My uncle got back to me this afternoon. Below are his comments:

Kurt… After about 5000 hours in the Scooter I am not aware of a “never exceed” airspeed. The Tanks had a limiting speed of something in excess of 550 kts. We carried a centerline tank in Viet Nam and I usually got about 550 to 600 kts on pull outs over in Indian country. My patented way to stay alive in Laos, or Cambodia was never below 550 kts below 10,000 ft. Seems to have worked…

As an aside, I got supersonic a couple of times with no tanks aboard. We were so small we didn’t have a sonic boom.. we “pinged”. Nothing came off the A/C. Remember we were a low level Nuke delivery pilots. Deliver the weapon and bug out as fast as possible to avoid the effects.. Couldn’t get away from the flash, but could ameliorate the heat and a little of the blast by getting as far away as possible at time of detonation.

Not much help but we didn’t worry about a max airspeed. I’m sure there was one but we couldn’t get to it…

Ed

Hope this helps!

I’ve got two books on the A-5/RA-5 that both show that it was tested with conventional air to ground munitions hung off four underwing hardpoints. The reason that the RA-5C was rarely seen with underwing tanks is, according to these books, the drag was enough to render the range boost provided by the tanks almost negligible, so they flew with internal fuel only.

The books are the Squadron/Signal Mini on the Vigilante and the Osprey book on the various units that operated the aircraft.

Somewhere, and I apologize for not remembering where, on the net (some defense site DID or one of the others) mentioned that the F-22 was cleared to launch from any aspect, any G load, from the side bays as the rail extended into the airstream and the missile launched off the rail. The center bay, on the other hand, was limited to a 7G maneuver. There was no specification on just what sort of 7G maneuver, but I would suspect that it would be something other than flying straight and level. 😀

Two peace activists who broke into RAF Fairford in a bid to stop B.52’s taking off to bomb Iraq have been found guilty. How would you stop a B.52 taking off?:confused:

If they were terrorists, they’d commit suicide by jumping into and FOD’ing the engines. 😀

so when does Civillian aircraft part of threat mix? it only happened in 21st century. Stealth has been around since 70s and 80s.

Since Matthias Rust flew a Cessna 172 from Finland to Moscow and landed on Vasilevski Spusk in 1987. He could have had any sort of payload up to about 1000 lbs stashed in the Cessna and taken out the capital of the Soviet Union.

The point here is that if the Soviet air defenses can’t pick up a Cessna at the height of the Cold War, then how are we to reasonably believe their claims today when they say they can spot something that’s been specifically designed to evade detection?

Something we agree on…….

I’m tired of hearing about some company or team complaining when they don’t get a certain contract. We’ve seen it with this, we saw it with the RoKAF’s F-X competition….we will likely see it again at some point.

Where does it end?

The CSAR-X is now in it’s second round of suits with the GAO threatening, IIRC, to compel the AF to redo the RFP.

I can understand Sikorsky’s desire for the S-92, they put a lot of money into it and sales are, um, flat. I can also understand the US-101 team in that building a new manufacturing line for a couple airframes isn’t going to look on the P&L for the program. But twice this was put to bid, and twice it was awarded to Boeing, the second time after it went through additional scrutiny.

You’re right, where will it end?

I have this weird dream of the heat death of the universe and the CSAR-X is still in litigation…

For what it’s worth, this may all be a moot point or nothing more than an interesting exercise in “what if?” as it appears the original article wasn’t accurate…

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070619/67480943.html