It's not just the thrust vectoring that gives the F-22 it's agility. It's wings are HUGE. It's tail surfaces are HUGE. It's vertical tail surfaces, which are canted outward to deflect radar, those act as lifting surfaces and they're bigger than the F-16s wings. TV helps a lot, but the purpose of TV isn't to give the…

$130M per copy for an F-22. I've seen the delivery paperwork.

Sprey hated the F-15. By his own admission, he was an automatic opponent of any program he was not a part of. He had no military aviation experience. He claimed that the F-15 was too big, lacked maneuverability and was far too dependent on it's massive radar and missiles to be effective.

Actually, the F-15 is just as…

Pierre Sprey didn't design the F-16. Sprey has never 'designed' anything with wings, and he still doesn't know diddley-squat about aircraft design OR air warfare. He started at the Pentagon in 1966 as one of Robert S. McNamara's (the genius [/sarc] behind the TFX) "wiz kids."

Sprey started out as a weapons system…

The only people who claim "stealth" makes aircraft invisible are the media and people who don't know what "low obervable" is. Low observable reduces the range at which an aircraft can be picked up on radar. It's the reduction in the range at which an enemy's radar can detect, target, lock on and engage the aircraft.…

Except those radars he talks about? They aren't used to target aircraft.

I'm no fan of the F-35, but Pierre Spey's no one to talk. His theories have been repeatedly been disproven over the years to the point where he just barks to anyone who'll listen.

1. His critique is about what the f-15 has become. That in increasing its roles, it's not as nimble as it should be for a pure air…

If your proposal is unlikely due to the budget restraints, why even perpetuate the false hope of the Army A-10?

I replied because those questions point out just some of the flaws with the whole "give them to the Army" sport-bitching. If there was actual validity to your proposal, you could have answered those questions…

Thank you. I'm glad someone got that.

Alaska's already got a great flag; there's no point in replacing the Big Dipper and the northern star with hipster iconography.

They're trying too hard with some of these - take Tennessee for example:

You sure about that? Florida does have an usually high percentage of mutants.

Stevie Ray Vaughan is dead, and we can't get her in a helicopter?

I will love him and pet him and call him George.

"The A-10 needs to be folded into and operated by the army air-wing with the helicopter force."

- Where will all these A-10s be based, both here and abroad?
- Who's going to fly them?
- Where will the new pilots' basic flight training take place?
- How long will that take to get these pilots proficient so they can go to…

Came here to see if someone had posted Rocket. Wasn't disappointed.

"It's amazing. Every year, this part of our job gets easier. Between Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr, people are surveilling themselves."

Yeah, Tullahoma is used to that thanks to Arnold. Chattanooga on the other hand....

I was in Chattanooga at the time. For a stretch, those flights lasted the better part of 2003 year. Since the flights were above 10K feet, they didn't talk to local ATC. Everyone was calling Dobbins and every AFB and NAS in the region looking for answers but getting none. Conspiracy theories ran wild until someone…

Bingo on the "...get an operational squadron..." thing.

Lockheed used to fly F-22s over SE Tennessee all the time before delivering them to the USAF. It was a shakedown flight the AF mandated and one of the performance goals was that each plane had to prove it could super cruise. This area got picked because it was the…