“Keep your nose out the sky, keep your heart to god, and keep your face to the raising sun.” – Kanye WestÂ
Aircraft have long been disobeying Kanye’s advice. Can you use your alarmingly comprehensive knowledge of aeroplanes to identify the following types from their schnozes alone?Â
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If you think you know the answers, place them in the comments box below.
Answers coming soon…
To keep this blog going- allowing us to create new articles- we need donations. We’re trying to do something different with Hush-Kit: give aviation fans something that is both entertaining, surprising and well-informed. Please do help us and click on the donate button above – you can really make a difference (suggested donation £10). You will keep us impartial and without advertisers – and allow us to carry on being naughty. Once you’ve done that we hope you enjoy 10 Incredible Soviet fighter Aircraft that never entered service. A big thank you to all of our readers.
Suggested donation £10.Â
At the moment our contributors do not receive any payment but we’re hoping to reward them for their fascinating stories in the future.
Faced with such a mouth-watering menu of Soviet fighter projects that never entered service, it was almost painful to select a mere ten. I won’t promise anything, but when the Hush-Kit writers are next sufficiently sober we may create a part two.
To keep this blog going, allowing us to create new articles- we need donations. We’re trying to do something different with Hush-Kit: give aviation fans something that is both entertaining, surprising and well-informed. Please do help us save the Hush-Kit blog. Our site is absolutely free and we have no advertisements. If you’ve enjoyed an article you can donate here. Your donations, however big or small, keep this going. Thank you.Â
10. Mikoyan MiG-33/35 “F-16ski”
In the 1980s, the Mikoyan design bureau tinkered with a simple, single-engine warplane similar in concept to the original version of Lockheed’s F-16 lightweight fighter. Like the F-16A, the new Soviet plane would be simple, manoeuvrable and inexpensive.
The Project 33 design, sometimes — and perhaps erroneously — referred to as the MiG-33 or MiG-35, featured a single Klimov RD-33/93 afterburning turbofan, two of which power the larger and more complex MiG-29. According to a 1988 report in Jane’s Defense Weekly, Project 33 was “seen as a complementary combat aircraft to the powerful MiG-29.” Where the MiG-29 boasts some multirole and beyond-visual-range capability, the Project 33 was a short-range, point-defence fighter. Here was a MiG-21 for the 1980s – an ideal fighter for friendly states on a budget.
Mikoyan didn’t get very far with Project 33, as Soviet leadership apparently preferred to devote the USSR’s resources to more sophisticated aircraft. But Project 33’s DNA might survive to some extent in the Chinese-made FC-1 fighter built for export.
Mikoyan reportedly sold the Project 33 design to China after it became clear there would be no Soviet market for the plane. China folded elements of Project 33 into the FC-1, which itself evolved from the joint U.S.-Chinese Super 7 light fighter, work on which collapsed following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a weird sort of aerospace-design convergence, the Super 7 had also drawn inspiration from the F-16.
Powered by a single RD-33/39-powered FC-1, the FC-1 (also known as the JF-17) today is one of Pakistan’s most important fighters, serving alongside — you guessed it — F-16s.
Picture the scene: it’s the late thirties, you are aircraft designer Vasili Nikitin and you are puzzling out the future of the fighter aircraft whilst living in the terrifying day-to-day world of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yakovlev came up with a nice little fighter and was given a car. Yet Polikarpov showed a bit too much cockiness and was thrown in jail. And right now everything is awkward: The speed of the monoplane seems to be pointing the way to the future yet the biplane still has superior manoeuvrability, short field performance and climb-rate. What the hell are you supposed to do? Suddenly up pops seemingly crazed test-pilot Vladimir Shevchenko who explains over a couple of cups of kvass how you could achieve both in the same airframe with a hare-brained scheme he dubs the ‘folding fighter’. Against all better judgement the entire lower biplane wing hinges and retracts into the fuselage side and upper wing, transforming the handy but slow biplane into a sleek monoplane at the flick of a switch. You wonder if the idea is insane – but after due consideration you decide it may well be the next big thing in aerospace technology
Somehow the approval of the Chief Directorate of the Aviation Industry was obtained, and a folding fighter was built: the IS-1. Amazingly for such a seemingly radical machine it performed excellently. A productionised version dubbed the IS-2 was quickly developed but its monoplane abilities were insufficiently competitive and Nikitin devised the considerably more formidable IS-4. The design of the wing(s) remained basically unchanged but this is where the similarity ended as the IS-4 was to be fitted with a bubble canopy, tricycle undercarriage and the M-120: a 16-cylinder X-configuration engine delivering 1650 hp. With the M-120 engine a top speed of 447 mph was forecast in monoplane configuration, heady stuff indeed for 1941, yet transformed into a biplane a landing speed of merely 66 mph was projected. An aircraft offering this astonishing breadth of performance would have been invaluable for the Soviet air force, especially early in the war when their fighters were required to operate from rough fields where the docility and inherent STOL capability of a biplane would have been greatly appreciated. It is also worth pondering what might have been had the design been known to the contemporary outside world, the folding fighter concept has obvious potential for carrier based aircraft for example. Likewise the inherent liabilities of the type were never to be operationally evaluated, what would happen if the lower wing deployed asymmetrically for example? Nikitin had designed a lock to prevent this from occurring yet who knows what would happen in combat. Similarly the undercarriage could not be lowered in monoplane configuration. Were the wing and wheels to stick ‘up’ for any reason the resulting forced landing would be highly dangerous and almost definitely result in the loss of the aircraft.
But this was all to remain academic as fate intervened (as for so many other hopeful Soviet armament projects) in the form of a massive German invasion curtailing work on promising new aircraft to concentrate on existing types. To be fair, things had already begun to unravel somewhat for the IS-4 when the M-120 engine was cancelled and the lower-powered Mikulin AM-37 (as fitted to the less than spectacular MiG-3) had to be substituted as the only alternative inline power unit available. Nonetheless the IS-4 was apparently flown in the summer of 1941 but records of what flight testing was done were lost when the design bureau and workshop were evacuated ahead of the advancing German forces.
An engine, yesterday.
Despite the recorded completion and flight of the IS-4, I have searched online for nearly five whole minutes and not been able to find a single photograph of the complete aircraft. There’s three-views and an oft-reproduced drawing of the aircraft in its M-120 engined form hurtling skyward in dramatic fashion but that’s about it. Given that every other obscure fighter I can think of has at least turned up in at least one photograph (even the long lost PZL.50 JastrzÄ…b) it does seem to cast doubt on the flight claims of this amazing aircraft. Or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough. However the cancellation of the IS-4, whether or not it actually flew, brought to an end the development of the world’s first serious attempt at a variable-geometry fighter, closing the door on a conceptually unique aircraft that appeared to have a great deal of potential.
The less than stellar MiG-3.
8 ‘Article 468’
No-one but the Soviet Union could name things as well without naming them. Just take the satellite planned to be the first manmade device in space that was given the mundane and yet somehow awesome moniker ‘Object D’. Another example of this minimalist naming policy was a rocket-powered interceptor developed by the research institution OKB-2 in the late 1940s, ‘izdeliya (article) 468’. The 468 was somewhat ambitious for the late 1940s, an era when the major military nations expected fleets of supersonic bombers penetrating their airspace at high altitude would be the main threat in the immediate future. The Soviet Union had been working on rocket-powered research aircraft since the early 1930s, and work on a rocket interceptor, the B1, began in earnest in 1940. In many ways, the 468 was the culmination of this effort – a slender dart with surprisingly small delta wings and a surprisingly huge tail fin, aided by large fins under the wings that also housed the landing skids.
It is not known if stolen Soviet plans aided the design of Roger Ramjet’s aircraft.
 The Soviet space programme proved there was nothing wrong with its rocket technology. In truly Dan Dare fashion, the 468 would take off using a rocket-powered dolly, before using its multi-chamber, four-nozzle liquid rocket motor to climb 72,000 feet in two and a half minutes, guided to its target at up to Mach 2 by radar in the nose. The design was expected to be impressively stable in flight but would have been interesting to land, given that its wing loading was more than double that of standard contemporary fighters. It’s a shame that none of the many pure-rocket interceptors of the late 40s and early 50s made it into the air, especially the 468, which made aircraft appearing 20 years later look a bit staid. All that remains of the 468, following its cancellation in 1951, is a wind-tunnel model at the museum of technology at Dubna.
Nikolai Polikarpov’s I-185 was an excellent aircraft stymied by engine trouble, politics, timing, and outright bad luck. It should have been the finest fighter the USSR fielded during the Great Patriotic war with 2000hp on tap, slightly smaller than a Grumman Bearcat but weighing 1900 lb less in normal loaded condition, faster than the contemporary Bf 109F at all altitudes up to 20,000 feet, its handling was immeasurably better and it was recommended for immediate production in the Autumn of 1942. Yet it ended up merely an also-ran. The problems began way back in 1937 when Polikarpov’s incredibly successful I-16 was fighting in the Spanish Civil war. Republican forces captured a Messerschmitt Bf 109B which was evaluated thoroughly by a team of Soviet experts. The consensus was that the 109 was inferior in virtually every regard to the latest I-16 Type 10. Whilst this was true, it was unfortunate that the Soviets failed to envisage the incredible rate of development of the 109; had they captured one of the considerably better 109Es that were fielded in Spain in the latter stages of the Civil war it might have encouraged greater urgency in developing a successor to the I-16. As it was, work on an I-16 replacement proceeded in a somewhat leisurely fashion and aimed for rather conservative performance improvement.
The early Bf 109s were considered inferior to the Soviet I-16 Type 10s in almost all regards.
The fighter that emerged was the named I-180 and looked very much like stretched I-16. Development seemed to be going well until December 1938 when the test pilot Valeri Chkalov was killed in the prototype. Unfortunately for Polikarpov, Chkalov was a bona fide national hero of immense popularity. Whilst his body lay in state and was visited by all the principal military and civil dignitaries, the NKVD started arresting members of the design team on suspicion of sabotage. It is said that only the personal intervention of Stalin prevented Polikarpov himself being packed off to the gulag. Work continued on the new fighter, though the programme was somewhat under a cloud. Meanwhile Chkalov’s home town was renamed in his honour and in 1941 a biopic of his life was made entitled ‘Red Flyer’.
