Upgrade to enjoy this feature!
Vital MX fantasy is free to play, but Premium users receive great benefits. Premium benefits include:
- View and download rider stats
- Pick trends
- Create a private league
- And more!
Only $10 for all 2026 SX, MX, and SMX series.
You might wanna explain the “N” to the gallery or anyone that didn’t have the Aggressors in their notes…🤣
So much good stuff never makes it. Most folks just couldn't fathom how the procurement system actually works. Heads explode.
I was at Holloman when they were dismantling the last of the F4 drones and gutting the cockpits/installing the Ironman in the F16's. Sad seeing the coal burners gone and perfectly good 16's relegated to such work. Oh well...in the words Mellencamp, "Life goes on".
Navy still have an aggressor squadron at NAS Key West? That would have been a cool shore duty assignment. Beats ROTC instructor at some God-forsaken college in the Midwest.
The Shop
DeCal Works Huge Plastic Inventory of UFO and Polisport kits.
Luxon 4-Post Bar Mounts
$189.95 - $239.95
Ha ha, the F-16N (N for Navy) was a small number of dedicated adversary F-16s back in the 90s. They were flown by the two adversary squadrons, one at Oceana and the other Miramar, and with TopGun, which was still at Miramar. These things started as F-16Cs and were stripped down to the bare minimum to be the lightest F-16s with the biggest motors at the time. Only thing lacking was the big-mouth intake. But these flew completely slick, approximately zero drag. They could turn and accelerate like nothing else! Escaping once in a dogfight was not an option. They could simply turn on a dime (turn into a white cloud) and get back to 600 kts to chase you, or shoot. I was flying with a young guy one day and we were in a good fight and we passed 180 out with an F-16N. We were pointed ~30deg down in full blower accelerating through ~300 kts. The F-16N was going up. He turned into a white cloud as we were passing and proceeded to be pointed at us in zero time and gained enough speed for a shot. That boys and girls was our lesson for the day. Do not try to escape!
The only way to beat them was to get into a very tight fight and get them on their AOA limiter. Then, and only then, could our big motor F-14Ds outperform them. That was before digital flight controls were installed in the Toms. Good pilots could make that thing turn inside itself or do some unusual pirouettes. I had the best seat in the house for many, many great fights with Ns, as well as A4 Super F, F-15, F/A-18, F-16C, F-5, you name it. I was fortunate to fly with THE guy who in my opinion was the best 1v1 dogfight pilot in the Navy. We got calls from units all over the west to fight him personally. In a year and a half flying with him, he lost only 1 engagement. All we did was air-to-air in those days. That was the first one of the day against an F-16N being flown by a guy he trained. It was our first day flying with external tanks installed (working towards deployment) and we were at the range closest to Miramar so we were still very fat on gas. Jet wouldn't quite do what he wanted and he got beat. The next three engagements were the most aggressive I ever felt a Tomcat get flown and they resulted in three tracking guns kills on the F-16N. That was certainly not the norm. As I type this, I recall the last TopGun class to have the F-16Ns as adversaries was in late '94.
The F-16 adversaries today are still cool jets, but they are not F-16Ns!
Give us some background on your job in the back seat and using your skills on the scope and how your eyes are always searching thru the canopy into the never-never… please.
Also…did you ever make weapons decisions/selection?
Oh, and…how about some stories how the wings fold fwd and back based on speed and other inputs…like when you dragged those 16Ns into their uncomfortable situations…
Stoked that we have someone that flew the later-bad-ass variant!
From the fine folks at Lock-Mart…
The latest Viper: Bloc 70/72…The Humpback 😎
And a few deliverables…
Tomcats are the most impressive aircraft in US Navy history. And this coming from an A-6 guy! Their air-to-mud capabilities were discovered late in the game, and the retrofits didn’t do the F-14 justice. The navy was all-in on the F/A-18 had the go-forward platform, replacing both Tomcats and Intruders. Hornets remain an outstanding aircraft that still plays a large role 40+ years after its initial deployment, but for sheer brute force, range, and versatility, the F-14 is one of one.
On 3 October 1967, a B-52 bomber took off over the Mojave Desert carrying a small black rocket plane under its wing. Inside it sat Air Force Major Pete Knight.
The plane was the X-15, built to fly faster than any aircraft before it. At those speeds the air itself becomes hot enough to destroy a plane, so engineers had covered this one in a special coating designed to burn away in flight instead of the metal. It would not be enough.
