Interesting Bit on the Avro Arrow
- Thread starter jwp_145
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Bandit_Driver
Gold Member
Interesting...
Pilot Fighter
Well-Known Member
jwp_145
GhostRider in the Sky
I agree with a lot of what the military guy being interviewed said.
What is awesome is that the engineers at AV Roe did... "Destroy all those blueprints GUY!"
"No way Friend!"
"Don't call me Friend, Buddy!"
"I'm not your Buddy, GUY!"
And while that whole exchange was happening, they were walking the blueprints out the back door!
I imagine that with modern materials and avionics the Arrow would be a great interceptor. The guy had a point, what Canada needs is a screaming fast interceptor to reach out to the edge of their land...not the CF35.
What is awesome is that the engineers at AV Roe did... "Destroy all those blueprints GUY!"
"No way Friend!"
"Don't call me Friend, Buddy!"
"I'm not your Buddy, GUY!"
And while that whole exchange was happening, they were walking the blueprints out the back door!
I imagine that with modern materials and avionics the Arrow would be a great interceptor. The guy had a point, what Canada needs is a screaming fast interceptor to reach out to the edge of their land...not the CF35.
Bandit_Driver
Gold Member
The problem with the militaries today, they want one plane to do it all. A plane that does it all will do no mission well. I think the armed forces were better off with role specific aircraft. The F-14 did its job well, the prowler and intruders had their roles. The A-10 for the USAF does it's role extremely well, etc
ScorpionStinger
Well-Known Member
I like his comment that it should be called the A-35.
Anti-Stealth technology is already out there. Plus you can attack the F-35 from above at higher altitude and pick it out of the sky. Smart guy.
Anti-Stealth technology is already out there. Plus you can attack the F-35 from above at higher altitude and pick it out of the sky. Smart guy.
ryan1234
Desensitized Member
I respectfully disagree that the military is better of with role specific aircraft. Coincidently, the F-14 saw more combat outside its primary design role as a fleet intercepter. The battlefield is totally dynamic. Day one of the war may not be the same as day five. The enemy always has a vote on how to mitigate their own risk and maximize their success. Self-escort strike is a huge capability. Additionally, when a large industrial war doesn't go as we'd like it, we could easily find ourselves doing something like Defensive Counter Air (DCA) against enemy strikes. The ability to have an asset do DCA and then self-escort strike, air interdiction or specifically dynamic targeting (DT) is critical given a finite amount of assets in theater at the time or left during an all out war. Even F-16s that can do SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) and then be able to perform other air to ground taskings, whether it's loading up with GBU-38s and attacking critical centers of gravity. Flexibility has been a little lost on the fact we've been waging warfare in permissive environments.
The bottomline is that multi-role aircraft allow for a higher level of tactical flexibility to push warfare at an extremely fast pace. I'm not saying that multirole aircraft perform every role great, but they can have a greater strategic impact on the war through the immediate violence of action than some single role aircraft could. Also, the A-10 is not the only CAS asset in the AF or military for that matter. If you look specifically at Marine doctrines of maneuver warfare, you'll see that flexibility in almost every system augments the overall strategic impact quite well.
Lawman
Well-Known Member
Look the Avro Arrow was a great program, but it has some of the greatest false inflation of any fighter out there. It's like the Tigershark or the Tomcat 21 project, because it never happened it gets inflated by aviation writers and fanboys like a Dale Brown novel.
The Arrow was designed before we even understood area rule theory or solid state electronics or even made the switch from turbojets to low bypass turbofans in a lot of our fighters. Against a lot of the peers of it's day yeah it was ahead of it's time, but it's still a dinosaur.
Saying something like "imagine the arrow with..." And telling the modern multirole stuff out there you're doing it wrong would be like telling the Ford Motor Co stop what your doing with the _____ design, imagine what you could do with modern brakes and suspension and engines in a 71 Torino.