After Chkalov’s death a major redesign was implemented and the resulting I-180S looked a lot less like the I-16 which had spawned it. Unfortunately for the new fighter two prototypes were lost in spins in quick succession resulting in the death of another test pilot, Tomass Susy. Although 10 pre-series examples were built during 1940 the performance of the aircraft was tacitly admitted to be lagging behind world-class and a further redesign was undertaken. The resulting aircraft was the I-185 and it was intended for either the M-90 or M-71 engine offering nearly double the power of the M-88 fitted to the I-180S. Both engines were troubled but the M-90 particularly so and it was abandoned. The M-71 eventually achieved sufficient reliability to power the first I-185 to fly in February 1942. The aircraft flew beautifully and the M-71 was getting over its teething troubles, when it functioned properly the performance was spectacular (a speed of 426 mph was ultimately to be recorded) and the future finally should have looked rosy for Polikarpov’s purposeful fighter.
Chkalov meeting one of the Mario Brothers.
However, by this time everything had been thrown into chaos by the Germans having invaded and begun their headlong rush towards Moscow. The Soviets needed lots of fighters immediately and didn’t have the luxury of waiting for promising prototypes. Unpopular but available fighters were produced in their thousands and gradual evolution rather than completely new types ultimately yielded the two major Soviet fighter series from Lavochkin and Yakovlev. Yet the I-185 was so good that it refused to die. In November 1942, the three prototypes were sent to the front to be evaluated under operational conditions. The report was unambiguously favourable: “The I-185 outclasses both Soviet and foreign aircraft in level speed. It performs aerobatic manoeuvres easily, rapidly and vigorously. The I-185 is the best current fighter from the point of control simplicity, speed, manoeuvrability (especially in climb), armament and survivability.” Plans were begun to start production forthwith and a ‘production standard’ aircraft was completed. Unfortunately the engine failed and it crashed. Development continued with the original three prototypes, one of which crashed and killed its pilot after another engine failure in January 1943. The M-71 was rapidly being considered a dead end.Plans to produce the I-185 with the reliable but lower-powered M-82 were eventually abandoned as the M-82 was required for the inferior (but good enough) La-5 that, crucially, was already in production and the I-185 programme was formally cancelled in April 1943, finally depriving the Soviet Union of its finest piston-engined fighter. A little over a year later Nikolai Polikarpov was dead and his design bureau was eventually absorbed into Sukhoi.
In 1939 Nikolai Polikarpov was ordered to take a work trip to Germany. While he was away, all his mates fucked him over. His plant director, chief engineer, and the design engineer Mikhail Gurevich suggested a new fighter (the I-200) and got the go-ahead from Artem Mikoyan (whose brother was a senior politician- just saying). On his return, poor Polikarpov found that his bureau no longer existed, with his engineers at the new MiG bureau. Just goes to show, never go on holiday if you work with knobs.
 6. Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut
While the US was entranced by stealth, Russia was seduced by super-manoeuvrability. A fighter based on the Su-47 Berkut would have been incredibly agile.
In some parallel universe where Salamander’s Future Fighters is an aviation history book, crowds at airshows today are wowed by weird-looking fighters performing impossible manoeuvres, with their wings seemingly stuck on back-to-front. Here production versions of the Grumman X-29, British Aerospace P.1214 rub shoulder-pads with Russia’s Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut – a forward-swept wing (FSW) experimental heavy fighter from the 1980s. Like shoulder-pads, FSWs were briefly fashionable in the 1980s, as they promised enhanced agility, lower take-off and landing distances and better controllability at high angles-of attack.
While Russia had toyed with a captured Ju-287 bomber after the war and tested their own Tsybin LL-3 in 1948, the concept had to wait for fly-by-wire technology and composite materials for designers to be able to create a practical aircraft – because of the extreme instability and the strong wings needed.
Enter Sukhoi, which in 1983, was given the go-ahead to develop the Su-47 (originally Su-37) demonstrator – based on the Flanker family but with fly-by-wire, forward swept wings and canards.
The Su-47’s development was disrupted by the end of the Cold War and it didn’t get into the air until 1997, a dark time for Russian aviation (though Sukhoi was in a better position than most thanks to Flanker export sales) Technology, too, had moved on.
The truly extraordinary Belyayev DB-LK swept-forward wing bomber of 1940 will be covered in our forthcoming article on cancelled Soviet bombers.Another company interested in forward-swept wing was Northrop. This advanced tactical fighter concept is from the 1980s, and it bears interesting comparison with the Berkut.The Su-47’s development was disrupted by the end of the Cold War and it didn’t get into the air until 1997,
While its fly-by-wire controls and composite structure undoubtedly fed into Sukhoi’s Su-35 and PAK-FA programmes – its radical forward swept wings did not. FBW and thrust-vectoring means the Su-35 today can perform jaw-dropping aerobatics without needing canards or FSWs. Stealth too, where the alignment of edges is the first step in lowering RCS, would also present a unique problem for anyone designing a FSW fighter now. While only one was made, the Su-47 still looks unbelievable cool.
Tim Robinson, Editor-in-Chief. AEROSPACE magazine @RAeSTimR
5. Sukhoi Su-37/S-37Â
As the Cold War was reaching its (thankfully low key) climax, the craze across the fighter houses of Europe was for canard-deltas. Soviet designers had been studying canard foreplanes on jet fighters since the 1950s, and were re-awakened to the idea by both advances in flight control software and the Western trend. It was at this time, in the late 1980s, that Sukhoi was considered a new ground attack aircraft. It was planned that it would combine the canard delta configuration with several unusual features.
The Sukhoi bureau developed plans for what was dubbed ‘Su-37’ or ‘S-37’ (this designation was later recycled for a ‘Flanker’ variant, which is unrelated to this project) as a single-engined single-seat fighter. Learning from experience in Afghanistan the ’37 was designed to replace Soviet Aviation’s ‘Fitters’, Floggers and Frogfoots (or is it Frogfeet?). Again echoing trends in West defence planning, the Su-37 was intended to combine the ground attack and air-to-air role, with an emphasis on the first role. Consequently, it had 18 external hard points able to carry 8300kg of stores together with an internal 30mm gun. Of contemporary Western aircraft only Tornado could lug more around and they’re not as pretty. To assist the pilot in carrying out these disparate roles an ambitious avionics package was planned with multi-mode radar capable of terrain following and simultaneous tracking of up to 10 targets against background clutter.
An integrated electro-optical system and defensive aids suite (DAS) were also planned, today technologies found on the F-35. Unlike the F-35 it also had 800kg of armour plate for the pilot and other sensitive areas. To reduce vulnerability on the ground it also, oddly for a non-naval aircraft, had folding wingtips allowing more to be packed into a hardened air shelter Alas with the ending of the Cold War funding for this supersonic Sturmovik was not to be and instead we enthusiasts of Russian metal must be content with endless tedious Flanker derivatives.
— Bing Chandler, former Lynx helicopter Observer (now works in flight safety)
4 Yakovlev Yak-43
Russia (and the Soviet Union) is often accused of stealing US aircraft concepts and technologies. In reality there has been give and take (as well as similar design solutions resulting from parallel teams working to solve similar problems).
That Lockheed bought research from Yakovlev on the STOVL propulsion system of the Yak-41 (or 141 if you prefer) is pretty notable. The Yak-41, impressive though it was, was merely a stepping stone to the formidable Yak-43 fighter. The Yak-43 would have been far faster and versatile than the Harrier, with a performance comparable to the MiG-29. The tumultuous transitional period that made the collaboration with Lockheed possible also killed the Yak-43, but its DNA lives on today in the F-35B.
In the mid-1930s, the concept of the ‘cruiser fighter’/ ‘Zerstörer’ was very popular in design and planning circles. The Grokhovsky G-38 was one of many examples of this class of fighter that never left the drawing board. It was a twin-boom, multi-seat heavy fighter comparable in concept to the Dutch Fokker G.1 or American Lockheed P-58 ‘Chain Lightning’. The G-38, however, was remarkable in a number of respects, most significant of which was the execution of the twin-book concept. The Fokker and the Lockheed were large, bulky, even clumsy aircraft, as was the original take on the G-38. When Grokhovsky hired the young Pavel Ivensen to work on the project, however, the aircraft was transformed into something rather exciting. Ivensen started from a clean sheet. The new G-38 was tiny for a three-seat aircraft, with a wingspan of 13.4 m (compared with 16 m for the P-38 and 17 m for the Fokker G.1) and ultra-neat packaging. The crew were contained in a torpedo-shaped pod faired into the broad wing centre-section, and the two Gnome-Rhone radial engines tapered to super-slender booms. It had an incredibly low frontal area for an aircraft of its class, and a high wing loading for the time, and it’s safe to say that it would have been fast. Most remarkable of all was the fact that the preliminary designs were approved in 1934, making the highly modern looking G-38 contemporary with the Hawker Hurricane and Curtiss P-36. Had it not been cancelled (for ‘unknown reasons’, around the time of the major Stalinist purges), it is intriguing to consider what the aircraft might have done for the otherwise lacklustre heavy fighter class.
2. Grokhovsky 39
On 8 September 1914, the Russian Imperial Air Service pilot Pyotr Nesterov performed the first aerial ramming aircraft attack, using his aircraft itself as an offensive weapon. Though very dangerous, the use of ramming as a last ditch tactic proved popular with Soviet pilots.
In 1932, the Soviet air force began a classified project to produce a purpose-built ramming fighter. This effort, dubbed Project ‘Taran’ (battering ram) considered various manned and unmanned solutions before settling on Grokhovsky’s G-39 project. Grokhovsky was a highly-skilled pilot, aircraft designer and inventor; he created the world’s first cotton parachutes, and designed items as varied as cargo containers for airborne troops, rocket artillery, armoured hovercraft and even a weaponised snowmobile (it is not known whether the Saatchi artist Katya Grokhovsky, below, is a descendant).Â
