F-111F Refueling from KC-135

An unusual photo. The angle and lighting are dramatic but the TFX-LBJ will never be dear to my heart or excite me after working on the winning proposal team until Johnson and Mac Namarra entered the picture. Hats off to Taz, though.

 

The F-111 was a good airplane once the bugs were worked out, at least on land. But the carrier trials of the F-111B were almost laughable. What a clumsy looking airplane! They did the right thing cancelling it and transferring the Phoenix to the F-14, which was a much better all-around fighter.

 

The Navy told Mac Namarra that the airplane was way too heavy to operate from carriers and that it was unfit. It was way over the max landing weight for the carrier decks but ol' Mac insisted on" One Size Fits All."

 

The TFX proposal will always stick in my craw. When it was awarded to Gen Dynamics not only was all of our design data sent to GD per competition rules but soon after, GD admitted that they needed more technical help and 100's of laid- off Boeing engineers went to Dallas to bail them out. A lot of the configuration of the competition GD airplane showed features that we had thrown out 6 months before as unworkable. So, in the end, after correction, much of the final F-111 was influenced by Boeing. BUT LBJ got it built in Dallas and that was the most important thing , after all, wasn't it.

 

I'm guessing you don't want to eject in that configuration!

 

I can't knock the airplane, just the route to get it there. Several other proposal programs on which I worked went the same way. I don't take kindly to seeing months of hard work and overtime to produced the winning proposal only to see it go to a political favorite. I know, Grow up, that's the real world. I'm glad that the F-111 served you well, Taz, it turned out to be a good airplane.

 

Just to clarify, the F-111 was not built in Dallas. The plant is on the west side of Fort Worth across the runway from what was then Carswell AFB.