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Steve Davies

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Posts posted by Steve Davies

  1. Took me almost five years to build the story, and it might not make me any friends in publishing it, but Schultz’ honour deserves to be defended:

     

    Doc Schultz' Area 51 Mishap: The Details Revealed
    https://youtu.be/zidJB6qxlKs

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  2. For the uninitiated, can someone explain why a formation approach is any more/less risky than formation aerobatics or formation flying in wx? I get that proximity to the ground is a big consideration, but is there anything else that is inherently different about it?

  3. 3 hours ago, Lawman said:


    For the opening salvo of the Air Campaign the Fin was flying an extremely low number of sorties (2%) while experiencing roughly 25% of the Allied air losses. This was entirely a combination or tactics vs threat driven both by the limitation of the platform (optimization to low level Euro campaign entirely) with no organic PGM capability in the GR1 and the requirement of those tactics/capes to put the airplane right into the most dangerous regime as far as threat.

    And there is absolutely no comparison between Tornado GR1 and the IS fielded 111s at the time. GR4 developed into something similar, but that wouldn’t come until later. 111s didn’t have to go find another Vietnam era plane to truck around 1 of 2 experimentally developed pods to designate for it so it could get back into the Air Campaign effectively.

    That’s the problem the Tornado always suffered and what as others have said Typhoon suffers now. The RAF will be in a conflict with a sturdy enough airframe but what always seems to lack is a 5-10 year gap in capabilities that it’s peers on the Coalition Ramp already enjoy. I get that there is something to be said for unified euro political alignments in military procurements but honestly they keen going into fighter programs with the Germans and Italians like we haven’t seen this not work out before. Shoulda/woulda/coulda if anybody had a chance to get on something like Raptor it was England.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

    Thanks for the considered post. 

    I don't agree with the assessment that a 5-10 year capability gap existed between the F-111 and the Tornado. 

    The Tornado IDS was on par with the F-111E (operating in Northern Iraq out of Incirlik) in terms of capabilities. These 1-11s dropped at night from medium altitude, alone and without ever seeing many of their targets (and they weren't running against Saddam's airfields, either). I am not sure how effective they were, but as one of the guys who there recently told me, "no one really cared about what we were doing". 

    As for the F-111F with its PGM capability, they still went in low against airfields and other targets in the opening nights. So, they chose the exact same tactics. Sure, they didn't overfly the runways, but I think I have already established was not the cause of the initial Tornado losses. In fact, the F-models were extremely lucky not to eclipse the Tornado force's losses - three of them were badly damaged by AAA on night one.

    The F-15E, which had a PGM capability, went in low for the first couple of nights. One was downed by AAA on night one. At the time, it was the newest MDS in the Air Force inventory and was, in the same way as you characterise the IDS, optimised for a European conflict. But the capability gap didn't stop the same tactics being chosen...

    The F-16 had no PGM capability (some squadrons with LANTIRN did, but they were in the monitory), and they went in at medium altitude and dropped dumb bombs without any idea whether they were going to hit the target. 

    So, no, not convinced that capabilities explain the disparity between sortie numbers and loss rates. 

     

     

     

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  4. On 2/26/2021 at 5:18 AM, Lawman said:

    ... Tornado, a plane which literally did nothing as well as any of its peers except fly fat slow and stupid down a runway and get shot down in spectacular fashion.

    Hmm.

    Only one Tornado was lost on a JP233 mission and that was actually on the egress and several miles from the runway. IIRC, only two others were lost at low level - neither of which flew down any runway. 

    A balanced view of the performance of the Tornado in ODS is that it did well. It certainly held its own against other strikers in theater, including F-15E, F-111, F-16, Jaguar, A-6, A-7 etc. 

    • Upvote 1
  5. Hmm. I like Eddie Murphy a lot. His stand up comedy is brilliant. The original Coming to America was funny and a little edgy ("You may now clean the Royal penis") but that trailer makes the sequel look dull and potentially just a little woke.  

    • Upvote 1
  6. This is a really long shot, and I apologise for the cryptic nature of it, but...

    Does anyone know MAC C-5 crewmembers who flew classified missions through the 1970s? Probably part of a unit whose mission included supporting AFSC and CIA. I would imagine it was a tight-knit community, but I don't know anyone who was part of it. 

    Specifically, I am looking to speak to a crew who flew into Egypt on 21 Sept 1977.

    TIA

  7. Some questions for any Eagle drivers who feel able to comment:

    • c.270 hours of total time, and only 60 or so in the Eagle. Is that enough for what was being asked of him?
    • There's no mention of JHMCS, so I assume he was not wearing it. Why not? And had he been, does it give substantial SA cues that might have given him a chance to recover earlier?
    • Hard deck of 4,000' seems very low, especially given the WX. Is that standard?
    • He pulled just over 8gs to recover. Presumably, had he thought he was going to hit the sea, he would have pulled as many as he could - was the limit therefore his technique, or simply a function of what the jet could give him at 570 knots?
  8. It’s irrelevant as to whether the Russian/Chinese FLANKERS are on an American military unit emblem because of a mistake or because or regulation. What matters is that it makes you look stooopid.

    Surely it’s someone’s job in the Air Force to give a shit about that, even if it does mean having to know your arse from your elbow?

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  9. On 8/2/2020 at 7:22 AM, bfargin said:

    Good stuff. I didn't expect to sit and listen to the whole interview when I saw it was over an hour long...

    That's an interesting observation. I thought longer was better (STS), but perhaps I need to chop the interview up a bit more.

    Glad you enjoyed it. 

    11 hours ago, HuggyU2 said:

    We did the interviews some time ago, but I believe Steve plans to add on to the interview with some additional talks that we are doing now.  

    Thank you for creating a well done final product, Steve.  (And especially for your editing work!!  You know what I mean!!  Haha!!)

    Huggy, thank you for giving me your time and trust. Thanks also for being forgiving of my belated understanding of the difference between Z and BST!

    Yes, Part 2 will be out in two weeks, and then there'll be the concluding AMA/Part 3. 

     

  10. 8 hours ago, bfargin said:

    Steve yeah, I meant the tall one. My bad (not sure whether to apologize to the Scots or to the gentleman from Lancashire). It's been a while since I lived in Scotland (1994-5) but in my memory, he sounded like the Scots I hung out with (slurred and muddy sounding). I had to listen pretty closely to understand 1/2 of what they said for the first couple of months. I spent a semester in Manchester adjacent to Lancashire but that was back in the Fall of 1992 snd don't remember that type accent (but I was in school at MBS so maybe the master's degree students I interacted with weren't quite as British "redneck" sounding).

    I hear ya. I imagine that if you don't hear these accents all the time, the sort of blend into one another -  an unintelligible mess. 

    I wonder whether your mam likes Rab C Nesbit. It's fun to watch some with the YouTube captions enabled to see just how badly it 'translates' his speech:

     

  11. On 6/18/2020 at 2:41 AM, bfargin said:

    Scots always sound inebriated, even when stone sober. I'm 1/2 Scot, thanks to my mom, but holy shit they sound like they have marbles in their mouth when they speak.

    None of the guys in that video is Scottish. Do you mean Paddy (the tall one?). He has a Lancashire accent. 

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