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Gratuitious Cold War Warplanes Videos


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Good show, I remember the series when it was first on, I seem to recall another one was on the Huey. Sean Bean playing a part where he doesnt die. :D

 

Im still amazed we pulled that off. Although reading a contemporary American paper, there was a description of a Sea Harrier in the US (it doesnt say where) out manoeuvring an F16 at low altitude. So maybe its not quite so surprising.

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It would depend on the speed of the engagement. Obviously, the slower the fight, the greater the Harrier's advantage. My platoon commander in OCS was a Phantom pilot, and once described an engagement with a Harrier where the AV-8 literally turned on a dime in front of him.

IIRC, the Sea Harriers in the Falklands didn't use any vectoring in their dogfights, though. As described, it was mainly tactics and probably good vectoring by controllers.

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No, they didnt viff once as best as I can recall.

 

Areed on vectoring though. Ironically from Wards book, the RN had grave misgivings about the radar in the Sea Harrier, but Ward's squadron (I think on Hermes) persisted with it and got it tuned, and it provided good results.

When you think that they didnt have a single airborne radar that wasnt mounted on a harrier, the results look even more remarkable.

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Ward was on invincible - his bio of the conflict is continually whining about how Hermes only had half the taskings with two-thirds of the squadrons, plus a claim that his lot tended to make it back on the fumes in the tanks, whereas Hermes' squadrons were far more "by the book".

 

He makes it clear that the radar was a tricky beast, but insists that invincible had techs on board who seemed to be able to make it work, to the point where they ignored command who had told them not to use it because all it did was give your position away.

 

He claims that the surface search mode worked fine when properly tuned, with significant range (might even have been 100+ miles). Quite why one set of techs could make it work and not the others is a mystery.

 

His discovery of the internet hasn't exactly endeared him to a lot of people - I'm afraid he's been accused of blinkered service-related bias, but given that's how the respective Chiefs behave, it's not really a surprise.

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Ive seen this many times, but I never noticed that. The Tomcat was a bitch when you got it into a spin, standing orders were if sweeping forward the wing didnt do any good, you have to punch out. One of the more realistic bits of Top Gun. Well, other than the gay volleyball anyway.

 

Maybe they should do a follow up where an F15J Squadron goes back in time to 1944 Japan. :D

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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