I appreciate your gentle rebuke, and must confess my ignorance of fighter jets and such. It will have to be fixed in a second edition, though, because my rewrite chances have been expended and the text is locked. So, too, the "kitten in jaws of pitbull" thing, which made me cringe when I realized I had missed it. So easy to invert the cliche and refresh it "After the world finished worrying at his plane like a pit bull with a fresh kitten in its jaws" would have been better.
Mercifully, this is the only excerpt that involved fighter jets of any kind, and certainly the only one with that overworked phrase.
While the research is bad, there is a lot I liked about this passage, which is why I posted it here and elsewhere. Now that its flaws have been pointed out, I'll find some other excerpt to post.
Thanks for the kind words about the style.