After the F-15 had finished its display, everyone was waiting for the underpowered F-14A demonstration: the Tomcat’s TF-30 engines would have not given to the aircraft the same thrust to weigh ratio of the Eagle.
However, during the F-15’s performance, Evans and Romano burned down a
great quantity of fuel and now they had only 2,500 pounds of remaining
gas: while this little quantity was only sufficient to accomplish their
flight demonstration, 2,500 pounds was also one eight of the Tomcat’s
internal fuel capacity and thanks to this fact the Tomcat had the same
thrust to weight ratio of the Eagle.
At this point the F-14 had one thing that the F-15 didn’t have:
variable geometry wings that would have made the difference for the
grace of the flight demonstration.
Funny that flash ended up selling the bird, guess the Shah wasn't big on energy-manoeuvrability diagrams.
The F-14 actually did have another thing going for it though: the AIM-54 Phoenix long range missile. To this day, it remains a capability gap.
What's with this picture anyways? There's no way that's a real combat loadout right? This must for Macross battles!
No comments:
Post a Comment