that's what they want you to believe, he's living in Carmel keeping a low profile.

I ate lunch under the wing of a Foxbat in Kirkuk 2004ish. Huge plane.

Then this fell out of the cockpit and came home with me. My one Iraq war trophy:



One of these days I’ll figure out what it is.

Also got to hang out with Balenko for an evening at a BBQ with a handful of other student naval aviators at Kingsville NAS. Interesting guy.

Clearly a poor soviet copy of a superior Canadian design...

Kinda like Europe copied the YE-8 into the Eurofucker... But you know the soviets came up with it 30 years prior.

There are a ton of reasons it didn't happen as an interceptor. I wonder what the nose of the A-12 was made of? Oh right doesn't matter cuz it didn't have a A/A radar.

Looks like the Chinese J-10

If you’re talking about the one the Belenko defected with, it never left Japan until it went back home in crates.

Ummmm… by the sea?

Wrong plane

I also had a part fall out of a Mig 25 cockpit and land in my cargo pocket. I tentatively identified mine as some sort of IFF channel selector.

That's because they were designed for two different missions.

MiG 25 was intended to be a high-altitude interceptor, not a dogfighter.  Add in the fact that it was designed about a decade before the F-15 even flew.

You better have something to replace the hydraulic fluid that the mechanics drained off and filtered through bread to get blind drunk

That was another problem that the defector Mig -25  pilot said was a big problem

The upgrayded MiG-31 radar and missiles came courtesy of the F-14s and AIM-54 phoenix missiles in Iran, that the USSR traded for to get one to reverse engineer.

A perfect example of the US building something so much more superior to the competition.

F15 FTW

Except it was from the 60's and russian.

LOFL... You literally could not be more wrong if you were deliberately trying. Like do the letters D and K mean anything to you sesame street wise?

So fact 1... Iran hated the USSR, they hated the SU, they bought the F14 to shoot down mig25's. So yeah, I'm sure as it was totally convenient in 1980 or whatever, they packed up an F14 and sent it to the SU (thats sarcasm son).

The Mig31 had its first flight in 1975, long before the Shah was "out of office" and hey well before the F14 was in Iranian service.

Fact 2. The Mig-31 had the worlds first PESA radar (you can think of this an AEGIS radar system from the same era, but on a jet)

Fact 3. The AA-9 (R-33 for people who actually know WTF they are talking about), was not a fox-3 like the phoenix, it was a fox1, being guided by the PESA radar (zaslon) on the mig 31.

What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Are you an insufferable ass everywhere?  Or just here?
No doubt everywhere

I still think he needs to take another crack at the Eigar. North Face of course.

Oh so sorry did I make you look like the absolute ignoramous with what you presented in the earlier post? I did didn't I? Like literally you just wrote some random shit with 0 actual knowledge of what you spoolged onto the interweb.

I guess you expect an apology to validate yourself. So you can feel special and good.

Guess what... Nah...

Yes, I understand that.

And it doesn't negate the fact that the F-15 was designed to counter what we "thought" the MIG-25 could do. If that was all just bad intel or if some Russian "salesmanship" factored into it, I don't know.

By that point, it was something we excelled at.

I mean, professional threat inflators played into the design of the the F15, but at the end of the day the F15 was what the professional threat inflators "though" the mig25 was. As it turned out the mig25 wasn't all that, and the F15 was fucking amazing in comparison.

Not really, the F15 was the first example of that though.

Wasn't the mig 25 the plane that would burn it's engines up at full throttle trying to chase the sr71?

I thought I remembered reading they'd only last a few minutes at max speed

Not as big as the TU-22 big... That was the flying party house.

Well, the MiG 25 is fast and in the 1970s that really freaked the US out.  There is a story of an F-4 trying to catch a 25 and they pilot just casually hit the throttle and left him in the dust.

It wasn't until Belenko defected that we realized that it couldn't fight low and slow.

Mostly the professional threat inflators at least at that point in history.

It wasn't ever designed to fight low or slow. Plus the mig23 could literally shit on most US fighters of the day in terms of acceleration including the F-teens, but that isn't the only metric that matters, in fact it doesn't matter all that much.

