Flights of Fantasy -- July 25, 2015

Hats off to the team and the USAF for that bit from the Dragon Lady 363 ERS Squadron ....

I respect you all.
And envy da hell outa Adam, you lucky swine, what I would have given for that seat......

One hell of a week at the office.
No you will never ever find anything at all that will beat that.
Even if you get a seat on a commercial Space flight, you wont get the intimate feeling of a two-seater ultra-light ultra-high fast jet....

However.
Just being pedantically picky because I can, because I dont believe all the hype about it being that hard to fly....

Most of what he said when he said "We have to do a one week training course just to be a passenger"...
Yeah.
You do know you got off lightly there?.
That wasnt even fast-track....
That was more of "how the hell do we get these guys up there with the minimum training".

Skip the basics of flight training, skip the two seat piston engine basic trainers, skip a lot of stuff....
It took £14 million to train a RAF pilot to fly Tornado, that was when I was with them, last century.
They spent a whole month training me to basic flight training.
But on that score, at some point, it was expected my instructor would be saying "You have control"....

So how hard is it to fly fast jets?...
How hard is it to fly the U2?..
I spent the whole episode wondering if those particular USAF pilots had ever VTOL a Harrier.

Now the USAF have Harrier GR mk10's or whatever their current model number is these days, and I do believe that to fly one, you not only have to go through the entire jet and fast jest training, you also have to do Helicopter training to manage the hover part, and then you are allowed to "learn" the flying bedstead of a Harrier.
Cant see a runway?.. we dont need no stinking runway.....
The Harrier is being replaced by the F-35B, a STOVL, short take off vertical landing, even that is a handful.

So you cant see all of the runway on landing the U2.... so what?... if you fly something like the Douglass DC3, or even some of the other large propeller driven aircraft of old, you have a very restrictive view of the ground, they even had to droop concords nose to make a little more of the view.
Try the view from a Vulcan.... in comparison, the U2 is definitely picturesque.

So you wear a pressure suit....
Try a "G" suit and then let them put you through some stunning high G swings.
I passed out, but they kind of expected me to at some point anyway... I cam round to the sound of the pilots laughter "you lasted a little longer than I thought you would?..."

Pressure suits and G suits... So do all the Space shuttle pilots?..
But apparently they dont class that as a "plane" do they?.
Its a glider.....

What is the most difficult plane to Fly?...

In my experience, the first one you land all on your own.
You may have the pilot alongside you, or behind you, but he says "Your turn to land" and you brick yourself...
If you dont, your doing it wrong.

My Granddad would argue the most difficult plane to fly in the whole of the world would be some that didnt make it past development stages...

And how many Tornado pilots have ever come down with a round of the bends (decompression sickness AKA DCS)?

I found an article the other day (after 20 minutes of Googling, it's eluding me right now, but I'll post it if I ever find it again) where they wrote about U2 pilots coming down after 14 hours flights with serious scaring from bubbles of dissolved nitrogen bursting under their skin. A few cases were so severe that it was nothing short of incredible that the pilots were even able to land the damn thing again, because they were so disoriented that they'd forgotten everything but their basic flight training.

One story even told of a pilot so out of it that he looked down at his gauges and controls and just thought, "I know these are important, but I can't for the life of me figure out why." At that point he couldn't even make the connection that those instruments belonged in an airplane. He had no clue where he was. He had to be talked down by another pilot and his basic training started coming back as he descended, but he still had no clue what anything other than his altimeter, his gimbel and his stick was. Everything else he knew about that plane was just gone and yet, he still managed to land it without damaging anything. The effects of DCS on him were so severe that he got permanent brain damage and was decomissioned as a U2 pilot. He now works as a private contractor for the program, teaching new pilots about the avionics and the dangers of DCS, but he will never pilot anything but an R/C plane again.

All of these severe cases of DCS started around 2002, so USAF doctors had to find out what had changed so dramatically. The answer was the missions.

Back in the Cold War, pilots rarely flew for more than 10 hours and the missions weren't "live". They flew somewhere, took some pictures, came back home and the info was processed after the fact. Most of the time the plane was on autopilot, so the pilot could save his strength for takeoff, landing and the important bits in between. Getting there and getting back wasn't "the important bits", so during this time, the pilot could take a nap if he wanted to. Even under these conditions, pilots had to breathe pure oxygen for about an hour before takeoff to purge their blood of as much nitrogen as possible and had to spend time in a pressure chamber when they came back.