Near Mud Lake, Nevada, the B-52 released him. Knight fired the rocket engine.
The X-15 accelerated through Mach 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. At engine burnout, Knight was flying 4,520 mph, Mach 6.7, at 102,100 feet. A mile and a quarter every second. No pilot had ever flown an airplane that fast. No pilot has since.
The speed came at a price. Under the belly, the superheated air passed 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, far more than the coating could take. The heat burned past it, into the plane itself. It melted a test engine clean off the aircraft. It burned holes in the tail fin. It damaged wiring and pressure lines. Passing Mach 5.5, a high-temperature warning lit up in the cockpit, and Knight brought the damaged plane home to Edwards Air Force Base.
Still in his pressure suit, he walked around the X-15 and saw what the flight had done. The damage stunned NASA's engineers. The plane was repaired, but it never flew again.
12 men flew the X-15. 1 of them was Neil Armstrong. None of them, and nobody since in any airplane, flew faster than Pete Knight did 59 years ago today. President Johnson handed him the Harmon Trophy. The program just called him Speedy Pete.
That is cool! ^^^
The RIO’s job goes back to the original mission of the Tomcat, long range Fleet defense. Operating the sensors to locate, track, and get off shots on Rooskie bombers carrying anti-ship missiles and employing heavy jamming. The radar displays were set up to show both synthetic radar tracks and to also see the raw radar return to help with identifying the jamming techniques. We also used that display for all the non-tracking modes. We could pick from various radar modes, pulse repetition frequencies or sensors to defeat the jamming. Lots of tools in the tool box. Because there were so many what I’ll call ‘manual’ modes, the person could really make a difference in challenging situations. While cruising around you could just put the radar in Track While Scan, set the scan volume, point it to the correct piece of sky and it worked very well.
Pilots only controlled radar when using dog fight modes.
For weapons, the pilot made the weapons selection. Either seat could shoot radar missiles. Only the pilot could shoot the sidewinders or gun. No real standard as to who shot the radar missiles, just a clear agreement that everything was good and nobody was going to mess it up by selecting a different weapon or sensor mode.
Lookout, simply do it as much as possible. If the pilot was fighting someone in the visual arena I was looking elsewhere and keeping an eye on altitude, airspeed, fuel, and keeping my thumb on the chaff dispenser, etc.
Wings were easy, put them in auto. In a dog fight they would always be full forward. Big straight wings and a lot of flat fuselage created excellent lift at slow speeds. Big motors allowed the jet to stand on its tail too. About the only time they were manually positioned was to put them back when coming into the break to land. Looked cooler, and leaving them back as long as possible helped to bleed speed from 500-600 down to approach speed (~135 kts). Interesting trivia, the wings had an oversweep position for parking on the carrier, but you couldn’t fly with them there. Some paintings show the wings in oversweep while flying. Ugh.
We also had a reconnaissance mission. There was a big pod with three cameras. That was a favorite mission of mine. On deployment we got the cool missions to go places not typical to get the requested pics.
Once we got the LANTIRN targeting pod and started carrying bombs that added a whole new skillset. The Tom was a good precision bomber, but whether big bombs or small, we only carried four. Pretty pitiful compared to the A-6. But the way we carried them flush against the rail they didn’t add that much drag so our range or speed wasn’t hit too bad.
Having two people helped with the really dynamic and demanding CSAR and FAC(A) missions. (Combat Search and Rescue and Forward Air Controller-Airborne). It would take a novel to capture the effort and complexity of those.
The Tom was a great jet during its time. The performance would still be solid today. The stealthy attributes and modern avionics on newer jets have come a long ways though. Time moves on.
The view was spectacular!
Man I’m glad I never had to go to a TARPs squadron as a PH. Unless they got sent TAD to the ship’s photo lab or CVIC (carrier intel center) underway, those poor Photomates were just over educated airframers when you guys weren’t flying the pod.
The F-14 on the cat and working its way through burner zones was a sight to behold, especially at night. Even approaching the shuttle the Tomcat would lower the front gear (the crouch?), giving it even more of a hot rod look.
The Intruder’s radar and avionics were mediocre at best. The FLIR pod was awesome, but the navigation computer had a tendency to “walk” from the target. Meaning the B/N could set the cursor on a specific point and watch that cursor drift away. We were constantly slewing the cursor back on target while desperately stabbing at the update button. Sometimes it even worked.