The G-39 design was a monoplane pusher with rudders on the outer sections of the wing instead of a conventional tail unit. The most unusual feature of the G-39 was its weapon: two steel wires running from a boom on the nose to the wingtips, intended to slice through enemy aircraft. In case the wires snapped, the wing’s leading edges were made exceptionally strong. The exceptionally brave (or unfortunate) G-39 pilots would have had a degree of protection from a retractable bullet-proof windscreen. This extremely strange machine was readied for flight in 1935, but refused to take-off. With its 100hp engine, the G-39 was woefully underpowered. Work on the G-39 was discontinued. Like many others, he would was crushed by Stalin’s brutal state- Grokhovsky was arrested in 1942 and died in prison four years later.
Mikoyan-Gurevich Ye-150 family
Ye-150 series were wildly high performance heavy interceptors. They could out-drag and out-climb any fighter in the world, and they also looked exceptionally mean. Despite taking its first flight in 1959, the Ye-150 could reach an astonishing Mach 2.65 (some sources claim even higher speeds) and could reach altitudes above 69,000 feet (remarkably all of this was achieved with the same installed thrust as today’s rather more pedestrian Gripen). This series of four experimental fighter prototypes were built in the effort to create a new, highly automated fighter to defend the Soviet union against a proliferating Western threat (including the supersonic bombers like the B-58- then in development). To catch and destroy these fast high-flying intruders the interceptor was to be automatically steered under the guidance of ground radars before engaging its own cutting-edge detection and weapons system. But it was a case of too much too soon; the ferociously exacting requirements on the electronics, missile and powerplant were too demanding, and each suffered severe delays and development problems. What could have been the best intercepter in the world was cancelled in 1962.
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Trump has revealed a comprehensive plan for a new USAF, run by local private companies in individual states. He has promised to double or triple funding.
Donald Trump today released a statement mapping out his plan for a better-equipped and more powerful USAF. The plan was revealed at a convention of the Veterans of the Eagle Stars and Stripes in Kansas.Â
“The United States Air Force used to be really, really great believe me and I’m going to make it amazing again. I was told by a good, good friend of mine who is a smart man- who knows everything about the air force- that it now has less fighters than Belgium – can you believe that? That is true- you can check that – believe me. The Chinese air force now has better fighters, more fighters, stealth fighters – which they stole from us by the way. And yet we’re giving away- selling our fighters to other countries? Oh boy.”
A re-engined variant of the World War P-51 fighter would form the backbone of Trump’s proposed USAF fighter force.
“I want to make our USAF amazing- here’s how: I was watching RT the other day, and even a Russian TV station, a RUSSIAN TV station knows more than us. They know the F-35 is trash. I want to fire the F-35. I’m going to replace it with a Trump fighter- it’s faster, better-armed and cheaper than the very bad, very bad F-35- and what more it’s 100% American. The P-51 Mustang is the best fighter in the world- that’s what the best fighter pilots say – amazing men, great people- and does USAF listen to them, these great veterans? No. No. No. It’s just sad. I would listen to them – I would have 10,000 P-51 Mustangs, I would have 20,000 Mustangs. Hell of a fighter, hell of a fighter. I’m going to get the Mustang and give it the biggest, best engine in the world – the General Electric GE90- 100% US made. They don’t tell you this, the whiners, the Europeans, and those trying to take your money- but the GE90 is twice as powerful as the F-35’s very bad, very bad engine. You can check that – twice as powerful. So that’s fighters? Bombers – can we do better than the B-52 that is seventy years old and still in service? Can we do better than the B-1B that’s forty years old? The B-2 that is thirty years old? Right now, Russia has ‘Blackjack’ bombers in production, twice as fast as anything we have and newer. I say we buy 1000 of them. Get em’ in. Get em’ in. Get em’ in. We stick the GE90 in which is huge and amazing. This is a very, very good idea- a smart move.”
“Right now USAF is mostly sending aid to countries that don’t send aid to us- that seem fair to you? 100% of the countries you pay to drop food on – do not – REFUSE to do the same for us. Where was Ethiopia in Katrina? Yep- you’re right. Nowhere. Very true, very bad. Dozens of people tell me this and can’t believe it. Right now- the F-22, the best US fighter after the P-51- and this is true- I saw it on the Sputnik news agency- the F-22 is worse than the Chinese Su-35- and we are weak now. Right now VERY few, very few – maybe a HANDFUL of US aircraft can carry nukes- and every Soviet sub- which are invisible – could, and probably do, sail up the Hudson every day, carry many, many, many nukes. I promise a nuke on every American airplane, every airliner, every private jet – I’m ashamed to be STRONG? You afraid of that? I’m not – I think the world needs a strong, a very very great, America. Right now Obama wants to tell you we need to be weak and let Merkel, an unattractive woman in France, tell us what to do? And the Air Force now takes money from honest hardworking Americans – it’s practically Socialist- can you believe that? It doesn’t make a penny- it loses BILLIONS. TRILLIONS. I understand business and that is bad business. I would not keep it in the hands of idiots, bureaucrats and greedy Federal lawmakers- no way- that’s not right. I would let those who have proved they’re smart business people run it- give it to good guys, to good smart companies who know how to run things. Vote for me for a strong USAFâ€
China’s Chengdu J-20, the aircraft most likely to be stolen by Clint Eastwood.
What year do you expect the J-20 to enter service and how will it compare to Western fighters in terms of capability and technology level?Â
I expect the J-20 to start entering squadron service for IOC around 2020, with deliveries continuing at a fairly impressive rate throughout the 2020s. The J-20 will almost certainly fall short of the F-22 and F-35 in terms of all-aspect stealth and sensor fusion-enabled situational awareness, but will carry a more impressive internal payload and will have significantly greater unrefuelled range which will serve it well in the Pacific. Essentially, the J-20 will present the US and its allies in the region with a long ranged, heavily armed and difficult to track strike fighter-bomber threat. I would suggest its closest Western conceptual analogue would be a low-observable F-111.
How is the Sukhoi PAK FA programme going? What are the biggest challenges it faces?Â
Russia’s Sukhoi PAK-FA, a case of over-ambition?
Not well is the short answer. The T-50 has been downgraded for now to a laughable 12 aircraft for the VVS. This is a huge indicator that the programme is beset by deep-rooted problems in many areas. The T-50/PAK FA as a whole is a perfect example of the lesson that whilst it is comparatively easy to create flying prototypes which look like fifth generation fighters, it is extremely hard to actually make them work as the US alone has managed with the F-22 so far. The huge delays and problems which have beset the F-35 project in spite of the eye-watering quantities of money and expertise which the US has thrown into it should not purely be seen as evidence of programmatic mismanagement (although there is much which I’m sure the US would do differently if given a second chance), but also as evidence of quite how hard what they are trying to achieve is. Russia can make superb airframes but extreme quality control and CPU-crushing electronic complexity are not areas where her aerospace industry has traditionally excelled. Sadly for the VVS, those are precisely what is required to make the T-50/PAK FA into something which can genuinely compete with the F-22 or F-35. Furthermore, Russia simply does not have enough money to fund its massive military modernisation programmes and priority is being given to the Strategic (nuclear) Rocket Forces, submarine force and new tanks for the army.
Many pundits dismiss the JF-17 – what would be a fair assessment of its effectiveness? Is it comparable to the F-16, and if so – which Block would it be on a par with?Â
The Sino-Pakistani JF-17, not to be underestimated.
The JF-17 as an airframe is certainly competitive with the F-16, being slightly aerodynamically cleaner, with a lower wing loading but a less efficient engine than the F-16s latest F110-GE-129/132 engine options. In terms of pilot interface, sensor suite and weapon flexibility, the JF-17 is roughly at a par with 1990s-vintage F-16 Block 40/42 and could be close to the USAF-standard Block 50/52, although without the conformal fuel tanks, JHMCS helmet sighting system and radar upgrades which distinguish the later Block 50/52+ and AESA which equips the UAE’s Block 60/61s.
WVR, equipped with the MAA-1 Piranha missile, the small and agile JF-17 will be a dangerous but not exactly world-beating opponent for existing fourth generation fighters. It is limited to +8/-3g and the current block 1 and 2 fighters do not yet have a helmet mounted sight system as standard (this is promised for block 3). The JF-17 also doesn’t have a greater than 1:1 thrust to weight ratio so would be at a significant disadvantage in terms of energy management against opponents such as the F-15C, Typhoon or Su-35. BVR, the KLJ-7 radar is significantly out-ranged by the F-16’s AN/APG-68 and completely outclassed by the Rafale’s AESA array, Typhoon’s CAPTOR-M and the Su-35’s monstrously powerful Irbis-E. The JF-17s small wing area and lightweight also limit its missile-carrying capacity which further disadvantages it in BVR engagements. However, it is worth remembering that the JF-17 is not really intended to take on Typhoons, Rafales, F-15s or Su-35s. It is meant to be a cheap and cheerful light multirole fighter and configured accordingly.
The Super Hornet, compared to other US fighters, has been a big export flop – why do you think this is, and how effective are the latest versions? Also- which fighter will Canada end up with?
In simple terms, the F-18 series has not sold as well on the export market as other US fighters because it is a carrier-capable fighter competing for contracts with conventional fighters to countries which do not operate big-deck carriers. The F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is second only to the Rafale M as the most capable carrier fighter in the world, but to withstand the huge stresses and corrosive environment of carrier operations it is required to be built heavier, more over-engineered and more expensively than land-based fighters in its class. If a country does not need fighters capable of operating from carriers, it is more likely to go for something like the F-16 which offers similar and in some ways superior capabilities at a significantly lower cost than the Super Hornet. The Super Hornet is an excellent strike fighter with a fairly effective radar, huge weapon flexibility, adequate range and breath-taking high alpha nose authority in a dogfight. However, it does not have the thrust-to-weight ratio and manoeuvrability of the Typhoon or Rafale, the value for money of the F-16/Gripen or the raw power of the F-15. It also cannot offer the same future survivability as the F-35 in high threat environments. Canada will probably buy Super Hornet because they already operate the legacy Hornet (easing maintenance and pilot retraining burdens) and the Trudeau government is politically committed to getting out of purchasing F-35.
How is the F-22 ageing? Is it still extremely maintenance heavy? Is there evidence to suggest LO degrades with time?Â
Undefeated champion dependent on a lot of love.
