You can still have the macho parts of the movie, like a bunch of them shirtless playing beach volleyball. Pick someone for the star pupil role that is popular with the girls and can play the beefcake part. Rake in the teen girls and single gals. But throw a wrench in there. Have Maverick show off the difference between brain and brawn by giving his star pupil a not so private session of a good old fashioned ass kicking in an old man’s sport, like racquetball. You can reel in the pupil by having him claim he’s the base champion prior to the challenge. Have him play one-dimensional, some cheap way to play that he uses to dominate. Then have Maverick counter that move like it’s child’s play and then go on to humiliate him in front of all his peers.

I like the theme of brain over brawn. You can add a spin to the training, where the Air Force is tasked with a week long joint training session, only they bring in F-22’s not F-35A’s. The lesson to learn is how to use stealth to its full advantage. The Navy pilots and the AF pilots square off where its a flight of four F-35C’s against just one F-22. Time after time their radar warning receiver goes off too late and they take hit after hit. The Navy pilots openly complain how they can literally see 360º around them, as if their plane was Wonder Woman’s inviso jet, yet they cannot see the F-22. Maverick debriefs them and clues them in on what they are doing wrong, simply stating, “You’re not looking in the right places, obviously.”

In the very last training session the star pupil watches each of his flight mates go down one at a time and when he’s the last remaining one he gets an idea. Suddenly he pulls back on the throttle, lights the afterburner, evades the F-22 pilot’s awareness of where he went, and zoom climbs to the jet’s ceiling where he gets a virtual shot off to win the day. He flames out and it causes Maverick to go into a flashback of how he lost Goose. Only this time his star pupil recovers and flies home in one piece.

That can lead to a bar scene where they sing, end up spotting some hot young ladies, and predictably act like dogs in heat.

For all the moaning about the Hornet and Rhino it’s been a pretty effective tandem after a couple of decades of service. I’d be curious to see a Flanker next to a Super Hornet on a carrier deck and to hear how the perform in comparison. I’m surprised the Chinese could procure some, but the USN never smuggled any over.

Post 9-11 we find the United States surrounded by potential enemies. What does the establishment do? They create a utopian-level police force where its least a problem, in the circles of political adversaries, and open the borders to about anyone and everyone sneaking through. Then you encourage union labor attitudes that prefers to hack the performers out of groups because they are too productive. Plus you move work overseas that deals with the most private and sensitive aspects of the lives of the average Americans. (Let’s make it easy for the enemy to search our databases regarding our citizens?) And you make it ridiculously difficult for military people leaving to find employment that is meaningful. And the scientists that don’t follow unscientific-but-politically-correct dogma are ramrodded out of industry and forced into academic arenas where the liberal anti-establishment crowd festers. If I hadn’t seen it happening I’d think its a fox in a hen disguise. Rather than tighten the obvious security problems, they brought them in on the guise of free trade, a politically correct motive.

You can bet for sure that someone in, or was in, the RQ-170 program knows the weaknesses of their program and can probably deduce the problem. But the C-Y-A attitudes are going to try to mute those voices. That’s the problem when you create terror within your own organization when you point out that someone in the upper hierarchy (that is already paranoid they could lose their job) has made a poor strategic decision.

If the Hornet had looked like a shrunken Tomcat nobody would probably be too concerned about the change to SH. The Hornet looked cool. The SH looked hacked.

If not for cancelled programs that beg ‘what if’ this forum would get boring fast. We love the talk about such topics as the F-14D and Avro Arrow because they were superior engineering wiped from the face of the earth by secrecy. Don’t hate the what if. It drives the crowd here!

No, no, no – no need to remove an armament mount.

You’re not even using the #5 station (front center-line) station in an air to ground mission anyway. At most you give up one TALD, which you can use on several other stations. It makes more sense to use it for LANTIRN than to leave it out of use.

After looking around the IR seeker probably could have been swapped out with LANTIRN parts. It looks like it may have been capped off on some F-14D’s anyhow:

The F-14 was a heavier aircraft so it’s going to take more man hours to fly. As weight scales so does the maintenance, that’s perfectly normal. But the Super Hornet was promised to fly with ten or eleven hours per flight hour and that is no longer the norm. Just as the original Hornet, man hours per flight hour have steadily climbed. The Tomcat was being purposely neglected which increased failures on it and raised the man hours associated to flying it. The sad reality is it would have been relatively just as affordable as the Super Hornet if it had gone through a redesign, too. But budgets were short and political games were long. Grumman didn’t have the politicians by the pocketbook like Mickey D.