“After all these years, the F-16 continues to be the best damn MRF ever.
It appears physics and engineering capped out in the early 1970’s.
In 10 or so years (late 60s, early 70s) we developed and deployed the F-16 MRF, the F-15 Air Superiority, the F-18 MRF, the F-14 Tomcat (killed by politics not ability) and the B-1 Lancer. Not to mention the craft that will never be bettered until we get warp drive: the SR-71 Blackbird.”
Good points.
F14 has speed and range over newer stuff.
SR71 was abandoned but the older, slower, lower flying, everything less U-2 was kept?! What the F**K?!
With the current Obama regime, probably our next weapon system will be designed by the same people who did Obama’s “Cr*pCare”.
The “healthcare” system so bad, that the Dems were willing to shut down the Govt rather than to be required to participate in ObabaCare.
Say, don’t forget the xb70 Valkyrie Bomber our only Mach 3 Bomber ever.
Designed by North American Aviation in the late 1950s, the Valkyrie was a large six-engined aircraft able to fly Mach 3+
The buildup of heat due to skin friction during sustained supersonic flight had to be addressed. During a Mach 3 cruise the aircraft would reach an average of 450 °F (230 °C), although there were portions as high as 650 °F (340 °C). NAA proposed building their design out of a sandwich panels, consisting of two thin sheets of stainless steel brazed to opposite faces of a honeycomb-shaped foil core. Expensive titanium would be used only in high-temperature areas like the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer, and the nose.[25] For cooling the interior, the XB-70 pumped fuel en route to the engines through heat exchangers.[26]
two NACA wind tunnel experts who wrote a report in 1956 entitled “Aircraft Configurations Developing High Lift-Drag Ratios at High Supersonic Speeds”.[21] Known today as compression lift, the idea was to use the shock wave generated off the nose or other sharp points on the aircraft as a source of high pressure air.[22
Wow, before computers where all over the place, men actually used their brains to come up with ideas.