The F-22 is ageing well, having successfully maintained its status as far and away the most formidable air-superiority fighter ever made and with no sign of having that status seriously challenged anytime soon. It is less maintenance heavy than it used to be, especially since the new-generation stealth coatings developed for the F-35 have been incorporated onto the fleet. However, it remains extremely expensive to fly and maintain – USAF figures for last year show a cost per flight hour of $68,000 which is more than even the four-engine supersonic intercontinental B-1B Lancer heavy bomber. This is not only a function of the outdated and highly niche electronics and general mechanical complexity, but also of the very small fleet size compared to what was intended which means that fixed costs for the whole fleet are spread across a comparatively small number of flying hours.
Tejas- joke or hope?Â
Tejas, national pride over practicality?
Joke. Thirty years of development to produce an aircraft with short range, poor payload, and severe quality control issues throughout the manufacturing process leading to badly fitting structural components, slow delivery rates and high costs due to remanufacturing and alterations requirements. India would have done much better to have just bought a licence to manufacture Gripen C/D.
What is the status of the F-2 fleet of the JASDF? How would you rate the F-2 in terms of effectiveness?Â
The Mitsubishi F-2: Big-winged F-16 a waste of effort?
The F-2 is, in effect, an F-16 with Japanese electronic wizardry baked into it and a slight aerodynamics upgrade. However, for that Japan has paid an extortionate cost per aircraft and one which cannot really justified by the marginal improvements over the F-16, especially given that the latest UAE-standard F-16 Block 61 Desert Falcons are cheaper and more capable in almost every way. The F-2 shares almost all the same strengths and limitations of the F-16 family so I won’t go into much more detail here. Certainly a useful aircraft for the JASDF but not worth the money and time it took to develop and procure unless the domestic industrial experience gained eventually enables a workable fighter to be developed from the X-2 Shinshin.
Is the AIDC F-CK-1 Ching-kuo a viable defence against the Chinese navy/air force?
F-CK you I won’t do what you tell me.
One on one, the F-CK-1 is more than a match for the J-7 and can probably hold its own against the J-11, but is outclassed by the recent Su-35s purchased from Russia and is certainly not an answer to the J-20 or Beijing’s huge ballistic and long range SAM arsenal within range of Taiwan. However, the F-CK-1 is unlikely to face Chinese fighters on anything like a one for one confrontation and would be hopelessly outnumbered in any likely invasion scenario.
Which of the new fighter projects (South Korea/Japan/Turkey/Eurofighter replacement) would you predict will come to fruition and how effective do you expect them to be?
Mitsubishi X-2 Shinshin: the next superfighter.
I think the Japanese X-2 follow on fifth/sixth generation project is the most likely of these to actually develop into a frontline type. However, this assumes the US does not build an F-22 Raptor replacement first and export it to Japan. If this does not happen, the fact that F-35 is not particularly well suited to Japan’s specific air superiority requirements suggests that they might well feel their own stealth fighter is essential. If it were developed, the aircraft would most likely be at least comparable to the F-22 to make it worth the trouble and so would be formidably capable by almost any measurement.
The most exotic fighter in development is the MiG-31 replacement – what do we know about this?Â
Pie in the sky?
Source: Bemil.chosun
Sadly, very little indeed. It is yet another potentially very expensive ambition for the VVS but given the fate of the T-50/PAK FA project, I wouldn’t hold your breath on this one until something much more concrete than a statement of requirement emerges.
Will India ever get Rafales? What are the Rafale’s export chances?
Will Rafale become India’s main fighter?
India will most likely get its 36 off the shelf Rafales and then many more once the purchase model has finally been agreed upon. However, the terms of that deal and the timescale are anyone’s guess. Basically, the Indian Air Force is in desperate need of new fighters and the Rafale is simply too capable to stick at 36 aircraft given the poor serviceability which plagues the Su-30MKI fleet and the disappointing Tejas. Assuming they do take delivery of 36, I would bet on India ordering more and possibly a lot more.
What are Typhoon’s export chances?Â
Typhoon: too late and too much.
Whilst the Kuwaiti order has been a great morale boost for Eurofighter, it is difficult to escape concluding that Typhoon has more or less run out of significant new export opportunities for the foreseeable which means production will end by around 2020. The problem is that although the aircraft is formidably capable as a top-class multirole fighter, it is simply too expensive to compete with the F-16 and F-18 for medium-rank air forces whilst it is so late with promised capabilities such as the AESA radar that those countries that are looking for gold-plated solutions and might once have bought the jet are mostly waiting to purchase the F-35.
Any news on the status of the Meteor on Gripen? How would you rate the frontline Meteor-armed Gripens in terms of A2A capability?Â
Gripen with Meteor: the little guy with the long arms.
The Gripen with Meteor is a highly capable platform BVR but relies on permissive rules of engagement to be able to take advantage of the long range punch of the missile. It also does not have the grunt of Typhoon to get the most out of the missile with supercruise launch profiles at very high altitudes guided by CAPTOR. However, Meteor certainly makes the Gripen even more competitive on the export market as it can continue to provide (in very rough terms) 90% of the capability of a Typhoon or F-15 at a third of the price. Coupled with the Gripen NG’s impressive electronic warfare package, Meteor will give the Swedish and Brazilian air forces a very respectable fighter for the next decade with a bargain price tag
What should I have asked you?Â
Probably something on FCAS but that can wait for another time!
I have next to no knowledge in the field of aerodynamics- I stumble to explain the two competing theories of how a wing works, how coupled and uncoupled canard-deltas differ – even the simple equations of Energy Management have me stumped (not even sure this last one solely exists in aerodynamics). So I’m hoping that some bright aerodynamic engineer can help me with this one – ideally using simple language. Why does the F-35 produce such distinctive vortices from the wingtip/flap edge – and are they intentional, and positive in effect? Agile fighters – with strakes or canards – display visible vortices on the inner section of the wing- presumably where it’s wanted. I thought that wingtip vortices caused induced drag and were best avoided? Yet, the F-35 seems to stream them like a ’70s airliner. Educated comments in the reply section are VERY welcome.Â
I found this delightfully bonkers idea while do a patent search- this one is from 2001:
“An autonomous passenger module is releasably carried on a super-sonic aircraft, such as a military fighter jet, for carrying plural passengers on supersonic and near space flights. The passenger module is equipped with passenger service and life support systems to provide oxygen and the like, a parachute system, and a landing airbag or flotation aid system. The module remains mounted on the aircraft throughout a normal flight. In an emergency situation, the module separates from the aircraft by means of releasable connector elements and descends using parachutes. The module provides high passenger capacity at a low cost in a simple manner for commercial supersonic flights using an existing supersonic aircraft as a carrier platform.”
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Boeing has bet the farm on the 787, but do pilots like it? Ian Black bid farewell to his beloved Airbus to train on the latest DreamLiner- so what does he make of the ‘Electric 8-ball’?Â
When did you begin training on the 787? Â January 2016 – my last flight was a very pleasant A330 hop to Antigua
What were your first impressions? First impression was that it is a step forward from the Airbus – even though it doesn’t have a side-stick !
Does it have any similarities to other Boeings? I’ve not flown any other Boeing but everyone says its like the triple 7.
The conventional control yoke seems archaic to former Airbus jocks.
What’s the biggest difference between it and an A340? Biggest difference -hard question as Boeing and Airbus are chalk and cheese – I guess going back to a yolk after a side-stick. Side-stick definitely feels more 21st Century.
What do you like most about it? If I was paying the bills – Â the fuel burn. It literally uses half the fuel that the ‘340 needed. From a pilot view, the cockpit is very bright and spacious.
What do you like least about it? Least of all – the pilots seats are no where near as comfy as the Airbus – I think Porsche build the Airbus seats
Uncomfortable seats are the only downside of the 787 cockpit.
What are the crew rest quarters like? Crew rest is amazing! Said in an American voice -‘they are truly awesome‘. It’s like a proper bed and your quality of rest is much improved. Added to the low cabin Altitude and you genuinely feel better when you get off.
Did anything surprise you about it? Lots of things surprised me. The technology creep is very subtle with small changes from the 777 – and even a pilot from the older 747 and 757 can see the Boeing style. There is a real difficulty now where modern computer technology – like Apple’s iPad – advances at a faster rate than aeronautical technology. This leads to the almost bizarre situation where we have an electronic flight book that is way behind the iPad so we end up relying on iPads for maps and charts – strange when the cost of the EFB is probably a hundred times more.
Is it easy to taxi? Its very easy to taxi and similar in feel to the A330 – perhaps a little more sensitive than an Airbus
What is the acceleration and climb like compared to a A340-600? Pretty similar – The A340-600 was almost overpowered when lightly loaded.
It is a relatively young aircraft, does is it feeling adequately mature? As alluded to in my earlier answer, modern airliners embrace a mixture of old and new to allow crews to be multi-rated on different type and simplify the conversion this is on the plus side. On the down side it means manufactures are reluctant to encompass an entirely new cockpit environment – in modern speak they are more risk aware.
What advice would you give to new 787 pilots? Pretty much the same as a new Airbus – take the automatics out and its the same as any aeroplane where you can manually control the thrust and pitch and roll and it behaves as any aircraft should
What do you think of the 787’s looks? Perhaps the hardest question. Personally I found the A340 one of the most graceful airliners every built – similar to a 707, it looked right. The 777 looks right, but the new generation of airliners the A350 and B787 feature the latest in terms of wing design and fuselage construction leading to a somewhat unbalanced appearance. The undercarriage also draws the aircraft lower to the ground giving a squat look. From the front people have described it as ‘Comet-like’ which is no bad thing but I guess we will have to wait for the 787 -10 to see what the big DreamLiner looks like.
 Three words to describe it?  Futuristic, innovative and aerodynamic.
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Since its combat debut in Vietnam, the B-52 Stratofortress has unleashed more destruction than any other aircraft. Keith Shiban flew the ’52 in the nuclear deterrent role, and in combat missions over Iraq. We spoke to him about flying and fighting in this menacing enforcer of American foreign policy.
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What were your first impressions of the B-52? 

