Maki
Anytime Baby!!!
- Joined
- 2 September 2007
- Messages
- 22
- Reaction score
- 9
BTW, the F-8 owed its best-of-the-war win/loss ratio mostly to tactics and training. F-4 crews had to learn ACM, but also long range intercept, various kinds of ground attack and in USAF's case nuclear strike. Plus, F-4 crews weren't trained that much in the concept of maneuvering combat in the first part of the war. F-8s did limited bombing, but first and foremost they lived, breathed and trained for air combat. Arguably that's why they had the best win/loss ratio up through 1968. F-4 got to be a lot better once the crews were trained to use the F-04 strengths, including acceleration, fighting in the vertical and to force the MiGs to sustain their turn where they ran out of energy.
This is all true, but the bottom line is that the Phantom wasn't built for the kind of combat it experienced over Vietnam. It's was built to take down targets at long range with Sparrow missiles at high speeds. The people in charge thought BVR was the future of air combat and that subsonic ACM was dead. Vietnam proved that it wasn't. Today we see a lot of the same talk. Of course it might be true that WVR combat is certain death with high off-boresight missiles, but what if that isn't the case in 15 years. Further advancements in stealth or some other technology might prove us wrong. A lot of modern fighters can sustain 9g, it's nothing out of the ordinary.