This post was one that I originally wrote for www.tatp.org but that really doesn’t fit in with what we’re trying to do over there. I say “we”, I’ve not contributed a lot there for a couple of weeks. It’s mainly Ben and Darrell at the moment. Anyway, here’s this:
As a boy, I bought every issue of the popular partwork “Take-Off”. Unfortunately, I can’t find any of the damn things any more, which is a real shame as aircraft have always been an interest of mine - begun, I think, when I played my friend’s copy of F-19 Stealth Fighter on his dad’s PC. More on that later - for now, here’s some facts about my favorite planes.
A-1 Skyraider
A bit of a weird anachronism this one. The Skyraider was designed as a divebomber and entered service in the 1950s. That’s weird because, as you can see from the pictures, it’s got a big propeller on it’s nose whilst all the new aircraft around it were being designed around jets. Still, the Skyranger found a niche for itself in Vietnam as a seach and rescue aircraft, with it’s low speed allowing it to both escort the helicopters that were picking up the downed pilots and also to help locate them in the first place.
Somewhat terrifyingly, someone in the US thought it would be an excellent idea to equit this small, slow propeller driven aircraft with nuclear weapons, and 193 AD-4B aircraft were in service. Now I’m not sure how familiar you all are with nuclear weapons, but the blast radius of a nuke is “big“. Which means that if you’re dropping one you probably want to go “quite fast” to get out of that radius. If you’re flying a Skyraider you would probably have had trouble, so the USAF’s tactic was intended to be that you lobbed the bomb whilst in a climb, allowing it to travel further and enabling you to get away without being vaporised. Thankfully it seems that no-one ever had to test how effective this would be. I’d strongly suspect you’d end up with singed eyebrows as a minimum, along with a fair few tumours to deal with.
X-31
The American X-planes have always been a source of fascination to me. All of them are designed to prove or disprove the usefulness of a particular concept. The X-1 is famous for being the first plane to exceed the speed of sound - which people were concerned about, as they thought it might set the entire atmosphere on fire. You do have to admire the Americans for going ahead if that was a concern, don’t you? Anyway. The X-15 was a rocket plane that was dropped from a B-52 and intended to provide information for the space program by going up to ridiculous heights. The X-29 had backward wings. But the one that always stands out for me is the X-31.
The X-31 looks like a fairly ordinary aircraft at first glance - it’s got normal wings, a normal tail and what SEEMS to be a normal engine. What you can’t tell just by looking is that the engine can vector the thrust around across two axes. This means it can do absolutely crazy maneuvers (have a look at this YouTube link to see what I mean). It was a pretty bonkers idea but it worked brilliantly and a lot of the learnings from it have been incorporated in the F-22 Raptor, though that can only vector it’s engines up and down and not side to side. I love the X-31 because, like most of the X-planes, it’s the culmination of some very serious types sitting around and working out calculations and then going:
“Well let’s chuck it all in a plane and see if it works.“
Ace.
F-19
Now strictly speaking the F-19 doesn’t really… well… exist. You see the Americans went from the F/A-18 Hornet to the F-20 Tigershark (which never actually went into US service) and skipped over the 19 designation. There was an open secret that the US was working on a stealth aircraft, so there was a natural assumption that work had begun on it prior to the F-20 and therefore the aircraft carried the F-19 designation. This was so widely assumed that Microprose released the game that started my aircraft fixation, and Tom Clancy included an F-19 in his novel Red Storm Rising. Considering Clancy prizes himself on his accuracy, it must have been a REALLY popular rumour.
However, there’s never been an F-19. The stealth aircraft that everyone was assuming to be the F-19 was actually the F-117 (which was only called THAT due to a beureaucratic cock-up - it’s not a fighter and should probably have been called the A-something or B-something really). When Microprose released the Amiga version of F-19 Stealth Fighter it gave you the choice of flying the fictional F-19 or the real F-117. This version of the game also changed the Iraqis from being an allied nation to a hostile one, presumably because we’d finished selling them guns by then and were busy bombing them.
As I mentioned before, the F-19 got me into aircraft. Both by being fun, and by having copy protection that consisted of identifying aircraft by their silhouette. As a result I got really good at identifying 80s NATO and Soviet aircraft and ended up knowing LOADS about them.
Su-25 Frogfoot
For those not in the know, Frogfoot is not what the Russians called this attack aircraft. All Soviet aircraft were given “reporting names” by NATO which began with the letter corresponding to their presumed function (e.g. F for fighter, B for bomber, though NATO got the designation of this one slightly wrong).
The Su-25 is the Russian cousin of the A-10 Thunderbolt, designed for close support of tanks and infantry. Like the A-10, it’s got widely spaced engines in case of damage, a titanium “bathtub” that the pilot sits in to protect them from ground fire and is pretty horrendously ugly. Unlike the A-10, it has the fantastic ability to run on pretty much any fuel you put in it. Aviation gas is obviously it’s preferred tipple, but petrol, diesel, ethanol and probably vodka will all get this beast up in the sky. It wins out over the A-10 in my book because it just seems like such a product of it’s country of origin.
“We are running out of avgas, comrade.”
“I have a still behind the hangar. Come, let us refuel the aircraft and get drunk at the same time.”
Still in service to this day - despite former president Yeltsin doing some serious damage to the fuel stocks.
There’s loads more I could go on about and another time perhaps I will - for now I must fly. Ha ha.
Phil Catterall is not proud of that joke.
Now: dinner.
