Charlie Hotchkiss wrote: > Nimble. Hmm. Wasn't the F16 so responsive that it became the first > fighter to put its pilot to sleep if he yanked to hard on the > controls.
Certainly not the first. GLOC has been an known issue from the very early days of aviation. There was an experimental fighter design in the 40's (someone help me out here with the name...) that had the pilot lying on his stomach to increase the allowable G loads. A pilot in a normal seat without a G suit can lose conciousness in as few as 10 seconds at 7G (I'm making those numbers up, but they're in the ballpark). You can do this in a Cessna 172 in a dive, if the wings stay on the plane. But certainly the F-16, owing to the neutral stability, was capable of pulling this hard through a much larger portion of its flight envelope. Most aircraft don't have the elevator authority to do this except at very high speeds (and at the AoA's you need to pull for those G's, you don't stay at those speeds very long). > Also, A means attack, not fighter. The A4 was Douglas' hot rod nuke > bomber. Its primary design goal was delivering a largish H-bomb using > an interesting attack sequence. The original design actually was for a fighter. But the Navy had already bought into the supersonic world with the F8U Crusader project, and didn't want a subsonic jet (despite the fact that the A-4 could fly rings around any production fighter at the time). So they told Douglas to submit it for the carrier based nuclear attack role that you mention. Actual deployed A-4's, though, ended up being used primarily for vanilla ground interdiction roles in Vietnam. Later, they got picked up by the Marines for ground based light attack and close air support. The Blue Angles flew it for ~15 years, until they replaced it with the Hornet. The Air Force bought a bunch for use as aggressor training aircraft, and the 2-seat A-4J still serves in a few squadrons as an advanced jet and carrier qualification trainer (although these are all being replaced by T-45 Goshawks, I believe). Very few A-4's every served in the nuclear deterent role, as it happens. > Alternately it had hard points for fuel tanks, bombs and missiles > for conventional ground attack. Dog fighting was contemplated, but > more in terms of self defense as it was strictly sub-sonic. Actually, by virtue of the Air Force employment as agressor planes, the Skyhawk probably has as much dogfighting experience as any other in-service aircraft in the world. It's one of those designs that Just Worked for pretty much everything it was used for, which is why I like it so much. It's a good, simple, unambitious aircraft. If it were a programming language, it would be C to the F-16's C++. :) Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
