They call the Aardvark a pig?
Sad news....this is Austrailia’s ready to go nuclear capable aircraft delivery system. Great range and payload for the island continent....and I DO hope SK/Japan/Austrailia go nuclear.
In the 80s, the F-4 squadron I was in deployed to Australia and got in a competition with the local F-111s for the lowest and fastest pass across the runway on return. On the final day of the deployment, the flight lead decided the F-4s were going to win. What he didn’t know was our pain-in-the-butt O-6 was doing a TV interview at the runway.
I wasn’t in the flight, and don’t know either how low or fast they went, but the shock wave knocked the O-6 & the cameras to the ground. The Aussie F-111s conceded the F-4s had won, but only because they didn’t get another shot at the title before we left!
The problem isn’t that the Aussies are retiring the F111’s; they are over 30 years old and that’s a long time to keep the plane working. As the article notes, the Aussies got more than their moneys worth out of them.
The problem is that we aren’t making a reasonable medium range aircraft to replace it. All the US Air Force seems to care about is high-performance fighters and long-range stealth bombers. Aarvaarks are considered “unglamorous” duty and the fighter jocks who fly and the ex-fighter jocks who set procurement policy don’t want anything to do with it.
I saw an RAAF F-111 do one those fuel dumps in Darwin about 10 years ago. Pretty impressive. We were there for the commemoration of the Japanese carrier attack in 1942.