Super Hornet buzzing City of Brisbane for Riverfire Festival 2022. (The other year it was a C17 Globemaster) Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Built in the USA. Australia bought Hornets in the early 80's, then some Super Hornets in 2008 and some Growlers in 2015. The legacy Hornets have been retired and some sold to Canada as the F35's come in to service.
There is nothing man has made that is cooler than a gen 4 or 5 fighter flying low, pulling G's and vapor!! Damn It is just so damn cool!! And leave it to the Aussie gov to let the planes fly so low and so close to a major city. USA flyovers are for painsy-asses. Damn gov......
Well, except for maybe a Gen3 fighter like a F-4 flying low, pulling G's and vapor First thing that came to my mind.
Save the F4 is a pig at pulling G's. Never was a dogfighter. Fast and a good bomb hauler, but got it's ass handed to it by Migs 20 years out of date! Watch an F22 or a Mig/Sukhoi or Typhoon doing it's stuff. 60° AOA, 9+ g's, 30° per second turn rate, 270° per second roll rate, 1.1 to 1.5 thrust to weight ratio. Pure sex!
Brian- Sounds like you never flew an F-4. Incidentally, pulling contrails is related to wing loading. The higher the wing loading, the easier it is to pull contrails in turns.
In 1980 while interviewing for a co-op position at WPAFB I met the Colonel in charge of the Flight Dynamics Lab. He had a picture on the wall from his gun camera of him shooting down a Mig
And North Vietnam pilot Đặng Ngọc Ngự has 4 photos on his wall-One for each F4 he shot down. And US AF pilot Col Charles Barbin DeBellevue has 6 photos on his wall. All Migs. So a lot of talent there.
Serious question for you. What is it like to fly a modern jet fighter? The year, I think was 1975 or maybe 1976. A buddy and I are fishing in the bay between Key West and the NAS (where I was born many years ago). I could see a haze forming toward the base. Then zip, something shoots off. Seconds later came rolling thunder. As I understand it, you perform certain steps in the sequence and it works. If you don’t, you die. Thoughts? Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat.com mobile app
Tex- Most modern fighter I flew was the F-16, with time in the F-15, F-4G, and RF-4C, all in the back seat. Operational in the F-111 in the right seat. Flying fighters operationally is difficult to explain simply. Extreme discipline is required, mixed with a lot of aggression. Weapons delivery requires exact switchology and sensor expertise and meeting a set of parameters through precise aircraft control. PGMs made things a lot easier since they could make up for being off parameters. Brian- Did you say you were operational in the F-22A? Very rare to hear a fighter jock bad-mouth another fighter. I am a Weapon School graduate, so we all knew the strengths and weaknesses of our and the other guy's aircraft. For its time, the F-4 was a formidable dogfighter when most fighters were limited to 7.5 G. If all you do is crunch numbers, you can get some misleading thoughts on how an aircraft performs against an adversary. Like crunching the numbers on the MiG-15 vs the F-86.
This pic will undoubtedly go down as one of the most famous Australian aviation pics ever. It was photographed by Nino Lo Giudice from the rooftop of fellow photographer David Kapernick’s apartment on the edge of the Brisbane River. image is © Copyright Nino Lo Guidice. Image Unavailable, Please Login
F-4 has an all time K/D ratio of 306-106 , unfortunately another 545 were lost to ground fire. Code: Vietnam War (US Navy) 40-7-66 Vietnam War (USMC) 3-1-74 Vietnam War (USAF) 108-33-337 Desert Storm (USAF) 0-0-1 NFZs (Turkey) 0-0-0 Soviet border clash 1976 (Iran) 1-0-0 Dhofar War (Iran) 0-0-1 Kurdish rebellion (Iran) 0-0-1 Iran-Iraq War (Iran) 68-29-33 Iran Gulf Clash 1984 (Iran) 0-1-0 Kurdish Civil War (Iran) 0-0-1 War of Attrition (Israel) 26-3-5 Yom Kippur War (Israel) 55-28-22 Syrian border clashes 1974-1981 (Israel) 4-3-1 Lebanon War (1982) (Israel) 1-1-1 Lebanon War 1982-2000 (Israel) 0-0-2
Very cool video and pics! I've read you can occasionally catch military aircraft doing low-level training at Rainbow Canyon in Death Valley Nat'l Park which seems like the next level of excitement vs. what you generally see at base air shows. That said, this pic a friend took of the F22 doing it's thing at MCAS Beaufort's air show a couple of years ago really got my pulse racing. We were seated right in front of where the F22 was staged. The noise was spectacular - I should have been wearing ear protection, but sometimes you just have to enjoy the moment Image Unavailable, Please Login
This is a phenomenon on an annual basis - what you're seeing is the practice runs during the day. The action actually happens at night.. I live in Brisbane and have enjoyed this event since the late 80's when working in the city at night during Riverfire - you wouldn't see the F-111's coming, but when it arrived and shattered the already loud buzz across the river city and flooded the sky with their afterburners (there were 2 of them) and disappeared into the night, everyone knew they were experiencing something unique and devastatingly powerful and importantly, lifelong memories being created. I took my boys to see this spectacle several years ago and with the inclusion of the C-17 Globemasters weaving their way down the river and then up through the buildings was even more frightening than these current guys. They're massive.
Richard- Affirmative, he was a WSO when he scored the 6 victories but went back to pilot training after scoring his 6th victory. So, he was eventually a fighter pilot with 6 victories.
At an air show in Rancho Murietta, CA an F4 Phantom ripped over us at close proximity….talk about rolling thunder. Another air show at Luke AFB in Arizona I watched an F22 Raptor go nose up and he basically stopped and hung that thing in the air, rolled it over, lit the afterburners and stole the show. If that doesn’t give you goosebumps, you don’t get them.great pics of the F18 down under. Thanks!