I was awed by the size of it. You don’t realize just how big it is until you get up close to one. It looks powerful, even sinister with the dark camouflage and ECM blisters all over it.It’s not what I would call a ‘pretty’ airplane. It’s a purpose-built weapon of war and looks the part.
I had just come off instructing in the T-38 and it was like jumping out of a Corvette into an 18-wheeler. I didn’t find the B-52 difficult to fly, but I did find it hard to fly well. Nothing happens quickly and there is a lot of inertia to manage.
Deflect the yoke and there’s a noticeable pause before the plane starts to bank. Centre the yoke and it keeps rolling for a bit. 

After my first training sortie I can remember looking back at this huge beast sitting on the tarmac and thinking “Damn, I landed that?â€
Air refueling was for me the most difficult thing to learn. As an aircraft commander, that’s where you make your money. If you can’t get the gas from the tanker you can’t do the mission. It wasn’t until my seventh or eighth training sortie that I was actually able to stay hooked up to the tanker. The short-tail B-52s (G and H models) have a bit of a dutch-roll to them. It’s not really noticeable until you get right behind the tanker.
You have to constantly work the yoke just to keep the wings level during air refuelling. Once you finally get your muscle-memory programmed it becomes second nature, but it took a while to figure it out. Even then it’s still aworkoutt. Taking on a 100,000 pounds of gas meant being on the end of that boom for 20 minutes or so. I’d feel like I’d been workout out at the gym afterwards.
A B-52G Stratofortress aircraft takes off on its return flight to the United States after being deployed during Operation Desert Storm.
The other big adjustment was handling that large of a crew. The B-52 is very much a navigator’s airplane. I used to joke about me just being the voice-activated autopilot for the navigators.
In training, I was taught that the Aircraft Commander’s job was to “fly the plane and make decisionsâ€. I had to constantly process inputs from the other crew positions and decide how to react. The offense team might be telling me to go one way to get to the target but the defense team might be telling me not to go that way because there’s a threat over there.
You lived or died as a crew. Even if the pilot is Chuck Yeager (and I’m not) it won’t do much if the Radar Navigator can’t hit the target or the Electronic Warfare Officer lets you get shot down on the way there. It was a team effort all the way. The aircraft commander tends to get all the credit but I was only as good as the rest of my crew. Fortunately I had a very good crew. How do B-52 crews view Dr Strangelove- was it realistic? 

