In the 50s the OA-10s (in the SAR role) were mostly painted in a light gray-blue, with large bright yellow bands around the rear fuselage, wingtips/floats and across the centre section. The bands were edged in black. White or light grey undersides, IIRC.

Remember, the F-86 was a by-product or development of the FJ-1 Fury program! The FJ-2 Fury was as you stated a ‘navalized’ F-86 Sabre.

True … but the FJ-2 was essentially different from the FJ-1 in almost every way imaginable. Like several other aircraft it was designated as a variant of an existing design for political reasons – it was thought more likely to gain production funds if it wasn’t considered a completely new aircraft.

What’s the story with the ‘Fiddler’? It’s a fighter with the company designation Tu-128 and service designation Tu-28(?)

Yup, that’s right. The story, as recounted in Ben Rich’s book, is that a Skunk Works mathematician/radar specialist (Denys Overholser) had been studying a scientific paper in which were buried the tools for accurately predicting electromagnetic reflection from a surface. The paper was written in 1966 by Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering, and based on much earlier work by Maxwell ( a Scot) and Sommerfeld (German). In 1990 Ufimtsev went to work at UCLA and only then became aware of what a help he had been!

There was most definitely some theoretical/lab work being performed, as I know someone who was involved. I don’t know what they were doing, or how they were doing it, but it was certainly going on c. late 1980s.

In 1969 (?) they got the wreckage of a D-21 drone which would have revealed a lot about RAM and early RCS reduction shaping/structural techniques – if they didn’t know about it already. I believe they were certainly technologically capable of producing something with similar RCS to the SR-71 and D-21 – there was a lot of work done in the early 1970s on a stealthy air-launched recce UAV called Voron, which looked an awful lot like …. the D-21!

As far as aircraft with F-117/B-2 levels of stealthiness go, I have no idea. I should imagine one of the many stumbling blocks was the fly-by-wire technology, which lagged that in the West by some years. As Lockheed found out in the early days, it’s a very difficult thing to produce a shape with low all-aspect RCS, and quite another very difficult thing to get it to fly!

I know during 1990/91 during the Gulf War it was something that was often mentioned when compared to its strike partner, the Tornado

Not quite sure where you got that from – Buccaneer did not do any low-level ops in GW1 so diffiult to compare the two.

Bucc was certainly a ‘legend’ at low level in its day, but so is Tornado. Beware, there is a lot of inter-type banter between the two so don’t be too swayed by the Bucc-mates’ version!. A mate who flew both would defend the Bucc loudly and vigourously in the bar, but if given the choice of what he would fly to war would choose the Tonks every time.

As a Sea Eagle platform in the anti-ship role the Bucc was quantifiably better, but for low-level overland….mmm…not so sure.

they did this genius STVOL plane too, the only one able to reach Mach 2!

Sorry, I’m going to have to stop you there.

The pic is of the Balzac V, which did not go anywhere near Mach 2. The only ‘2’ it was associated with was the number of test pilots it killed.

It was a testbed for the Mirage IIIV which did go mach 2. There were two built, they were hugely heavy, and one crashed. And so the ‘genius’ programme came to an end!!

Interesting! didn’t know that US was operating Global Hawks out of Pakistan. Thanks for the identification.

The UAVs are almost certainly Predators. If you put the measuring tool over them you get a span of just under 50 ft and a length of about 26 ft – the same as the MQ-1. RQ-4 measures 116 ft span and 44 ft in length.