Who did we capture the mug from? Japan. The Russian flew it to Japan and handed it over.
That pilot was surprised that it was only 1 pilot flying the 747 and not a team of pilots he was a passenger in on the trip to the USA.

[DK-Prof]lol[/DK-Prof]

I believe when the Mig hit top speed the engines was toast and the Mug was made to intercept the B70, well since the B70 was cancelled I guess it was repurposed into a fighter

That toggles on the bright landing lights

Can see that.  Being a late-night DJ must get boring after awhile...

Re:  really fast and high aircraft of long ago, the ASG-18 radar and Falcon AAMs were amazing.  On paper.  Plus there was some language in I think "Skunk Works," about how far one could chuck a bomb, if you were cutting it loose at M3.2, and 85K feet.

Which leads to a point that ziarifleman (whatever happened to him?) made a few years ago:  look at the power of the F-22's engines and compare them to the J58...  Accordingly, is it just that the 22s are stagnation temperature limited from doing things like hitting M2.5+ or they lack the stability to go to U2-ish heights?

The F15 then was definitely a more capable plane all around and would smoke a Mig25 in a dog fight.  That said, the Mig25 still holds the record of being the fastest and highest flying fighter ever made.  Yes, it’s engines will melt at its top speed of Mach 3.2, but even at its speed limit of Mach 2.8 it is the fastest production plane made next to the SR71.  That is what scared us back then.  

I think we realized you don’t need balls out speed for air superiority so we designed our interceptors to get there plenty fast and with the ability to slug it out and dominate the best fighters they could throw up.

One jet was clocked at 2,400 mph and the U.S. didn’t have a single aircraft that could catch it.




The fact that the Foxbat bore an uncanny resemblance to American fighter aircraft proposals fueled the unease. One primary requirement of the new fighter dubbed F-15 was exceptional maneuverability to dominate in a dogfight. Because the Foxbat’s layout appeared so similar to the cutting-edge F-15 hopefuls, many designers and evaluators presumed that the Soviets’ new MiG was built to perform in a comparable fashion.

The specter of the Foxbat forced the Air Force to make the F-15 faster and more maneuverable. The U.S. government, too, was spooked by the threat of the Soviets fielding an unparalleled jet fighter. When McDonnell Douglas won the F-15 competition in 1969, Congress had little choice but to shell out $1.1 billion for aircraft development, including the first 20 F-15 fighter jets, to stay competitive. (The fact that no F-15 has ever lost an air-to-air scrap to an enemy aircraft is in part due to America’s panic over the Foxbat.)

As the U.S. Air Force was selecting the F-15 in 1969, the MiG-25 Foxbat went into full production and began to fly in the Soviet Air Forces. Almost two years later, the Soviets deployed four MiG-25 reconnaissance planes to Egypt, where they conducted high-speed dashes over Israeli territory. The Israeli Air Force’s McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs scrambled to intercept numerous times, but the Foxbats flew at such stunning altitudes and impossible speeds that they easily outran the Israeli defenders. On one occasion, Israeli radar tracked a MiG-25 over the Sinai Peninsula at 80,000 feet traveling at an astounding Mach 3.2 (2,436 mph). For years, the MiG-25 Foxbat remained the most feared fighter in the Soviet arsenal. Then a Russian pilot stole one.

More

That's the blyat selector. The toggle switch light at the top sets the "per minute" or "per hour" setting for blyats. There is supposed to be a bulb under a button there.

When I was at tinker one of the indoc guys worked on the thing when they first got their hands on it. Don’t remember his name or what he said but it was ??

The military purchased the F-15 to counter what we thought it’s capabilities were.

As a result we bought a fighter that was so far ahead of everything else that it is still a dominating presence in the sky almost 50 years after initial development.

If a fighter can turn in a fight, fast acceleration matters because you can get the speed back after you cash it in for turn radius. Going fast only matters when running away for the most part and that can be very important in leaving a fight, but acceleration from a slow speed back to a tactical airspeed is critical. I did some BFM engagements against mig-23s at Peg, and they can accelerate very very quickly, but the good news is they can't turn worth a shit so if they survive pre-merge, they are dead within 180 degrees of turn. They won't stick around so killing them fast is critical before they can get away.