Ok, not supersonic, but close. The sound, oh the sound! [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGv6uKE85lE[/ame]
Lou- Transonic, most likely. If she had been supersonic, it would have blasted everyone's eardrums big time. You can pull contrails like that at fairly low airspeeds if the humidity is high enough and you pull 'g's. The higher the wing loading, the easier it is to make contrails. Co-located with F-4Es at Incirlik AFB for weapons training, the F-4 guys were really chapped that our F-111Fs were pulling contrails on the pitch out for overhead patterns and their F-4s could not. Much higher wing loading on the F-111, naturally. That was at 350 KCAS.
Yeah, I guess my title is misleading. I do state that it doesn't really go that fast in the description. If I put that in the title, no one would watch! All the non pilots around HB think it went supersonic anyway. We get those on the 747 on takeoff all the time. Still cool though
Looking at Wiki, the predecessor, the YF-17, could achieve Mach 2. But then, that would be an entirely different airplane/role, yes?
When I was a kid, they did supersonic fly bys at Kirtland AFB in the 60's. (Armed Forces Day.) Plane (F-100 I think) would scream down the runway with no sound whatsoever, absolutely silent. Then a couple seconds later ... BOOM! No condensation/contrail, Albuquerque is way too dry. Relative humidity about 5%.
