We all like to talk about how american combat aircraft are the best, which they are, but which ones just werent that good?
We all like to talk about how american combat aircraft are the best, which they are, but which ones just werent that good?
We all like to talk about how american combat aircraft are the best, which they are, but which ones just werent that good?
>but which ones just werent that good?
The A-10
Excellent bait, let me have a seat and watch for those who will fail for it
it is simultaneously bait but also completely correct
Thank goodness somebody finally said it
Like I always say, should've been a smoothbore to fire canister shot
It isn't actually that bad, it has just been forced past retirement
not just that but the plane it replaced did the same job better
A-10 isn't a navy aircraft, dumbass
Yes.
Why isn't it?
because it wasn't meant to. It was designed for the air force.
So?
you're gay and moronic
I want to see A-10s get their landing gear ripped off when launching off a carrier.
yeah, you are moronic, we already figured as much
You do know the A-7 served in the USAF and ANG too right?
Dumbass.
Its bad. It lives on the Blood of British Infantry and Marine Rifleman. Literally the worse Airframe in the USAF.
Also in the one conflict it had a direct competitor at pounding tanks, Desert Storm, it lost because while the A-10 pilots had to be issued binoculars to identify targets while its rival the F-111 would come in at high speed, use their targeting sensor to correctly identify their Iraqi target, land a fricking bomb on it and anything else within its trajectory, confirm its death and fly off or turn around for another pass at anything left alive from their first pass.
The A-10 was so shite in Desert Storm its believed a majority of their "Iraqi Armor" kills weren't kills because there was 0 evidence other than pilots, the same ones who needed binoculars to do their job, claiming they blew something up.
The F-111 had fricking footage from their targeting sensor showing armored vehicles taking their bombs face first and getting launched into space. Also the F-111 was the only plane in this role that could actually operate in an area with MANPADs and SAMs because it actually had proper defensive systems and could perform low altitude attacks at much higher speed than the A-10.
i am sad
The A10 has saved tons of ass.
The A-10 has the most blue-on-blue incidents of any American plane currently flying. It can't identify targets and the cannon has a CEP roughly equivalent to a bomb but with only a fraction of the lethality. It's not a good plane and it needs to be retired.
I think the GAU-8 has a place, but it is absolutely overhyped. The main utility is in killing multiple unarmored or light armored vehicles which are spaced out. It's much more efficient than a bomb because you can spread out the payload selectively. Drop a bomb and you kill 6 vehicles at the very best if they're practically touching each other, but the gun can kill 10 light armored or unarmored vehicles easily over a sortie.
You know, rocket pods and cluster munitions do the same thing, both come with options for guided munitions these days, and they don't require the aircraft to carry around more than one and a half ton of weapon/ammunition/ballast weight in the nose of the aircraft even when not in use.
The aircraft is balanced so closely around the gun system that when flying with it unloaded they have to fill the magazine with blanks/empty cases or the balance gets all screwed up.
You're right that guided rockets kick the shit out of a cannon in outright destructive power, but I think a point can be made that 30mm rounds are stupid cheap in comparison.
Finally, someone said it.
'finally?'
Brave, but you speak truth.
Go suck some wiener lazerpig
>but which ones just werent that good?
Osprey
The world isn't ready to accept this answer
>the marines aren't ready to accept this answer
fixed
>werent that good
P51 Mustang
t. P-47 fat frick
Not even joking but the F-18 and F-16.
The airframes themselves aren't bad, but the idea of multi role is, and as such, the capabilities of the aircraft suffer.
In the past, we had specific airframes to do specific jobs. This was eliminated when they brought in aircraft that can do everything, but excel at nothing.
Combat range being the absolute worst quality of multirole aircraft.
>The airframes themselves aren't bad, but the idea of multi role is, and as such, the capabilities of the aircraft suffer.
sprey what are you doing out of hell, youre supposed to be rimming satan
Multi-role makes sense for the reality of war where you don't always have everything you want.
