I wonder if the 104’s wing would be the same size as the F-22’s vertical tail? Looks damn near the same shape.

F-22s tails are about the same size as an F-16 wing iirc, or 14m2. Wing area for the F-104 is 18m2 ie 9m2 per wing.

Wing-size is drag. So every designer is looking for the smallest possible wing related to the mission demands. 😉

Which in case of the Starfighter shows what goals the designers were after. Hasn’t been repeated on its successors.

F-22.

I don’t think the F-22s wing is best described as tiny.
In fact, low wing loading was one of the design goals. Can’t really say the same about the F-104 😉

All weapon systems, including the gun, are disabled when the undercarriage is deployed on a fighter. This avoids any accidental use of weapons when the aircraft is on the ground. In most cases where defections have occured, and the defecting fighter has been intercepted, it is usually requested to deploy its undercarriage to disable its weapons systems.

Thanks for the explanation, I was just thinking about safety pins and didn’t see any…

Trying to justify the existence of the M-346 by saying its in the same class as the Hawk is laughable, the plane shape and airfoil cross section are nothing similar. The Hawk was designed as a subsonic trainer and its designers were quite surprised when they discovered it was able to go transonic in a shallow dive. And using the supersonic T-50 fighter to compare to the M-346 is even funnier. The T-50 was built simply because the Koreans wanted to acquire current fighter technology from America, so the Americans helped them build a low rated fighter same as they did for Taiwan with their Ching Kuo. You are quite desperate to make the M-346 look good by putting it in the same class as the T-50. Oh, and the US and China are going to buy advanced trainers, like that directly justifies the subsonic M-346, doesnt it.

Basically, M-346 = Yak-130 and Yak-130 plus afterburners = L-15. Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
Top speed of the L-15 is Mach 1.4, top speed of the T-50 is Mach 1.4-1.5. In other words, basically the same.
So the main difference between the M-346 and the T-50 as a trainer is the Italians didn’t have a supersonic requirement.

The Hawk is not an advanced trainer, it is a primary trainer the same as the L-59 and MB-339

So which advanced trainer is in service with the RAF f.e.? And what would that make the Tucano? 😉

They’re part of the ECM system. Additional antennas have been added at the back.
More info in this thread: http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?t=99346

why? is not more stealthy? what about the F-35?

What about the F-22?
DSI is simpler, cheaper, and lighter.

Then there is this. Burst length. In a combat application, we fired long bursts, not the short little squirts we used when practicing on a gunnery range. We had 100 rounds to shoot on these missions and usually tried to have that last for three passes. In between these passes, we made aim point corrections based on what the wind or the gun needed. The idea was to score the most hits and win the most money from the rest of the pilots.

Not so in a combat situation. We don’t play for nickels in combat. Here we fired a long burst to get max rounds on target…at least a one second burst or more. On a typical gunnery mission, I might fire initial “sighter” bursts of 10-20 rounds to see where the rounds were going…but at Red Flag, where we used combat tactics, I held the trigger down for a good two seconds or more while trying very hard to hold the pipper on the target. We wanted a one pass kill and were not interested in playing games with whose gun spun up the quickest.

How long before the gun is overheating? Or is overheating no issue?

Thanks for sharing your first hand insights! 🙂

@eagle afaik the demonstrated supercruise is 1.6M with YF-22 (which has more sweep), all other figures being speculation. Max speed on burners for the F-22A is varied claims from 1.8M to 2.5M with around 2M being likely. Advertised supercruise I’m aware is 1.7M for F-22A but then the advertised max level speed of the F-15A/C is 2.5+M when it is 1.78M in service (unless the engine management is overridden, which if it is the engines have to be fully torn down on landing). At this point I’m prepared to consider actual performance figures for the F-22 ~1.6M supercruise and ~2M on burners but it’s “classified” so we’ll never know for about thirty years unless you fly one.

check the wiki page respectively the sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22#Characteristics
While the YF-22 had more wing sweep, it had a fatter fuselage, bigger tails, draggier canopy design and of course less thrust.
Practical max. speed for the F-15 is M2.35, but it maybe limited to conserve airframe life.