I agree with you that having a pure breed interceptor in an area like Canada would be a great tool in the box. Big wings, big gas, lots of radar antenna... Those are great features for an area like thousands of square miles of tundra but two big problems. 1 Airplane programs are incredibly expensive. Canada wouldn't buy Vipers because of the Single engine issue at the time the reliability wasn't there for the ranges covered, but they couldn't afford Eagles hence ending up with Hornets. The other problem is like what Ryan said, that interceptor does nothing for you when they aren't actively sending aircraft after your stuff and instead is basically robbing money from your strike aircraft development so the people you send against an enemy have less capes. That's why multirole is the big word of the day. You don't want to or can't pay for 9 tools in the box, better get 1 or 2 that cover 7-8 of those specialized jobs well and the others decent.
Bandit_Driver
Gold Member
I get war is dynamic and we have to be flexible. We all that multi-tool leatherman in our tool box. Sure it comes in handy every now and then and gets you out of pinch when you need it. But when I"m going to be doing a specific task I reach for the most effective tool I have in the tool box, not the multi-tool.
Lawman
Well-Known Member
True but think of it this way if you want to use the general vs specific example we have kinda been going down,
Think of the air war in a conflict as remodeling an apartment complex. If you have a dozen rooms and only can hire so many workers for the duration of the job once my electrical work is done, my electrician isn't gonna suddenly start laying tile, and if he does he's gonna suck at it so my remodel now goes a lot slower because I can't in this instance hire somebody in place of that electrician. I have to keep him, and pay him, and watch him talk crap about how great the one fuse box re-wire that took him two days was (looking at you light grey eagle guys) while the rest of us spend the next three months laying carpet and fixing cabinets.
Multirole is like general contracting. He may have some outstanding dudes on his crew and some mediocre guys, but he can do a lot more a lot faster and when you call him and say "hey I need you to do ____" he doesn't respond with "sorry I specialize in ____ only."
That's one of the reasons the Single seat light grey Eagle guys are really the last of the "not a pound for air to ground" mantra of fighter design. The Raptor is every bit the air dominance machine to replace the Eagle in that air to air role but it also adds a Multirole strike capability.
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Bandit_Driver
Gold Member
I understand what you guys are saying, especially in the era of budget cuts and the weakening of the greatest military in the world. I also respectfully disagree agree it. To continue along the lines of construction this why we see crap in building construction today. No one specialized in anything any more. You walk into maintained 100 year homes you can find outstanding craftsmanship in the plaster, woodwork, etc. I was house shopping a few years ago and was horrified at what I was seeing in new construction from these jack of all trade guys (big name in building too). Cracked floors, poor dry wall work, and wood work was less than stellar and these were not cheap homes.
How much can one pilot truly master master and stay up on all the Air to Ground, Air to Air, all the other defensive and Offensive systems. Plus know and retain the other guys capabilities?
If it were me I would cut a lot of BS waste out the budget and properly fund our our national defense and research sectors.
How much can one pilot truly master master and stay up on all the Air to Ground, Air to Air, all the other defensive and Offensive systems. Plus know and retain the other guys capabilities?
If it were me I would cut a lot of BS waste out the budget and properly fund our our national defense and research sectors.
Lawman
Well-Known Member
Oddly enough the Multirole era only really came about because of budget cuts.
And along with that a lot of communities in military aviation branched out into new roles on their own because they saw the writing on the wall.
The Bomb-cat program for the F-14 is a great example. It wasn't a Navy directed program it was a bunch of guys playing with ideas over cocktails and taking them out on the range till they found a solution that worked.
A lot of effort is however made to tailor Multirole or unit training to specialize in certain areas over others. A lot of Viper units didn't train much CAS 20 years ago. They could drop bombs but things like a FAC qualification didn't exist because it wasn't a primary role it was secondary. Now it's kinda on units. The guy I worked with that flew Vipers whose sole job was SEAD didn't do CAS at all while he was in that unit, then he went somewhere else and it was like 80% of the job because that's what they needed to know for the A-Stan.