When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started, the mission for U2 pilots was changed. They were now doing live RECON, meaning they were in direct contact with ground forces requesting specific information here and now. Because there were only around 50 U2 pilots, they flew more and longer missions than ever before. Add to that the fact that they could no longer just sit back and let the autopilot do most of the work, but had to actively fly the plane and work the controls, gather, process and relay information and keep in contact with both ground forces and mission control and the taxation on the body in this low pressure environment was multiplied dramatically.

Don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for combat pilots of any kind, but how many of them have to work in an environment where just talking on the radio and flipping switches for prolonged periods of time can make them fatally ill?

There are any number of aircraft that people claim are hard to fly. Either the stealth fighter or the stealth bomber is nicknamed "wobblin' Wilma" because the test pilots had so much trouble keeping it in level flight. the F-22 raptor quite literally is unflyable without the computer controlled fly-by-wire system - it is designed to want to fly backwards, and the computer has to make constant corrections to keep it under control. the Gee Bee racers made a habit of killing their pilots. the V-22 Osprey flies like no other aircraft, and if you do it wrong, it tends to fall out of the sky.

you will recall, their final declaration was "plausible." planes that are hard to fly are hard in different ways, so there can be no completely objective analysis.

There's a distinct difference between temporarily passing out from not having enough blood pumped to your brain while turning at high speeds and being so high up that nitrogen dissolves into bubbles that burst in your body. Training can't help you there. You can't train yourself to break the laws of physics and chemistry.



Not at all. In fact, if you'd read my entire post, you would have caught this bit:





Like I said, I'm not taking anything away from any other type of combat pilot. It's an extremely demanding job, whether you're in an F-16, a Tornado, an Apache or any other combat aircraft. As the article tom1b linked to about the Apache says, you can certainly get a severe headache from processing all that information, but a severe headache can't kill you. DCS can. And the more energy you have to spend performing various tasks at low pressure, the faster DCS sets in and the more severe it gets. Back in the Cold War days, U2 pilots would also routinely report headaches and nausea, not as a result of of information overload, but as a result of mild DCS. As the missions became more demanding, they couldn't get away with just headaches and nausea anymore.

The point you made about the space suit vs. the G-suit earlier on is completely moot. They have wildly different functions. Without the G-suit, fighter pilots wouldn't be able to perform high G maneuvers, but they'd still be able to fly the plane in a straight line and in large soft turns. Some might even be fit enough to withstand 5-6 G turns for short periods of time without the G-suit. Without the space suit, U2 pilots would die from a combination of lack of oxygen and DCS before they even reached cruising altitude.

In other words: Without the G-suit, performing those high-G maneuvers would be excruciatingly uncomfortable, bordering on impossible, so the G-suit is designed for comfort and performance. The space suit is designed with one thing in mind and one thing only. Survival.

The Fleet Air Arm, part of the Royal Navy, operate aircraft on British Warships not the Air Force.

The confusion might come from the Falklands war, when the RAF operated some of their Harriers from the British Carriers and it seems that the Queen Elizabeth class Carriers will probably carry RAF aircraft on occasion and are designed and intended to do so. However if you see an aircraft, fixed winged or otherwise, on a British Warship it will be part of the Fleet Air Arm. It doesn't help that it was originally part of the Air Force.

The Sea Harrier was retired from service about a decade ago. The Sea Harrier was redesigned to act as an air superiority and air defense fighter, rather than as a fighter-bomber, and had an air-search radar fitted to it (the ground based Harriers lacked this, which can be seen from the smaller and 'flatter' pointed nose they had). I also seem to recall that they had some alterations made to their internal structure and construction to make them better suited for the rough life carrier aircraft have. As well as making them far more resistant to salt-water corrosion.

The nature of Carrier operations means that aircraft have to be built to be tougher and more resistant to corrosion than land-based aircraft. This isn't just about landing, but also taking off. Carriers typically use steam catapults in fact they've been in use since before WW2 as the original USS Enterprise Carrier, CV-6, had steam catapults for launching aircraft.
The end result is that while carrier aircraft can operate from land without any problems, the reverse isn't true. The F-16 has an arrester hook, but trying to use this to land on a carrier would most likely cause serious structural damage if not tear the aircraft in half. Even if you somehow managed to avoid that launching an F-16 from a carrier would not go well. The catapult would rip the nose wheel, and probably most of the nose, off and deposit them half a mile ahead of the ship...hopefully the aircraft itself wouldn't slid over the bow afterwards.

These design problems didn't really exist in the days of prop aircraft, as the aircraft themselves had such short take off requirements compared to later jets and very low landing speeds. This is why the Spitfire could be modified to become a carrier-fighter fairly easily (The Seafire), although landing was an adventure as the pilots apparently could barely see the carrier let alone the flight deck when coming in to land. Likewise it was the nature of prop aircraft that meant you could, if you could find pilots willing to try it, fly a B-24 off the flight deck.