If you can't get fighters you have to send bombers without escort, if you can't get bombers you can't hit ground targets.
Multi-role solves a frickload of logistics issues at the cost of a little preformance.
>Combat range being the absolute worst quality of multirole aircraft
I agree that's been a major issue in recent planes but it has nothing to do with multi-role because the F-14 and F-15 went updated for multi-role still had great range, that issue comes from smaller airframes.
have a nice day
imagine even pretending that multirole isn't great after 70 years of being proven wrong
The FA-18 is a perfect plane for a carrier. Multi-role is a strength with the navy.
i hate you, psuedo-intellectual moron.
Please b***h
F-16 and f-18
Can outright and outcome most of the previous fighters and strike aircraft
Are we just ignoring the F-15? It can kill 4 aircraft from 100 miles away, then drop an additional 4 Hellfires on armor, followed by a couple MK82s on grouped infantry, and it does that all better than any other non-gen 5 aircraft in the world.
>Hellfires
No.
Yeah, you're right. No Hellfires. Just a frickload of bombs. I'm not a weapons guy, so I only saw what I thought were AGMs and assumed Hellfire when I saw them fully loaded. Still enough firepower to obliterate half a dozen tanks and infantry in minutes and still maintain the capability to snipe several aircraft in the process.
>AGMs
F15E uses Mavericks, similar enough to Hellfire really.
Jack of all trades, master of none
But better then a master of one
neither the F-16 nor F-18 were designed for multirole from the blue print stage. They were designed as pure A2A fighters.
see:
.
Not well versed in older jets, but F-89D was complete garbage, only armament is forward firing unguided rockets.
Of newer jets, was F-16A, pre-block 30 a good plane ultimately? An excellent dogfighter but doesn't carry Sparrows nor AMRAAMs aside from the ANG variant as far as I know.
AV-8B harrier gets a mention because it's a subsonic radarless (non-plus) ground attack plane, on the other hand it does these sacrifices for the V/STOL capability, and bongs did pretty well with their harriers.
In the context of 1980s, we will never know if going for the gun was a good or a bad choice for the A-10, soviets fielded the Su-25 which primary non-missile antitank weapon was unguided rockets, americans opted for the GAU-8 instead once limited maverick stocks are used. Also no capacity for air to ground ranging nor LGB designation. Not going to comment on modern usage.
Objectively worst US aircraft are probably in the immediate post-war jets that were out of service by 1960. My two cents fully reddit spaced.
imagine mentioning the Harrier and not shitting on it for flipping out and killing the pilot
Pls elaborate anon
My CSO was a Top Gun F-14 guy, so naturally he had to tell everyone what he thought about every other aircraft besides the Tomcat.
He said that in the event of an engine failure the Harrier apparently inverts and this makes ejection impossible.
Everything between the F-86 amd the F-100. and that one only barely since it was a dancing machine of death and was only redeemed somewhat by burning asiatics alive
There are a few that are in use now that are sub-optimal (A-10), there are a few that were boondoggles when they came out but matured quite well (C-5, F-16, F-35), some that were failed by legislators (F-22), some that were hanger queens that were replaced by cheaper/more effective aircraft (F-14) and some that have just always been at the top of their game (F-15).
Don't talk shit about proto-aardvark, c**t. It's a good petite supersonic bomber.
>Proceeds to lose half of the fleet
nothing personal kid.
Bullshit, it was amazing at its job. It only suffered because it was used in roles it wasn't meant for and had no air cover
Its loss rate was so high because they were literally making up SEAD tactics with it on the fly
F-104 starfighter, F-100 super sabre wasn't that good of a fighter, a few other niche aircraft of the 50s. After that anything bad just never went into production.
The F-17, F-19, F-20, F-21, F-23 through F-34. If they were any good surely we'd have heard about them.
>F-20
Tigershark wasn't too bad, it just didn't find it's niche.