Dr. Strangelove was a staple on alert. I’ve seen it enough times to have the script memorized.

 Kubrick got an awful lot right with that movie, especially when you consider that the Air Force was very secretive about the B-52 at the time.

My main critique would be that the final bomb run seems to take up the last third of the movie, when in reality a bomb run doesn’t take nearly that long from Initial Point to release. I think they tried about eight different means of getting those bomb doors open. In reality there was a manual release cable that the navigators could pull to unlatch the doors. But hey, it’s a movie. They have to make it dramatic.
It’s still probably my favourite movie of all time. What tips would you offer to new crews coming onto the ’52?Â
Be proud. You’re flying a piece of history. Even to this day, when we really want some other country to know we mean business, we deploy B-52s. What kit did you wish for when you were serving on the B-52?Â
I would have liked more in the way of standoff weapons. In 1991 we were still mostly dropping iron bombs like in WWII. This required us to fly directly over the target. You can avoid most of the threats on the way to and from the target, but anything worth bombing is probably going to be defended. You can’t do much evasive action on the bomb run, because the whole reason you’re there is to hit the target. Even if the defenders don’t shoot you down, simply making you miss the target means you did all that work for nothing. Â
Please talk me through your first Gulf War mission
My crew was deployed in August of 1990 to Diego Garcia to be part of the 4300 Provisional Bomb Wing. I can remember getting the phone call early on a Sunday morning: “Be here in 4 hours with your bags packed. You’re going away indefinitely.â€
After seven months of living on tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean, the part of me that wasn’t scared shitless was ready to just get the whole mess over with so I could go home.
It was around 5:00 PM when we got notified. I know this because the chow hall opened at 5 and I was getting ready to go eat. Someone banged on the door to the room four of us shared and said “You’re going.â€
I forget how much time we had to get ready but I know I walked over to the dining hall and tried to eat something. My stomach twisted itself into a knot so all I all managed was to eat a bit of salad and sip some ice tea.
At the appointed time we were loaded onto a bus and driven down to the airfield. The security police gave us an escort with lights and sirens going, which I thought was pretty cool.
We had been previously briefed on what our Night One target would be. We would be hitting one of the Iraqi forward-deployment airfields. There were five of these roughly 25 miles from the border with Saudi Arabia. Three B-52s were tasked against each airfield plus we had a number of “airborne spares†in case one of the jets broke on the way there.
We were ushered into the auditorium for our pre mission briefings. Our pep talk from the commander was basically “Don’t run into the ground and do their job for themâ€. Good advice actually.
The mission briefings were pretty short since we already knew beforehand what the target was. We had done a few rehearsals against some islands out in the Indian Ocean so were pretty confident in our ability to do it.
I don’t recall exactly when we launched, but it was getting late in the day by the time we actually got out to the aircraft. We launched 20-some bombers and tankers completely by timing, without a single radio call being made. There was a scheduled time for engine start, taxi and takeoff for each aircraft.
A fully loaded B-52G is a sluggish beast and needs a lot of runway to get airborne. The runway at Diego was relatively short by SAC standards. Only 10,000 feet if I recall. We used up most of it by the time we lifted off.
There was a nasty line of heavy rain showers hitting the area right around then and we flew through some of it. I can recall taking a pretty good beating going through the weather.
A short while after we got leveled off we did our first air refueling. There were normally two air refuelings scheduled on the way up to the Saudi peninsula. The G model was a bit underpowered and the extra drag of having bombs on the wing pylons made it worse. Sometimes I would have the throttles to the firewall just trying to stay on the boom.
A good tanker crew could make you look good back there. If they were jinking around a lot, trying to stay in formation, it could make your job a lot tougher. If their autopilot wasn’t working it was even tougher. Our bow wave would actually move the tanker around. If either one of us wasn’t smooth on the controls it could cause a chain reaction.
Somewhere on the way up to Saudi Arabia we took time to don our survival gear and sidearms. We had flak vests, as I recall, but I think we placed them strategically around the cockpit rather than wearing them. We figured that anything likely to hit us would come up through the floor.
You probably want to know what I was feeling at the time. I am not a particularly brave individual. I was always pretty scared the days before a mission. Once I got in the jet I was fine. That was my comfort zone. No more worrying about if it’s going to happen, it’s happening now. Just do your job.
By this time I was very confident in our ability as a crew to do the mission. We did a lot of training in the six months prior and I knew I could fly the jet to its limits. Knowing that you’re probably going to get shot at in a few months gives you added incentive to train hard.
It was dark by the time we got up over Saudi Arabia. The sky was filled with the lights of aircraft massing for the attack. I can remember commenting on it, right before I fell asleep.
Now I’d to say that I’m such a steely-eyed warrior that I was able to sleep on way into combat but I think I was just exhausted at that point. I had been up most of the day, combined with the stress I think I just shut down.
Next thing I knew, my copilot was waking me up and telling me we needed to get ready for low level. This involved taping over all the lights in the cockpit with electrical tape and taping green chemical light-sticks under the dash to use as NVG lighting. Very high tech. Back then we had red cockpit lighting that would wash out the Night Vision Goggles. The goggles were not our primary method of flying low level but they were an addition to the terrain avoidance radar and the FLIR that were built into the aircraft. The goggles clipped to our helmet visor and had a battery pack mounted to the back of the helmet with velcro. The whole assembly was heavy and would snap your neck in an ejection – so you had remember to take it off before punching out.
Our formation at high altitude was 2 miles in trail with each aircraft stacked 500 feet above the one in front of it. As we dropped down to low altitude we went into what was called a “streamâ€. A bomber stream was normally spaced about a minute apart, roughly six miles at the speeds we flew low levels at.
We dropped down low well inside Saudi airspace so we wouldn’t get picked up by the Iraqi radars. Our tactics at that time were to avoid known threats. No sense tangling with a SAM site if you can just go around it. Of course it’s the one you don’t know about that worries you.
We were running between 300 and 500 on our way to the target. I remember it was pitch black that night and the NVGs weren’t really doing much for me as they need at least some ambient light to work. They were picking up all the anti-aircraft fire, however, and probably making it look closer than it actually was.
It looked to me like they were just trying to fill the air with lead and hope somebody flew through it. I can remember seeing a ZSU-23 spitting out tracers like a fire hose. Fortunately it wasn’t near us because one of those could ruin your day. I saw a lot of heavy stuff, 57mm and larger. I didn’t worry as much about those so much as they had a very low probability of actually hitting something.
I occupied myself with calling out what I was seeing to the crew and pointing out that it was either of range or not aiming at us. It’s hard to tell what you’re seeing at night. Was that light I just saw a missile or just a truck headlight?
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The actual bomb run was planned as a “multiple axis of attackâ€. The three bombers in our cell would come at it from three different directions to confuse the defenses. Sixty seconds was normally the spacing between aircraft but in this case we were compressing it to 45 seconds. The idea was to minimize our time over the target. Most critically, we would have to make our time-over-target with zero second tolerance or our bombs might frag the next guy over the target. The plan allowed no room for error.
My aircraft was loaded with fifty one cluster bombs that were filled with mines. The other two aircraft had British runway cratering bombs that we called a “UK1000â€. The bombs would crater the runways and taxiways while the mines would make life difficult for anyone trying to repair them. The bombs also had a variable time delay so some of them would dig a hole and then blow up as much as a day later.
To release the cluster bombs we would have to climb up to 1000 feet going across the target. That is not a good altitude. You either want to be really low or really high. The other two jets were able to drop from 500 feet. We got the first run over the target so that we might at least have surprise on side.
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The bomb run itself was uneventful except for not being able to see anything. As soon as started releasing, things got interesting. In my NVGs I saw “Flash! Flash! Flash! Flash!†and I thought “Oh crap, they’re shooting at us and I can’t do a damn thing about it until we get the bombs awayâ€.
As soon as the bombs were gone I went into an aggressive “gun jink†maneuver. This involved rapidly throwing the plane around in multiple directions. At the same time I pointed the nose back at the ground. We started picking up speed fast. Our limiting airspeed was 390 knots indicated and I’m sure I saw 430 on the gauge. At this point the plane was wanting to “mach tuckâ€. The faster we went the more the nose wanted to go down. I had to run the trim nose up quite a bit to counteract that. Meanwhile we’re jinking around low to ground at night, probably being a bigger threat to ourselves than anything the enemy might be doing.
What I probably saw that night was the charges from our own cluster bombs opening. The interval between flashes was just about right for it to look like a 37mm anti-aircraft gun. In 20/20 hindsight we probably weren’t getting shot at but I didn’t realize it at the time.
In all the excitement we turned the wrong way coming off target and ended up doing a 270 degree turn to get back on course. Meanwhile the other two bombers did their thing, followed up by a flight of F-15Es who took out the hardened shelters.
After that I was hyped up all the way to the Saudi border. The plan was for us to land at Jeddah International Airport in Saudi. I think we had to go around at least twice because the traffic pattern was so busy. Once we finally got on the ground some guys in silver hazmat suits checked the outside of our plane for contamination (chemicals). Then the maintenance guys checked us for battle damage and didn’t find any. Finally we got to park the jet. I can remember sitting on the ramp at Jeddah for a very long time waiting for someone to come get us. We didn’t really care, we were just happy to have accomplished the mission and still be alive. Tell me something most people get wrong about the B-52
Most people assume that something as large as a B-52 must be roomy on the inside. In reality it’s quite cramped in there. Most of the available space is taken up either by fuel tanks, bombs or electronics. The only place you can even stand up straight is the ladder between the upper and lower compartments. 