And along with that a lot of communities in military aviation branched out into new roles on their own because they saw the writing on the wall.
The Bomb-cat program for the F-14 is a great example. It wasn't a Navy directed program it was a bunch of guys playing with ideas over cocktails and taking them out on the range till they found a solution that worked.
A lot of effort is however made to tailor Multirole or unit training to specialize in certain areas over others. A lot of Viper units didn't train much CAS 20 years ago. They could drop bombs but things like a FAC qualification didn't exist because it wasn't a primary role it was secondary. Now it's kinda on units. The guy I worked with that flew Vipers whose sole job was SEAD didn't do CAS at all while he was in that unit, then he went somewhere else and it was like 80% of the job because that's what they needed to know for the A-Stan.
Don't say that to the rabid A-10 fanboy community.
I flew the thing, and am well aware of it's capes as well as its limitations, and even I get fanboys arguing with me about that, as they believe it possesses no limitations.
Even different Viper units of the same Block do different things, generally the earlier blocks.
The Kunsan squadrons, in the time I was there way back in the day, were interdiction and CAS dumb bomb droppers only, with their Block 30s. Additionally, one squadron shot AGM-65s, while the other squadron shot preemptive AGM-88s. Then you had the Osan squadron that didn't really do much CAS, but was PGM primary and was primarily interdiction role.
ryan1234
Desensitized Member
It's actually great to have people that dissent to any given view point on strategy. Specifically, it's great to have people draw up criticisms and raise questions, so thank you.
Mastering air to ground and air to air has been around since airplanes had weapons on them. Even in World War II, after clearing out the Luftwaffe, Allied fighters were extremely useful in interdiction against ground targets. Guys would move from an air to air sweep to strafing trains and various artillery positions. It continued into Korea, Vietnam, etc. We train a good amount in both arenas, particularly in self-escort strike. Depending on the current threat situation, it doesn't take too long for the crews to spin up tactically. I think you'd be surprised at how well some "multi-role" aircraft can do and how systems have evolved to facilitate that flexibility. When it boils down to it, it's still a jet finding, targeting a weapon to something... and killing it - whether it's air to air or air to ground. It's not always about just capabilities either, the enemy will always try to mitigate capabilities whether it's kinetic, non-kinetic, CCD, counter-stealth, IADS, etc. For example, the SA-23...according to the internet has a 120nm range - it's also a pretty deadly system. If you think about the SEAD problem that a 120nm range poses, that essentially means that an A-10 couldn't perform CAS within 120nm of the enemy FLOT. So sometimes it's about certain synergistic effects and tactics that can put us into a definitive advantage against the enemy.
"But, but, it can fly with an engine shot off, has a titanium bathtub, and does low and slow CAS"
Yes....there are fanboys who would argue just that to your comments......making you want to do this to their heads:
ryan1234
Desensitized Member
"But, but, it can fly with an engine shot off, has a titanium bathtub, and does low and slow CAS"
Yes....there are fanboys who would argue just that to your comments......making you want to do this to their heads:
Flying around with an engine shot off... right in the heart of the MANPAD envelope... Focusing on survival, not hitting the ground, losing SA on who's who in the zoo down on the ground. Not to mention if the first SAM didn't do the job, the second one will. Hopefully SERE pays off.
Bandit_Driver
Gold Member
I understand what you guys are saying and can't argue it much further not being in the military. I personally don't like having our eggs in only a few baskets or one. I hope in the future I am wrong and the one size fits all approach doesn't come back to bite us in the tukas.
Lawman
Well-Known Member
True but in all fairness we have in the past bought specialized aircraft only to have them be near or complete failures at their intended roles an only stuck around in other roles because we bought them so may as well put them to work.
F-104, F-102, A-5 Vigilante, etc