more with the Navy, i’m not so sure if the eventual requirement for those JSFs (next to the handful of Royal Navy jumpJSFs) would in the end be worth the effort. Now if the USAF goes for this variant too, it’s future seems a lot more certain.

And yes, i smell the same Lockheed-lobby as the one which finally got the USAF to adopt the FB-22 🙂

Do you really think that a country which spent billions on airbases didn’t pave their dispersals and reventments? Of course that Foxbat was on concrete. Dusty, and possibly even camouflaged, but the surface is definately hardened. There was quite a bit of force on it regardless of the direct fuse of the bomb (500lbs is my uneducated guess too – anything heavier would have left less Foxbat), and sand would definately have been blown away much more than just the black ‘scratchmarks’ you see here.

Bwaaa… panel/part numbers, no c/ns…