It had it's niche
Problem was it was meant for Taiwan and the sale to Taiwan was cancelled by us govt bribed by North Taiwan
F-20 tech then went on to be used to upgrade f-16s and everyone bought f-16s instead
F-20 tigershark was good
A way to give Taiwan f-16s without giving them f-16s
Yf-23 was better than f-22
The germans were the issue, not the aircraft.
>Muh bad pilots!
Literally vatnik-tier excuse, get your shit together, Lockmart merchant
Its what you get for using a aircraft meant for high altitude interception for low altitude bombing, lockheeb might have shilled for it but its all on the germans for even believing on it.
>lockheeb might have shilled for it but its all on the germans for even believing on it
Not him, but key procurement officers were bribed...
>The germans were the issue, not the aircraft.
The crash record isn't the only thing wrong with it. It's basically a NASA research bird larping as a fighter.
>no fuel
>no armaments
>point-defense interception doctrine after 1945
>point-defense interception doctrine after 1945
soviet engineering would like a word with you
whats the one that got literally hundreds of west germans killed lol
bf-109
F-16. totally wrong for us. My boss commanded a F-16 squadron back in the day. By the time you have fuel to get somewhere, you can't carry any bombs. If you have enough bombs to do something, you don't have the range to go anywhere. Great for our European allies.
I heard they had trouble early on in Vietnam because their missile-armed fighters didn't have gun pods at first. Can't remember which plane, maybe F-104 or F-4?
F-4. F-104 always had vulcan cannon
The whole "missiles bad, guns good" thing is a myth. The main problem was that the pilots weren't adequately trained on how to use them and the ground crewmen weren't trained on how maintain them. The airforce tried to solve it by adding a gun, it didn't work. The navy trained its ground crews on missile maintenance and created top gun for its pilots. IIRC the navy also had better missiles and a better radar for their F-4s.
I can't disagree that it was a bad plane, but I've always loved the look of the F-104. All the cold war jets really do it for me.
F4
have a nice day
F-102, was a shity stopgap that stayed in service for far too long.
ultimately it led to the F-106, a pretty good jet all things considered.
Don't you be dissing the Dagger or the Dart. I don't care how successful they were, they looked cool as hell.
they had horrendous stall characteristics
North American AJ Savage
Nuclear carrier bomber, was obsolete the second it came into service because of it being a slow cumbersome piston bomber in the jet age.
F3H Demon, original engine desingned for was so underpowered it couldn't take off. The new engine the Navy took from the army didn't like moisture, you can imagine how nice that is on a carrier aircraft.
Vought F7U Cutlass, quite possibly the worst carrier fighter ever developed, underpowered, unreliable, unstable garbage. Killing 21 airmen, and having 1/4 of its feet destroyed in accidents. Multiple carrier captain refused to operate the type due to the constant crashing.
Seconded. The Cutlass was a real damn pretty plane IMO, but the thing was probably one of the biggest widowmakers ever adopted. The thrust was pathetic, no hydraulic power while climbing, engines tended to flame out in the rain, and after a few landings the damn things started having an increasingly high chance of snapping in half. One of the highest accident rates out there to the point where a few carriers refused to have the things onboard entirely. There's probably never been worse.
It wasn't strictly a fault of the airframe design with the Cutlass - the failure of the Westinghouse J40 project pretty much doomed not just the Cutlass but an entire generation of Navy fighters in development at the time. The F3H Demon, the XF101 Jaguar, and the F4D Skyray all were planning to use the J40 as the new "next generation engine", but it turns out jet turbines are a lot more complicated than "make it bigger and it will deliver more power". The Cutlass was the hardest hit of the bunch since it was so much farther along in development, but none of them got to the lofty ideals projected for them.
The boondoggle pretty much broke Westinghouse's jet engine branch as well and indirectly contributed to the modern American military jet engine duopoly of Pratt & Whitney vs. General Electric.
Honestly the F-102 is my vote for the worst one made, though I will say it's funny af that they sold it to both the Greeks and Turks.
Most of the new ones are good examples. Anything after the F14 really.
the average /k/ gay is barely 20 years old