Yeah, weren’t the swing-wing actuator mechanisms in the F-111’s ballscrew and nut assemblies? The F-14s had them too but they didn’t have that problem or did they? I’ve never heard of any problems with the wings of the B-1B, the largest variable geometry-winged military aircraft ever produced.
Very early production F-111As had faulty wing boxes (that carry the wing to the fuselage) that failed causing the wings to fall off. We lost a couple in Vietnam in 1968 because of it.
That was long since corrected, and lessons learned applied to the F-14 and B-1B.
As others have said, the main problem for the F-111 was maintenance. In the time I worked at Mtn. Home AFB from 1978-81, we had maybe one third of our aircraft mission capable at any one time. The rest were down due to parts shortages both for the airframe and the avionics.
Imagine getting parts for either one today. Ain't gonna happen.
As I said, the F-15E can do almost everything the F-111F did. I'd rather see money spent on new build F-15Es than used to bring back F-111s.
“Yeah, weren’t the swing-wing actuator mechanisms in the F-111’s ballscrew and nut assemblies? The F-14s had them too but they didn’t have that problem or did they? I’ve never heard of any problems with the wings of the B-1B, the largest variable geometry-winged military aircraft ever produced.”
Not sure, I wasn’t a wrench bender. Suspect like most problems, they eventually got them figured out and built on that knowledge when the next generations came on line. But I also suspect that it would be about as useless as the F-4 when it came to CAS. Many of the FACs I knew wouldn’t use the F-4 in a TIC situation. ‘course the accuracy of current munitions is considerably better than what we had back when “Hit my smoke” meant “at least get it within 200 meters”.