How To Win In A Dogfight: Stories From A Pilot Who Flew F-16s And MiGs

Foxtrot Alpha ^ | 03 February 2015 | Tyler Rogoway

[zot]

Thanks for the ping. He explains several things I didn’t know, including the limitations of vectored thrust.

[minnesota_bound]

Even us non pilots see the comparison to the F-111 and F-35
I guess it was just to spread out some money to the states and not to build the best fighter to defend the USA with.

---

If you had to fly any fighter into an air combat arena today, including an operational F-35A as an option, what would it be?

The F-22. It’s a better jet than the F-35. It can carry at least as much, further and faster. If it was up to me I’d cancel the F-35 and start building more Raptors. A common counter to that is the cost to restart the F-22 assembly line. How much does one pig cost? Another is that the F-35 program is too far along. Yep, let’s just keep paying for a poorly-managed, overly expensive fighter that has three versions that make any one version less than it could be. Can you say F-111? That the F-35’s avionics are better than the F-22’s; how about a Raptor upgrade? I’d also build more advanced versions of the F-15 and F-16.

[spetznaz]

Thank you for a very interesting article. The comments on the F-35 were also very interesting.