In all honesty, he does raise a point. Free societies are by nature successful and efficient. The greatest expression of a free society is the wealth and well beings of its citizens. Freedom creates wealthy populations which in turn produce better pilots (among a host of other professions.)

Unfree societies are uniformily poor. Countries with caste systems that restrict the upward mobility of large portions of the population are the poorest among them. Caste systems are unfree societies that are not commie states. They are worse.

For example, the world’s “largest democracy” has the world’s largest reservoir people living in abject poverty. Immense and biblical poverty that had always attracted the world’s charity organizations. Children there actually die at birth twice as much as the largest commie state and its people live 8 years less.

Any nation that can trail a communist state in infant mortality and longevity is a very unfree state indeed.

So if it can’t raise the life expectancy of its people to even communist levels how can it pilots be any better?

Let’s see, Ramachandran. Your thread is about pilots from “free societes” versus those of “commie dictatorships.”

So obviously, you’ve defined the two sides in the debate. These two sides are well defined and have been since the Cold War.

1) Commies = unfree, poor, MiGs as represented by the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, therefore the pilots are poor.

2) Free= free, rich, Boeing or General Dynamics as represented by the US and NATO, therefore the pilots are superior.

The key is defining who belongs to what camp.

Now, take the world’s largest so-called “democracy.”

It is immensely poor, like the commies (actually even POORER than commies.)

It was on the side of the USSR during the Cold War. Friends of commies?

It flies MiGs. Obviously users of inferior commie products.

The world’s largest “democracy” therefore fits the “commie” bill to the T (except that it is even poorer) so the evidence is pretty overwhelming that its pilots are just as bad, right?

Thanks for bringing this discussion up.

One must face the realities of today and the reality is that free nations and democracies grow not only materially but their people grow intellectually too, which is sadly lacking in commie dictatorships.

Makes sense. Therefore, a country that is even [i]poorer[i] than a communist state is surely not a “free” society.

I would like to give an example. The worlds largest democracy is growing at above 8% annually and this growth is transforming the country, poverty is declining at an extremely rapid rate, the standard of living is rising, all this without compromising on fundamental human rights.

If it had not compromised on fundamental human rights then it would be as rich as Taiwan or South Korea today and not be more than twice as poor as communist China. But as the world’s largest reservoir of people living in absolute squalor, it had surely compromised on basic human rights.

It had five decades of “freedom” unlike China, it should be as wealthy as other free nations. It is not. It is only a fraction as wealthy as a communist state. It can not be a free nation by any stretch of the imagination.

Free nations do leave behind the vast majority of its population in extreme poverty.

It now has the largest number of billionaires in Asia, which is ample testimony to what is possible for an individual to achieve without the State stifling his/her individuality, that too within a decade following the economic reforms.

The most billionaires as well as the world’s largest amount of people in abject poverty (by far). That is not the sign of a free society but that of a backwards feudal state.

One must not forget that commie dictatorships do have poor people and rampant poverty

Forget? Do you actually come from a free country? No one from a real free nation ever forgets that communism create poverty.

Commie nations are by definition poor. The USSR, Eastern Euope, North Korea, you name it. Communism = poverty.

So how can you forget? You can’t, unless you come from a system that creates poverty more readily than communism and you actually believe that communism has a “wealthy” image :rolleyes:

Who ever started this thead have no idea what they are talking about…

Who ever started this thread wanted to pretend that a country that is among the most desperately poor in the world is “free” in the same way as the United States :rolleyes:

Good polit is based on training time allotted. Free countries have better pilots due to more funds avaliable to train them. So it really is about who ever has more dough. The wealthier the country the better the pilot.

Truly free nations are universally rich. A nation that is so poor that its people could only afford 1/3th or 1/10th of the computers and refrigerators and whose people live 8 years less than that of a communist country is not “free” by any definition. A feudal serfdom is not “free” even though it is not communist. A caste system where the vast majority are born poor and remain stuck in that station is not “free” even though it is not a communist..

Dragon you should know better than to be draged into some flame war on commies vs india…

True. But I feel the need to argue for the advantages of free states over feudal societies who pretend western-style freedoms while being the world’s largest prison of squalor and poverty.

Video of the L-15’s first flight in Mandarin (Windows media player required) :

http://tokyo.cool.ne.jp/aka666/pak/14423797.wmv

Cheers, Deino

Just watched it! Great film! Thanks for posting, Deino.

:rolleyes:

Between the F-15 and F-16, the two aircraft have an A2A record of probably 150 to 1 (and even that one is questionable.)

The Flanker has a kill ratio of 4-0 (all against MiG-29s) and the MiG-29 has a record of 0-12.

There is NOTHING that proves the Flanker or Fulcrum to be better in anyway.

The Su-27 is better than the F-15, the MiG-29 than the F-16 and F-18.

:rolleyes: Check out the kill records of the F-15 and F-16 and then look at the battle record of the MiG-29 and SU-27, please.

In WWII the Best pilots were German followed by the Japanese from far behind.

The pilots with the most “kills” where Germans and Japanese. Whether they were the best depended on the year of the war. They simply fought until they were killed and therefore tacked on huge kill numbers. American and British pilots were rotated after tours to train other pilots.

The Japanese skill level fell off sharply after Guadalcanal. Before the Solomons and especially before Midway, there are historians who say that the IJN pilots (both attack and fighter) of Nagumo Strike force had legimate claims as the best squadrons in the world. Carrier pilots were and are by definition trained longer than land-based ones.

But they were an elite group of several hundred. When they were worn away after Guadacanal (Midway destroyed Nagumo’s veterans and Guadalcanal grounded away the rest,) Japan had almost nothing.

People forget that the Japanese created superlative aircraft in the last years of the war — Ki-100, Ki-84, the N1K2, etc. — but atrocious pilots.

Germany had great pilots but their edge over Americans and British were slight to non-existent depending on the year of the war. By the end, the Luftwaffe was grounded to bits. Germany’s kill record came mostly against Russia. So did Finland’s.

In fact, Finland used what was considered the WORST US plane in the Pacific War, the Brewster Buffalo, to create 16 or so aces and hundreds of kills.

Argentina and Iraq had good pilots but in general they lost their respective wars due to the less advanced equipment and lesser numbers in high tech weaponry.

Argentina’s attack pilots were actually too good. At the Falklands, the A-4 pilots pressed their attacks so close that there were a dozen hits where bombs went in one side of British ships and out the other before exploding. They had armor-piercing bombs that were incorrectly fused for the situation. The Brits could have lost far more ships than the two kills by exocets.