Free Republic

The amazing feat only happened once. In 1985, a F-15A Eagle fitted with a classified missile shot down an aging weather satellite. The test of the Anti-Satellite (ASAT) was considered a huge success. Task & Purpose has published a rare interview with the pilot who flew the mission 35 years ago. ============================================================================================== One of the most remarkable feats of military engineering during the Cold War was the shootdown of an actual satellite by a fighter jet. The incident was the first and only use of the AGM-135 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon. Although anti-satellite weapon development slowed after the end of the...

When the F-15 was created, it was created to be a pure air-to-air fighter, with the philosophy of “not a pound for air-to-ground” guiding designers. So how did Israel end up turning their F-15s into deadly long-range multi-role strike aircraft well before the F-15E Strike Eagle became a reality? Here’s how. In Need Of A Game Changing Fighter Israel’s love affair with the F-15 began out of the need to procure a fighter that could trump the increasingly complex fighters that surrounding Arab states were amassing from Russian and French sources. Both the F-14 Tomcat and the F-15 Eagle were...