Unlike an airliner, it’s also extremely noisy. We had to wear headsets or helmets all the time to protect our hearing. Talking “cross cockpit†like we do in an airliner was impossible. Everything had to be said over the intercom.
Not a comfortable place to spend 12 to 16 hours. Even training missions would leave you completely drained physically. SAC liked to say “You’ve got to be tough to fly the heaviesâ€.
Tell me something most people don’t know about the B-52
I don’t think our role in the Gulf War was ever well publicized. Especially the low level strikes that were carried out on the first three nights. During the Cold War, did members of the B-52 aircrew community feel confident that they would survive an attack on the USSR? 

That’s the big question, isn’t it? Fortunately we never had to find out.
Soviet air defenses were quite formidable. Our ECM package in the G-model wasn’t as good as what the H-model has. There were some newer Soviet missiles, like the SA-10 (S-300) that we simply would not have wanted to meet. We also feared running into a MiG-31 long before we even got to Soviet territory.

You have to realize though, that by the time we got there both sides would likely have been lobbing ICBMs at each other for eight hours. There may not have been much left of their air defenses to worry about.
9. You stood nuclear alert- how does one reconcile personal ethics with the knowledge one may have carry out a nuclear attack? 

We were so well trained that we’d have probably been halfway to our targets by the time we even thought about what we were doing. We used to joke about turning south and making Jamaica the next nuclear power if the balloon went up but that was just a joke. 

Most of didn’t think we’d have to do it. The whole reason SAC existed was to prevent a war with the Soviets. If things had gotten that bad, we’d have probably been dodging nuclear explosions on our way out of US airspace. The instinct would have been to hit them back with everything we had at that point.

Still, it was sobering to sign for an alert aircraft with sixteen nuclear weapons on it. Quite a lot of responsibility for a 27-year-old aircraft commander.
  What were your favourite and least favourite flights/missions on the B-52?Â
I enjoyed doing anything tactical like low levels or playing with fighters. Touch and go landings were fun but I think SAC overdid it sometimes. We’d fly an 8 hour training mission and then have 3 hours of “transition†as it was called tacked on. We’d already be worn out from flying all night and they’d want us to practice landings from 1 AM to 4 AM. It was especially rough on the other crewmembers, who were just along for the ride at that point. Why do you think the B-52 has stayed in service for so long? 

In some ways it’s such a generic aircraft that it can be adapted to different missions. It can carry a lot of ordnance a long way and it can loiter for a long time. One thing people don’t always think about is it has a tremendous amount of electrical power from its four generators. That allows them to keep stuffing new electronics into it.
What do you think of its Russian equivalent, the Tu-95? 

When the Russians make something that works they stick with it. I’ve had the opportunity to crawl inside one. Like the B-52 it was a mix of very old and very new technology. It’s smaller than a B-52, about 2/3 the size. It’s extremely fast for a turboprop aircraft and also very efficient.

Those props produced a tremendous amount of noise and vibration. I can only imagine that it gave the crews a real beating over time.

Tactically I don’t think they were anywhere close to what we were doing in the B-52. I don’t believe they ever envisioned using the Tu-95 as a low-level penetrator.
 Did you ever fly at low altitude in a B-52?
Low level was our bread and butter in the B-52 community at that time. We were still training to penetrate Soviet air defences in the late 1980s. 

In the daytime it was a lot of fun, at least for the pilots. I don’t know how the other crew positions managed to sit through it. Sitting in the dark while getting bounced around on a hot day was a recipe for airsickness. B-52 navigators are a very dedicated bunch. The downward firing ejection seats the navigators rode in couldn’t have inspired much confidence either. 

At night it was very challenging. Our systems were good down to 200 feet over flat terrain and I think 300 or 400 feet in mountainous terrain. Keep in mind that our wingspan was almost 200 feet. A night low level required a tremendous team effort, especially between the pilots and navs. It was all hand flown in the B-52. Unlike the B-1 and F-111, we only had “terrain avoidance†radar. It wasn’t coupled to the autopilot. So imagine you’re bopping along at 360 knots through the mountains in the middle of the night. 

