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The F-111B was designed to defend the fleet, but only one landed aboard an aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea, in 1968, after the program was cancelled. (USS Coral Sea CVA-43 Association)
The F-111B was designed to defend the fleet, but only one landed aboard an aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea, in 1968, after the program was cancelled. (USS Coral Sea CVA-43 Association)
Ping.
Well, if nothing else, the Aussies sure liked them.
The F-111 was supposed to be the do everything fighter for all the services, but didn't do any one thing in a superior manner.
The F-35 scares me because it too is trying to be the everything fighter also. I pray it is not another F-111.
Yeah, good ol’ Bob McNamara, he sure got a lot done in his time...
I was flying a T-38, and taxied/took off behind an F-111D at Cannon AFB. The trust of that aircraft was impressive. It shook my T-38 like it was made of balsa wood.
As I recall it was F-111’s that Reagan ordered to bomb Khadafi. France wouldn’t allow American warplanes to fly over French airspace so they were sent from England around France and into the Med to Libya.
I don’t remember why carrier based aircraft weren’t used from the Mediterranean.
Well the ‘F’ variant performed ok over Libya. So wasn’t all that bad.
The F-111B Navy version didn’t really need an onboard anchor anyway. The extra weight and the toss overboard by the pilot when landing was the final straw.
The F-111 series were bleeding edge technology back then. Engineers were challenged to adapt the airframe design to various configurations for use by our Air Force and Navy, as well as variants versions sold to different countries. For the most part, the engineering was excellent. But there were trade-offs that were impossible without modification of the basic structure and flight parameters.
The F-111 was a good plane. Not a flying Edsel as many would have you believe.
The stories I've heard implied that it was too much mass x decel (aka force) for the ship to handle, routinely. (Full disclosure, this is likely just rumor, so it needs to be verified by someone who actually knows.)
The rear wheel base looks a bit squirrelly for a carrier landing.
Dateline “ September 2018. “
The F-111 is so fast it can arrive in the future.
J/k
5.56mm
We had F-111As and Spark Varks at Mt Home AFB when I first got there. At that point the F-111As had rather severe flight profile limitations on them because of the age of the airframes. The EFs deployed to Desert Storm. FB-111s used to sit cocked on nuclear alert at Pease and Plattsburgh when I was stationed in Griffiss.
What I read is that General Dynamics blackmailed Kennedy into using them for both services
Their spooks spied on his affairs
My guess is that if you have a plane which carries a great load and has great performance and also meets the structural and performance requirements needed for cat shots and trap landings, then it's bound to carry even more and fly even better in a ground-based version where you can take out some of that added weight.
Planes that are designed from the outset to be both land and carrier based (or worse,designed for runways and then adapted to carriers) don't seem to turn out nearly as well.
Yet the debate continues, as heated now as it was decades ago when the Pentagon introduced the then-novel concept of an “affordable” joint-use warplane.
. . . but note, Dear Reader, that the F-4 Phantom was a Navy plane before it was forced down the Air Force’s throat. It was not a joint development at all, and does not constitute a rationale for such.The F-16 and F-17 were designed to be “joint” but with the Air Force as lead. The AF selected the single-engine F-16 - and the Navy balked because it absolutely insisted on two engines. It not only rejected the F-16, it insisted on upgrades (read, weight increases) that turned the F-17 into the F-18. Not only that, it insisted on further increases in size which resulted in the "F-18E” which is basically an F-18 canopy with a different, significantly bigger aircraft under it (but with one design criterion being that it had to look like an F-18 so it could keep the same "F-18" moniker).
And even at that, the “legs” of an F-18E do not bear any comparison at all to those of the F14 (neither, FTM, would you expect an F-15 to have a comparable range to that of an F-14, since it has only about 2/3 the internal fuel capacity the F-14 had).
In the age of drones, it is possible to question how long air-air combat between manned fighter aircraft will be a thing. But while naval aircraft carriers remain used and useful, I would expect the Navy to incline toward more expensive aircraft than the Air Force does - for the simple reason that the more you pay for the spear, the less it pays to scrimp on the effectiveness of the tip of the spear. And a fully equipped and staffed aircraft carrier, along with its necessary defensive escort vessels, is one expensive spear.
Asked about the F-111, Grumman test pilot Don Evans replied, “It's a fine aircraft - as long as you don’t get in it thinking it’s a fighter."
I just got done reading a book on the history of stealth technology. The F-111 was brought up as a perfect example of why stealth was needed.
The F-111’s were originally designed to fly near the ground. Unfortunately, the active radar needed to do that warned opponents that it was coming for a long way off (the radar info was fed directly into the control system to keep from crashing into something). As long as they were third world nations, that was not a problem. It was felt by many that going up against the soviet union would have been suicide for an F-111.
The first stealth aircraft were designed with slide rules and mainframe computers. Not a PC or a SuperComputer in sight.
I laugh at the F-35 detractors. Those who whisper about it not being to dogfight against an F-16. Most planes can't either. The pilot often makes the difference, but if you put the same skill in an F/A-18 vs. an F-16 the Viper is going to kill the Hornet every time. Why? Because the Viper was designed for close in ACM in the weeds dogfighting. Slanted seat to accommodate G's and turning and acceleration on the deck like nothing else. Vipers were designed to mix it up close and personal with a sky full of ungodly amount of Migs all at once and have a field day with them. Russia never tested that. Hornets are designed to drop bombs and fight if they must, but the goal of attack aircraft is to get in and out and not mix it up in the sticks. Hornets are a stable bombing platform, but the Viper is a knife fighter. The Eagle will just kill you from BVR and a long way out and bug out. The F-15 is undefeated and a great fighter, but even with matched pilots the Eagle does not want to get into a knife fight on the deck with a Viper. Nobody plans for that and it is what happens when the strike mission goes wrong.
The F-35 gets in and out unseen. If you do see him you don't see his buddy flying CAP that already has an AMRAM going up your tailpipe. The F-35's are all integrated and linked and have a clearer picture of the battlefield. In a real world shootout they are capped by invisible and lethal Raptors who own the airspace night or day up or down and all around. I would not want to mess with U.S. Airpower, ever!
From the F-111 came the Tomcat.