- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Yeah, its easy to fuck around and find out you're not nearly as good of a pilot as you thought you were.aerobatic maneuvers
And for those wondering why anyone would do something retarded like that... well, nobody hires fighter pilots on a basis of how level-headed and risk-adverse they are.
Hoo boy, the number of fuckups on planes make the F-35 and F-22 look like paragons. The F-100 was so infamous for a rapid pitch-up at low speeds as a result of the delta wing it was known in the USAF as a Sabre Dance. Six major mechanical failures in less than three months when it entered service, leading to the whole fleet grounded for months until it was fixed. The F-105 Thunderchief managed only six shows with the Thunderbirds demonstration team before a crash, the B-26 bomber in WW2 was known as the Widowmaker as the tamest of its insults thanks to constant issues while landing...It uses to be insanely bad in the 1950s and 1960s, think 1/4 of an entire jet fleet being lost to .... Crashes in training.
Lol no. Even the F-105 Thunderchief, a plane that was technically classed as a fighter-bomber despite being originally designed for the nuclear strike role managed a positive K-D ratio against the Vietnamese, 27.5 kills to 17 losses. The F-4 Phantom went 147 to 40 against Vietnamese MiGs. A Phantom pilot was roughly 10x more likely to get shot down by SPAA on a low-level bombing run than he was in a dogfight, but even then they managed a little over 350, which sounds like a lot until you realize just how many ground attack missions they flew.The Viets scored a positive KDR I think.
https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/why-arabs-lose-warsYou are reenacting one of the debates in comparative military studies that has been circulating for a long time. Reasonable people can disagree on what's going on but Kenneth Pollack's book Armies of Sand (you can find it on scribd and probably elsewhere) makes a persuasive case it's mostly the cultural factors Jex alludes to - Arab officers are unwilling to ask questions in training because their vanity means they can't look like they don't already know the answer, and enlisted and officers hoard field manuals with maintenance information bc that's what makes them important.
There's definitely some coup-proofing going on, but you also have examples like Iraq and Syria where the most loyal forces were also the most competent and willing to conduct attacks.
You can't fix these people.