The SAC tactics people interviewed a Soviet MiG-29 pilot who had defected. The asked him “Do you think you could intercept a B-52 flying 300 feet at night in terrain?†He told them “No fucking wayâ€.
Abraham Lincoln noted that America will never be destroyed from the outside. Likewise the most serious threats to the US aircraft industry have always come from within, as demonstrated by the following inglorious parade of folly and nincompoopery. No nation has created as many aircraft types – or types that so comprehensively occupy the spectrum from superb to shit.Â
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10. Fisher P-75 Eagle
Long before the F-15 was even thought of, its illustrious namesake was the physical embodiment of audacious corporate fraud. The original Eagle was a poor aircraft built by General Motors with an ulterior motive that sucked in over $50 million in the middle of the most destructive war in history. Great things were expected of the Eagle, its designation P-75 had been specially allocated, P-73 and P-74 having been missed out, to allude to the French 75-mm gun of the Great war – regarded as a symbol of victory. The appellation “Eagle’ boasted of American greatness and nobility – and extensive media interest surrounded the programme. It was trumpeted as a ‘wonder plane’ before its first flight (less so afterwards) however the Eagle itself was a Frankenstein’s Monster of an interceptor, cobbled together out of bits of other, better, aircraft. The Eagle’s wings were taken from the P-40, its undercarriage from the F4U Corsair and the tail was appropriated from the SBD Dauntless. This approach appeared to yield distinct advantages: the aircraft could be built quickly as all these parts were already in production and (most attractively) the new fighter should be cheap as so much of it already existed. Unfortunately the design also employed the Allison (itself a division of General Motors) V-3420, a 24-cylinder engine that promised much but delivered considerably less, not least its rated horsepower and the Eagle’s performance was underwhelming. That aside, the XP-75 suffered from poor handling, dreadful spin characteristics and inadequate engine cooling. To further muddle an already problematic programme the Army decided it required not an interceptor but a long-range escort fighter. The XP-75 was redesigned, negating the advantage of using the pre-existing elements of its original design and emerged as a broadly acceptable aircraft in late 1944, by which time P-51s were proving spectacularly successful in the escort role rendering the Eagle superfluous, production terminated at the sixth airframe and that appeared to be that.
However all was not as it seemed, General Motors, who designed and built the P-75 at its Fisher Body Division, were tied up in a great many wartime programmes and believed they were overcommitted. When the USAAF came calling to try to get them to build B-29s, GM were desperate not to join in. With the knowledge that USAAF Materiel Command had the power to compel GM to build B-29s, they (allegedly) came up with an alternative and overriding commitment: development of the war-winning P-75! The USAAF bought it (in both senses) and GM never built a Single Superfortress. Looked on in this way, the P-75 was a resounding success.
9. Bell FM-1 Airacuda ‘Francis Ford Cuppola’Â
Bell were a new player on the scene in 1937 and their first aircraft design combined futuristic looks with unconventional features but its striking looks concealed a litany of flaws, questionable design choices and unsatisfactory performance in its designed roles. Firstly, the FM-1’s combined engine nacelle/gun positions gave the 37-mm weapons mounted therein a good field of fire for intercepting bomber formations but the pusher engines constantly overheated and the rear mounted propellors rendered death inevitable for any gunner who attempted to bail out. Actually firing the guns caused the gunner’s station to fill with choking smoke. Sensibly the aircraft was usually flown with the nacelles unoccupied. Accepting that the gunners were best left behind, their guns could be operated remotely from the cockpit but the aircraft was too draggy and slow to stand much chance of intercepting any modern bomber. Its manoeuvrability was also poor, had it ever faced contemporary fighters it would have been cut to pieces.
As if this wasn’t enough the Airacuda was expected to be able to perform ground-attack missions as well, its bombload of a mere 600lb would have been acceptable in 1918 but on the eve of the Second World War it was pathetic. To add considerable injury to insult the electrical system of the aircraft was extensive, complicated and unreliable. The FM-1 was the only aircraft to require a full-time supercharged auxiliary engine to power its own electrics as well as the fuel pumps. In the event of this engine failing (and it frequently did) the crew lost the use of the undercarriage, flaps and most importantly, the engines. Amazingly the FM-1 did enter limited operational service, equipping one squadron from 1938 to 1940. With only one recorded fatality whilst flying the Airacuda, the US Army got off surprisingly lightly.
8. Convair NB-36 ‘Atomic wait’
Of all the starkly insane ideas of the 1950s, the idea of putting an operating nuclear reactor in an aircraft remains particularly chilling. Yet both the Soviet Union and the USA did exactly that. The NB-36 ‘Crusader’ was a massive, terrifying ecological disaster waiting to happen every time it took to the sky. Yet take to the sky it did on no less than 47 occasions. Intended merely to test the feasibility of operating a nuclear reactor in flight prior to the development of a true atomic-powered aircraft, the NB-36 hauled a three megawatt reactor aloft. As a result of the shielding required to keep its crew alive, it remains by far the aircraft with the greatest amount of lead in its airframe: the rubber and lead-lined cockpit area alone weighed eleven tons.
A measure of its frightening potential can be gleaned from the fact that every time it flew it was accompanied by a team of support aircraft including a C-97 filled with a platoon of Marines who, in the event of a crash, or the reactor being jettisoned, were to parachute down, secure the site and attempt immediate clean-up, a task that would probably have cost them their lives. The NB-36 was also the only aircraft fitted with a hotline to the President’s office to be used in case of impending or actual disaster. This hotline was actually used when a smoke marker exploded in the reactor compartment (harmlessly as it turned out). Imagine taking that call.
As it turned out, the reactor was switched on for a total of 89 hours in flight and all was well, the NB-36 survived to be scrapped and the radioactive parts of the airframe were buried. However when one considers that 32 standard B-36s were written-off in accidents from 1949 to 1957 and even though this was a very good safety record for the time, it does make one wonder about the responsibility (or lack of it) of combining 1940s aeronautical technology with a potential Chernobyl.
7. Wright Flyer
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Just because an aircraft is epoch-making doesn’t make it any good. The Wright Flyer was, according to the Smithsonian Institution, “the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard” and they should know as they spent a great deal of time and money trying to prove that it wasn’t. However it should be pointed out that this sustained flight lasted an absolute maximum of 59 seconds, was more or less out of control, and covered a mere 852 feet. It flew four times on December 17 1903 but never again because the Flyer was essentially uncontrollable – and it should be noted that the Wright’s had plenty of experience flying gliders of the same configuration over long distances for years before they attempted powered flight. With the elevator mounted at the wrong end of the aircraft and too close to the centre of gravity, wing-warping rather than ailerons, and a rudder that was too small, the Flyerwas dangerously unstable about all three axes, particularly longitudinally – in all four flights the Flyer undulated violently. Added to this was its inability to take off under its own power without the aid of a launching rail, visible in the famous photograph above (some deluded groups, almost exclusively Brazilian, believe this feature makes it ineligible as the world’s first aircraft and favour Alberto Santos-Dumont’s 14-bis, which flew without the need for a launch rail in 1906. The fact that Santos-Dumont was also Brazilian obviously having no bearing on their opinion whatsoever). The one undeniably decent aspect of its design was its engine, which the brothers designed themselves and was remarkably powerful for its size – though not nearly as good as the Manly-Balzer radial fitted to Langley’s Aerodrome (of which more later). The Wrights themselves held the Flyer in no great esteem, after storing it for nine years, Wilbur was asked what they intended to do with it and replied that they ‘would most likely burn it’. It was a dreadful, dangerous, flawed aircraft but it was the first.
6. Lockheed Martin VH-71 Kestrel ‘King Arthur Daly’
From a purely aeronautical point of view there is nothing wrong with the VH-71 Kestrel, yet it is not in service and as an example of eye-watering cost overruns it is without parallel, and that’s including the F-35 programme. It’s not even as if it were a new aircraft but instead a version of the AgustaWestland AW101 Merlin, a successful (-ish) medium-lift helicopter first flown in 1987 and serving in the air arms of 13 nations. Unit cost for the Merlin is approximately $21 million. In 2002 Lockheed Martin and AgustaWestland agreed to jointly develop and market the helicopter in the US. In 2005 this aircraft won the competition to replace the fleet of helicopters operated by the Marines as Presidential transport. By 2009, the contract had ballooned from its original allocation of $6.1Billion to over $11.2 billion. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was dragged to go to Congress for a review of the project. The price continued happily rising. Some blame the rises on additional requested equipment that was not in the original brief, others point to improper lobbyist ties or erratic asset management. Its pretty hard to run a US military aircraft project so badly that it is killed (the A-12 being an notable exception) – the F-35 and C-5 proving the point, but this was a during a recession. Some pointed out, not entirely in jest, that this huge sum would do more to safeguard the President if it were spent on stabilising the economies of the world’s poorest countries.
President Obama doomed the Kestrel to cancellation with an injection of fiscal rationality in 2009 with the mild words “the helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me.” The nine Kestrels that had been built ended up being sold to Canada as spare parts for their AgustaWestland CH-149 Cormorant fleet (a somewhat more successful Merlin variant) for a mere $164 million, only $2.84 billion less than had already been inexplicably spent on their construction. Seven of these remain airworthy and there is the possibility that Canada may yet put these into service, an intriguing possibility for an aircraft that literally cost more than its weight in gold.
5. The Langley ‘Aerodrome’ ‘Pierpont Zero’
Samuel Pierpont Langley was a brilliant inventor, astronomer and scientist who happened to be secretary of the Smithsonian institution. He had built an excellent model aircraft that flew over a mile in 1901 and decided, reasonably, to scale it up and make the world’s first manned, powered flight. The Aerodrome was beautifully made and its 52hp radial had the best power-to-weight ratio of any engine, a record it held until 1919(!) – but it couldn’t fly. Twice the Aerodrome was flung off its catapult and plunged into the Potomac River. Nine days later the Wright brothers flew their aircraft into the history books, Langley died in 1906, and that should really have been that for the Aerodrome but fate decreed its story was not yet over.
The Wrights were as litigious as they were diligent and busily sued anyone who built a successful aircraft. In 1914 this included the talented pioneer Glenn Curtiss who came up with a brilliant scheme to flip the litigation on its head. If he could prove that the Aerodromewas capable of flight then the Wright’s patent would be invalid and he wasn’t going to let a little thing like the fact that it wasn’t stand in his way. After extensive modification including a new V-8 engine, approved by the Smithsonian who despised the Wrights for beating them into the air, Curtiss managed to coax it aloft for an awe-inspiring five seconds. Modifications removed, the Aerodromewas fraudulently placed on show as ‘the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight’. Thus began an ignoble tradition of deception, foul-play and skulduggery that has sustained the US aviation industry for well over a century.
4. Lockheed XFV-1 Salmon ‘Salmon fishing in no man’
The US military was full of bizarre ideas throughout the fifties, and luckily for us they were so prudence-crushingly rich that many of them actually got built. One of the craziest was the XFV-1 and its superior competitor the Convair XFY-1 ‘Pogo’, the last two airscrew-powered aircraft designed for the fighter role. Inspired, like all the best aviation ideas of the 1950s, by the flights of fantasy of the dying Third Reich (a regime not well known for rationality and good sense) the Pogo and Salmon were loosely derived from a Focke-Wulf design study for a fighter called the Triebflugel. This was to have a mid-mounted rotor/propellor powered by ramjets and the whole point of the idea was that it could take off vertically, ideal for a point-defence interceptor. The downside for the pilot of this and the subsequent Pogo and Salmon was that they had to land vertically – backwards – the pilot inching the aircraft back down onto to its tail. Nonetheless the US Navy couldn’t ignore the utility of a fighter aircraft that could be based on any ship large enough to mount a helipad, two prototypes were ordered, and a production contract was expected for whichever proved the better design. Quite apart from the landing problem, both programmes were condemned to employ the Allison XT-40 turboprop, a desultory engine with a disarming tendency to rip itself to pieces which was to prove the kiss of death to several other more conventional aircraft. Engine failure is not to be taken lightly in any aircraft but when one is hovering, nose vertical, a hundred or so feet above the ground, the prospect of that engine ceasing to work is a sobering one. Nevertheless Convair managed a few vertical take-offs and landings with their Pogo but the poor Salmon was not so lucky, a ton heavier than the Pogo, it was decided that it lacked necessary power for its weight to attempt either.
So, whilst Convair found their Pogo was possible to land – though it was regarded as almost impossible even by their exceptional test pilot ‘Skeets’ Coleman – Lockheed had to fly their Salmon with an embarrassing fixed undercarriage more appropriate for a 1920s airliner than a state-of-the-art interceptor. Both programmes were cancelled at the request of their manufacturers in 1955 (which was a shame, imagine these two dogfighting MiG-17s over Vietnam). Nevertheless, to their possible credit, they did try, Lockheed’s great designer Kelly Johnson said of the Salmon “We practised landing on clouds, and we practised looking over our shoulders. We couldn’t tell how fast we were coming down, or when we would hit. We wrote the Navy: ‘We think it is inadvisable to land the airplane.’ They came back with one paragraph that said ‘We agree.'”
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3. Rockwell XFV-12 ‘The Rockwell tart’
Generally, by the 1970s, it was a fairly safe bet that prototype fighter aircraft emerging from the world’s biggest, richest, and most successful aviation industry would be capable of flight. Yet in 1977 the Rockwell XFV-12 ingloriously proved that such assumptions are not always as safe as one might imagine. Rockwell’s XFV-12 certainly looked exciting with its canard layout and wingtip tail surfaces cunningly obscuring the parts that had been lifted off other, existing, aircraft – the intakes were from the F-4 and the whole cockpit and landing gear had been nicked from the Skyhawk. The concept of the XFV-12 was intriguing, a system known as a ‘thrust augmentor wing’ channelled engine exhaust downwards to enable vertical flight. Unfortunately someone at Rockwell had augmented the maths: thrust ‘augmentation’ from the system was 30% less than expected and as a result the engine was capable of lifting only three-quarters of the aircraft and the aircraft never flew. Despite this, tethered trials were carried out but with the obvious inability of the aircraft to support itself in the air the whole programme was terminated in 1981. After the expenditure of an estimated billion dollars on the programme the Navy stated that it had ‘learned all it could’ from the XFV-12 i.e. nothing.
2. De Lackner DH-4 Heli-Vector/HZ-1 Aero-cycle/YHO-2 ‘The Devil’s Hoverbike’
In the 1950s the US Army decided that only snow-eating Commies walk into battle and that having their infantrymen hover into action like elves or fairies on dangerous one-man helicopters was much more appropriate for the modern battlefield. The De Lackner DH-4 was the worst of the prospective designs to answer this idiotic request and one of the most terrifying machines ever to grace the sky. The true horror of this vehicle becomes clear when one studies a photograph of the DH-4 in flight and realises that the contra-rotating rotor blades are mounted approximately four inches under the feet of its luckless pilot, who was not provided with a seat and was compelled instead to balance on a tiny platform directly over the rotor hub. Standing above the whirling, unprotected rotors the infantryman of the future was required simply to lean in the direction he wished to go, much like a modern Segway. The difference being that a Segway is unlikely to chop one’s body into small pieces should you fall off. Eventually the realisation that the DH-4 was capable only of rendering the modern soldier a better target by raising him, terrified, a few feet above the ground, very noisily and at great expense, caused the programme’s demise. To be fair to the DH-4, it was at least relatively fast, being capable of a horrifying 75mph. This compared well to the rival Hiller Pawnee which at 16mph could be outrun by a not-particularly vigorously ridden bicycle.
1. Christmas Bullet ‘Unhappy Christmas’
Quite likely the Worst Aircraft Ever Built, and the only aircraft on this list that can be justifiably said to have been designed by a psychopath, the Christmas Bullet was a scandalous mockery of an aeroplane capable only of climbing high enough to guarantee the death of its pilot. Dr William Whitney Christmas MD was a seemingly respectable physician who had some unconventional ideas about aircraft development and coupled them with a plethora of lies both about his own achievements – he claimed for example to have invented the aileron – and his designs: he stated that he had received an offer of a million dollars to ‘take over’ Germany’s air force, and was swamped with orders for Bullets from Europe. Luckily for everyone, only one of his designs was to be built, less fortunately, and for no good reason, it was built twice. The Bullet was a stubbily purposeful looking aircraft and the US Army had gamely yet inexplicably (this was wartime and Armies seldom lend prototype military equipment to private individuals) loaned Christmas the prototype of its new Liberty L-6 engine, though they stated that they were to inspect the new aircraft before its first flight, a proviso Dr Christmas ignored.
On first inspection the Bullet appeared quite conventional until one noticed the paper-thin wing unbraced by struts or wires, that was free to flap (‘like a bird’) rather than remain rigid – this being Dr Christmas’s great idea.
Despite the fact that even a cursory glance at the wings makes it plain that they are going to fall off, Christmas managed to persuade an out-of-work pilot named Cuthbert Mills to take the Bullet up. In a twist of fate reminiscent of the worst kind of melodrama, the doomed Mills even invited his mother along to watch him fly the new fighter. The Bullet took off, the wings twisted and folded, and the Bullet crashed, killing its pilot. Undeterred, unrepentant and un-prosecuted Christmas built a new Bullet. It took off, the wings twisted and folded, and the Bullet crashed, killing its pilot. At least this time his mother wasn’t present. A mere month earlier this second Bullet had been on (static) display at the New York Air Show, where it was billed as the ‘safest, easiest controlled plane in the world’. Whilst showing no remorse for losing the lives of two pilots, nor apparently any concern about destroying the Army’s precious new L-6 engine against the their specific instructions, Christmas billed the Army $100,000 for his ‘revolutionary’ wing design. His gifts of persuasion must have been better than his skill as a designer for they duly paid up.
In a final ironic twist the chief designer for the Continental Aircraft company – who had actually built the Bullet for Dr Christmas – was one Vincent Burnelli, who dedicated the remainder of his working life to designing lifting-body aircraft of immense strength and safety. One cannot help but wonder if the horror of the Christmas Bullet inspired this brilliant designer to devote his considerable talent to making aviation safer. William Christmas died in 1964 ‘with money in his pockets and blood on his hands’. As the historian Bill Yenne put it, ‘his was the kind of tale they used to write folk songs about‘.
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I have next to no knowledge in the field of aerodynamics- I stumble to explain the two competing theories of how a wing works, how coupled and uncoupled canard-deltas differ – even the simple equations of Energy Management have me stumped (not even sure this last one solely exists in aerodynamics). So I’m hoping that some bright aerodynamic engineer can help me with this one – ideally using simple language. Why does the F-35 produce such distinctive vortices from the wingtip/flap edge – and are they intentional, and positive in effect? Agile fighters – with strakes or canards – display visible vortices on the inner section of the wing- presumably where it’s wanted. I thought that wingtip vortices caused induced drag and were best avoided? Yet, the F-35 seems to stream them like a ’70s airliner. Educated comments in the reply section are VERY welcome. 
What advice would you give to new 787 pilots? Pretty much the same as a new Airbus – take the automatics out and its the same as any aeroplane where you can manually control the thrust and pitch and roll and it behaves as any aircraft should
Have a look at this lovely model here 
So, whilst Convair found their Pogo was possible to land – though it was regarded as almost impossible even by their exceptional test pilot ‘Skeets’ Coleman – Lockheed had to fly their Salmon with an embarrassing fixed undercarriage more appropriate for a 1920s airliner than a state-of-the-art interceptor. Both programmes were cancelled at the request of their manufacturers in 1955 (which was a shame, imagine these two dogfighting MiG-17s over Vietnam). Nevertheless, to their possible credit, they did try, Lockheed’s great designer Kelly Johnson said of the Salmon “We practised landing on clouds, and we practised looking over our shoulders. We couldn’t tell how fast we were coming down, or when we would hit. We wrote the Navy: ‘We think it is inadvisable to land the airplane.’ They came back with one paragraph that said ‘We agree.'”
William Christmas died in 1964 ‘with money in his pockets and blood on his hands’. As the historian Bill Yenne put it, ‘his was the kind of tale they used to write folk songs about‘.
