Sunday, July 14, 2013

Fighter Planes - What is Old, What is New?

F-35 vs F-104

Is it just me, or, are there a lot of similarities? Fuselage, cockpit, and wings? Of course, the wing sweep is reversed, and the engines shrouded.

Maybe the function dictates the form. Not an engineer, so I can't say.

4 comments:

Scotty said...

Stealth being the most important thing. That 104 would show a nice and big blip on a radar screen.

But I get your point. How many variations of a fixed wing aircraft can there be and yet, they still require the same lift to get off the ground. Apart from the stealth can it go any further forward as far on the technology side? Probably not.

How many more do we need? There is nobody in the world that can compete with us in the air. We proved that in the mid-east when we went up against all that French and Soviet armament. Even more so on the ground.

Our problem isn't our war machine, it's our worry about who we might offend in war that will do us in. We proven that since Korea and on.

Well Seasoned Fool said...

You are correct about the political will. When it comes to technology, we don't have a monopoly on smarts. Production capacity usually.
Case in point, WWII Romanian IAR-80 fighter. Nasty surprise for our people raiding the Ploiesti refineries.

Old NFO said...

Well, the Chinese seem to be able to get them in production before we can... But yeah, function (airplane) limits design. Stealth limits design and capability...

Well Seasoned Fool said...

I wonder, given the level of corruption in China, what the quality of their product is.