Engineers bring a wide range of new technologies to the table during the Concept Exploration stage of the design cycle. The technologies that find their way onto an airplane go through an exhaustive vetting process using experienced aircrew employed by the contractor.

And for the manufacturer…and hence the engineer and those “experienced aircrew”…their entire purpose for living is to sell their machine and make a profit. The more interesting and novel goodies they can incorporate into their design, the better chance they have of selling it. Their focus is on getting the buyer to pull out his check book, not necessarily on how to best fly the jet.

I remember reading pilots often turned some “situational awareness” stuff off in Vietnam, it was appearantly more a distraction then help ITO.

You may be thinking of the radar warning gear…it had an aural and visual warning display that could be very distracting in an environment where multiple radar systems were encountered. The number of AAA and SAM radar alerts sometimes became too confusing to sort out, particularly in light of everything else going on. Not coincidentally, this was a situation where a second crew member (the WSO) became invaluable.

Linking to crackpot conspiracy lunatics (with an extra helping of jingoistic idiocy to boot) is generally not considered as a valid rebuttal. That page would make 911 deniers proud.

Do you honestly believe that the FAA would certify planes that decide on a whim to run to the ground and crash?

You’ve convinced me. Computers are the way to go. Programming uber alles.

Ah so a malfunction is proof computers can’t work as well as a human? Humans never malfunction and the majority of aviation accidents aren’t due to human error?

Yeh I saw the smiley but I was curious as to what you meant, the airbus reference had the whiff of bashing about it.

Your post has the whiff of someone looking for an ax to grind about it.

The computer does a much better job in managing systems and maintaining track of situational awareness than a dozen aircrew members can do…

Here is an answer to that belief…

AIRBUS

😀

With all due gratitude & respect, the F-4, F-104 & A-10 are nothing like modern combat aircraft.

No argument there.

But the point here isn’t aircraft capabilities then or now…it’s the capabilities of the enemy and the problems with dealing with them. These capabilities have increased over time and have correspondingly increased the problem of dealing with them. In my experience, the really tough decisions that have to be made aren’t the sort of things that a computer or machine is designed to deal with…in situations like this, two human processors, while perhaps lacking the number crunching ability of some multi-core gizmo, possess the situational awareness and ability to triage tough calls that no computer can come close to.

How many(%) average F-4 pilots(at ‘front-line’ units – for example in the USAFE or in the Luftwaffe) had same experiences(with ‘slow loops’ or with ‘kind of prohibited’ other slow ACMs) in mid 70’s ?

Not very many!!

I don’t remember ever trying such a maneuver. The F-4 behavior at high AOA was unforgiving and wasn’t something we trained for…it was kind of a “don’t go there” subject.

Did some pilots give it a try? Sure. Maneuvers like this were part of the F-4 Fighter Weapons School aircraft handling syllabus (as were similar maneuvers in the F-104 FWS)…but the typical squadron pilots were not trained to attempt them.

For the benefit of the others I point to the message 132 with scan of the of the MiG-21F13 limits, which triggered my response.
5000 m is ~16400 feet and close to 20.000 feet I figured out before. The max allowed 7G were reached at ~ Mach 0,68 which is 420 kt TAS or 300 kt IAS at that height in general.

Your posts haven’t benefited anybody.

I asked you to explain why “pilots stick” to IAS. You refuse to do that. I can only conclude that you don’t know.

Here’s why…in a simplified explanation.

Maneuvering a fighter to its limits requires flying the aircraft to high angles of attack (AOA). AOA is directly related to the speed of the jet through the air…as the jet increases AOA, the flow of the air over the wing eventually separates from the wing surface. This is the ‘stall’. Obviously pilots need to know when this is about to happen and so they use an instrument that gives them the speed of the air over the wing…we call that ‘indicated airspeed’ (IAS).

IAS is what pilots generally use to maneuver with because it is a speed that directly relates to AOA and therefore the stall. There are some exceptions…for example, when flying a navigation route, pilots from the 60s would compute their flight time along the route in ground speed speed in order to find the time between navigation waypoints. In order to compute ground speed, the pilot has to know how fast he is going across the ground and then adds or subtracts wind speed. This speed ‘across the ground’ is true airspeed (TAS). Some fighters had a TAS indicator, some didn’t. If the pilot didn’t have a TAS indicator, he would take his altitude and temperature and compute what IAS would equal the TAS that he wanted to fly…or he could fly a fixed IAS and compute what TAS that would equal and then use that number to compute his navigation flight times.

But for air-to-air maneuvering, TAS becomes less useful because it doesn’t directly relate to AOA (and therefore g). Since the jet performs based on IAS, the pilot flys it using that speed. The relationship between IAS and TAS is this…as altitude increases, for a given IAS, TAS increases. For example, fighter flying at 400IAS close to sea level will have a TAS close to that speed…but at high altitude, that same 400IAS will now equate to a much higher TAS. A SR-71 doing 400IAS at low altitude will have a TAS of about that number …but at cruise altitude with the same IAS, it will be really honking!!

This relationship between IAS and TAS became significant in the Korean War when, for the first time, fighters were able to fly at high altitudes and relatively high speeds. Pilots quickly found that an IAS speed that allowed them to maneuver effectively at low altitude (meaning a good g capability) was far less effective at high altitude…at that speed, they had much less g capability and could easily stall the airplane. So they tried to fly faster to improve their maneuverability…but for those jets and their low power engines, they could only accelerate to subsonic speeds. They had to be very careful about hard maneuvers because these maneuvers would bleed off their IAS and as a result, their g capability. The outcome would be a slow speed…to speed up, the pilot would usually have to descend to accelerate.

From the well known ‘bible’ of those days (No Guts, No Glory) comes this example of the need to keep IAS up…