Being a side by side cockpit the pilot and B/N shared recovery duties. This was especially valuable at night as the pilot would fly the needles while I got a visual on lineup, meatball, and AOA. At 3/4 mile I’d call the ball and bring my scan inside while the pilot simultaneously went eyes-up. From there I’d monitor the VSI and call out the rate of descent. The VSI would provide feedback before the ball, so the pilot could add power or go easy with it and catch the ball before it moved. Night time landings are never routine, and my pilot buddies who transitioned to Hornets often said that’s when they missed the A-6 the most.
Can’t see a Fury/Sabre without thinking about Lee Majors
Thanks for explaining the multiple missions and the breadth of your capabilities.
Pit Row
The video is from a flight simulator, but the terrain is crazily realistic. The place I grew up in is approximately 10:26 in. There are a lot more houses there now than when I grew up (it was all orchards way back then). This is VR1350 from Whidbey Island. A lot of the time the planes would dive down after crossing the ridge just before getting to us, and the lowest altitude there was only 200’ above ground level.
Seemed like most of the planes as I got older were A-6/EA-6 types but there were some others that I’m not really sure about.
VRs were super challenging. Even though the course was laid out, things can go south quickly when doing 420 kts at <500’ AGL. I have several friends and compatriots who wound up on the wrong side of a VR route, including one that hit the Columbia River outside of Wenatchee.
You sir, are a bad ass.🫡
I remember the one that clipped the rocks coming down the Palisades. I also remember one in that same area that clipped a power line. He didn’t completely realize it until he landed but the wire came down just behind the cab of a truck and demolished the camper (and the truck too, just didn’t kill any of the occupants!). I’m pretty sure that I posted the news story about that incident a while back.
That area is a little over an hour’s drive south of where I grew up.
The rocks that the pilot clipped are right about where the number for HWY 28 is on this map. He was coming down the canyon/coulee SW and where it meets the Columbia River valley, he was hugging just a bit too close on his left.
Hard not to think about it when you go by it. A few more feet and he likely would have made it home.
My buddy’s crash was in 1991. I was at sea when we got the news (so around Sept or Oct). Grady was a super guy from Shreveport, LA.
Awesome Bomber for its day.
The Convair B-36 Peacemaker was truly one of the great giants of the Cold War. With its enormous wingspan, six piston engines and later four additional jet engines, the B-36 looked almost unreal when it took to the sky.
Compared with the sleek B-58 Hustler and the futuristic XB-70 Valkyrie, the Peacemaker represented a completely different approach to strategic air power. The B-58 was built around speed, while the XB-70 was designed to push toward Mach 3. The B-36 relied on something more fundamental: enormous size, long range, and the ability to carry a massive bomb load across continents.
It may have been slower and older-looking than its supersonic successors, but for a time, the B-36 was quite simply the giant of America's Cold War skies.
"6 turning, 4 burning"
There is a lot of crazy speculation online about a possible refurbishment and return to service of a SR71 to use as a test bed for modern engines.
Edit, just seeing the other thread making this old news.
I honestly would have thought NASA would have pickled one for some future need to test something strapped to a really fast plane.
Hell, is there anyone left that can revive those avionics?
I only "worked" on an SR twice. I didn't actually work on it. I was called out to confirm a discrepancy on a Transinent bird. Damn SP with an M16 at arms length all the time. Almost as bad as AF1 or an old RC135.🙃
Can you even imagine the maintenance man hours per flight hour on that beast!
Supposedly, there were only a handful of air fields they could fly the B36 into, because most runways weren't rated for an aircraft that heavy.
WoW!! 😲
Here is another awesome aircraft, and the fact the belly pod contained fuel and also a bomb!!
Man stuff was wild back then.!!!! 😲
The B-58 was built for extreme speed. It had a very slim fuselage, a delta wing, and four jet engines in separate pods. That shape helped it reach Mach 2, but it also created a major problem: It had no normal internal bomb bay so Convairs solution was to carry the main weapon and extra fuel in a large streamlined pod under the fuselage.
The early pod was the MB-1C pod. This was a combined fuel-and-weapon pod. The forward section carried fuel, and the rear section carried a nuclear weapon. During a mission, the B-58 could use fuel from the pod to extend its range, then release the entire pod over the target.
Post a reply to: Historic Aircraft from back in the day