In the jet age the nature of the design considerations meant that carrier and land aircraft remained and were considered different entities. With the former being (and in reality often being) considered less capable combat machines. This changed in the 60's with the advent of the F-4 Phantom. This was the first (jet) carrier aircraft who's performance was equal to if not better than its land based counterparts to the point that it ended up being used as a land based aircraft by many airforces. Such a transition from sea to land is uncommon, the F-18 Hornet is the other example I can think of*.
Land to sea is a different matter, with the Harrier being the only example I can think of where an aircraft designed specifically for land use ended up being used successfully at sea*.

This is one of the reasons why there are many who are questioning the F-35C, and it may be the major reason the F-35 has become the most expensive fighter to date (or at least the most expensive we know of).

(*In a twist the F-18 was originally designed for the contract that went to the F-16. The YF-17 design was reworked into a carrier aircraft. This doesn't mean that this was a land-based fighter adopted for sea-use, as the aircraft was not in production at this point and when it did enter production it was as the 'naval' design. Just to show the different design requirements between land and sea fighters even the re-worked Hornet turned out to have problems as a carrier fighter. The most serious of these was its limited fuel storage and hence poor range compared to most carrier aircraft. They ended up having to redesign the fighter again to create the Super-Hornet, which is basically a bigger version of the older fighter.)

****

In terms of landing, the most difficult is hard to pin down. If you are going by number of aircraft lost on landing then the U2 probably doesn't even register...but that would be misleading as the pilots are carefully chosen.
If however you were looking at aircraft being flown by regular pilots then the 'winner' for prop aircraft is probably the Me 109. Of the thousands produced of all models and variants some 5% were written off trying to take off or land. For jets the 'winner' was probably the F-104 Starfighter, which pilots seem to have hated to try and land if only because some genius decided to give the aircraft a downwards firing ejection seat.
For both aircraft the problem with landing was down to having a narrow landing gear, which made it easy to tip over when landing. In the case of the Me-109's later versions (G onwards) the torque from the engine was powerful enough to flip the aircraft onto one wheel (and shortly thereafter its back) if you opened the throttle up too much on takeoff. Other prop fighters of this date also had problems if you opened up the throttle too much too soon. But this usually resulted in the aircraft turning to the side not rolling over, and could be corrected before something bad happened.

The Me-163 would also make it onto the list. This small rocket powered fighter didn't have landing gear, instead having to land on skids - which often resulted in the thing cartwheeling down the runway. Just in case the pilot survived that the designers thoughtfully decided to power the rocket engine with chemicals that could turn a human body into slush in seconds. So even if you survived the crash, or heck even managed to land without actually crashing, there was a good chance of the fuel tanks cracking open and the fuel turning you into a puddle before you could get out.
Not something U2 pilots have to worry about....

Not even close.

The US navy's first fighter was the Vought VE-7 dating to 1917, which as far as can tell was only used by the Navy. Of course this was a biplane and given the date wouldn't have been all the different to land-based fighters. If indeed there was any significant difference beyond adding a tail hook.

The first US fighter that I can find reference to being designed specifically for carrier operations was the Boeing F2B, another biplane, dating to 1926.

The Corsair was preceded by the the F2A Brewster Buffalo and the F4F Wildcat, both monoplane fighters. With the F6F Grumman Hellcat entering service at the same time as the Corsair. From what I can tell it seems that the Corsair was not all that common on carriers, as there were some major issues with the design where carrier landings were concerned*. So it was more often found operating from land bases in the more than capable hands of the US Marine Corps.

(*It appears that the Corsair suffered from the same problem the Seafire did when it came to landings. Namely that the long nose of the aircraft made it difficult to see the deck when you came into land.)

well, that performance characteristic matches US military thinking of the era. - always missing a detail.

edit: the wiki page for the F2B does not mention specific carrier consideration.

yes, plus seaplane carriers, which would hoist the planes in and out of the water for launch and landing.

perhaps I should have said the Corsair was designed for modern carrier operations - but now I am questioning whether it was the corsair I was thinking of.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_F4U_Corsair

based on the wiki article it was.

it was actually designed to have the kind of landing gear abuse you get from carrier operations. - I believe it was also the first plane specified with folding wings - keeping in mind the Wildcat went into production quicker, but was started later.



basically that era was the point they started thinking in terms of what characteristics they wanted in a plane that was built for the carrier instead of modified for it.