I’ll have a look at the Growlers on Monday.

Yes, Defence costs money and if we want to do the good stuff we have to back off on the dole payments to put it into ships, planes and APCs.

I think the technology of fast jets has become inherently less prone to the sort of crashes that terrorized air forces in the 50s and 60s. Things like engine flameouts used to happen all the time back in the day and aerodynamically a lot of old jets left a lot to be desired in slower and/or higher AoA flight regimes. Eg the F104 at high AoA the wing airflow would disrupt the high-mounted tailplane airflow resulting in a crash, ad the Mirage III used to glide like a brick.

By the time of the teen series fighters a lot of these problems had been ironed out, often at the expense of the highest end performance numbers. Looking at the inlets of an F16 and F18 compared to something like a Mirage III illustrates how tolerant these engines are of crappy airflow compared to the older designs. Similarly the aerodynamic configuration of these aircraft is quite conventional, without fancy tricks like delta wings, giving them a much better slow speed and high AoA handling regime. The result is that a lot of flight situations which would result in the loss of an aircraft in the 60s and 70s are now easily handled, so we don’t see the ‘stupid’ attrition caused by less than fully informed design.

I also wonder how the lead-in fighter concept has affected fighter attrition, a couple of years in a Hawk before stepping up to a Super Hornet might be the leavening that pilots need to avoid crashing situations.

I was curious about this figure and found this site which claims that 517 were lost through enemy action or accidents with 493 ejections. One squadron alone, VFP-63, had 60 ejections!

http://gator.crouze.com/chapter7.html

That list of survivors alone makes the figure of 88% wrong since there are over 200 hundred survivors on there rather than less than 150 that this article says would be left.The Wiki crusader page lists 89 F8D, 136 F8E, 87 F8C and 61 F8B as rebuilt, so perhaps a plane had a major crash and gets rebuilt so looks to have been written off when it hasn’t. Indeed I think some planes could be crashed and written off twice.

Just as a comparison the ‘ADF Serials’ site for the RAAF Mirage shows that aircraft had crashes so bad that they were rebuilt only to crash later and be destroyed. Others crashed and while not destroyed were deemed beyond economic repair and converted to components.

Interesting.

I don’t think Crusaders would have saved the RN’s bigger carriers, common sense was entirely absent and stupid politics was rampant in that array of decisions. Even the Conservative decision to save the FAA was only very half-arsed since they didn’t reinstate the Eagle’s refit or keep the FAA up to aircraft strength.

How would the 2 seat Crusader be better than the Phantom for the RN, other than having guns and better turning performance? It would be slower, shorter range, have less capable avionics and carry less weapons.

I read about Dick Lord and Top Gun recently, would that have been in ‘Phoenix Squadron’ by Rowland White?

It does make sense for the FAA pilots to do the whole shebang with the USN now that that’s their only outlet, I assume when the JSF come along the RN will start joining the QWI courses again.

Up until 2010 or so RN-FAA pilots wouldn’t have needed to go to Top Gun, they would just have done the British QWI course. IIRC there were several QWIs with 800 and 801 sqns in 1982 who did quite well in air to air combat.

For me the only thing ‘wrong’ with the Vigilante was that rearward ejecting weapons tunnel, it made the plane a one trick pony just at the time when that trick was being taken over by Polaris missiles and the USN needed planes for other tricks over Vietnam. I wonder how the Vigilante would have been developed if it had a more conventional bomb bay that could carry regular dumb bombs.