And nothing will change as long as the Air Force has its hand on CAS and tactical transport and akin missions. An Army Aviation Corps is *so* overdue!

BRAVO.. and give them their C-27s while your at it.

Yeah.. I can go to bed now… Good Night 😉

The ALQ-99 are powered by the little propellors on front of the pods….

Which, with the pods themselves, cause lots of drag… which in turn reduces range. This is exacerbated by the fact that a 5-pod F-18 cannot carry external fuel.

AESA and EODAS

Here is an update from the FY2011 budget numbers.

Looks like they pulled their heads out of their a$$e$ and added procurement for the F-15C and F-15E AESA upgrades in the FY2011 budget.

Here is a breakdown of the Program & Year of procurement.
Program FY2011 FY2012 FY2013 FY2014 FY2015<br />
F-15C 14 14 17 17 14<br />
F-15E 6 10 13 12 13<br />


Installation will be about two years after procurement.

Doesn’t make sense. The Raptor has no passive homing A2A weapons (except for the HOJ capability of the AMRAAM which I doubt they have been using there).

Also sounds awfully like 1on1 stuff. Does either air force actually do such missions? Would be extremely surprised if the USAF did. Don’t really know about the French. Seems like a made up story to me all together.

The Aim-9M can only be used passively. It can also be queued from the EW system, but it has to lock on before launch.

Production started in 2007 for the airframes that will be delivered to the USAF.

2007 = 2 F-35s
2008 = 12 F-35s
2009 = 17 F-35s
2010 = 30 F-35s

At it’s height of production, the F-35 is planned to be built at a rate of 229 per year.