A-10C Thunderbolt II makes a comeback

[Speaker to Animals]

Bullshit.

The F-16 has an annual crash rate ranging between 3.0 and 3.8.

It's by far the most crash-likely airframe in the US inventory right now.

Sure, a good portion of those crashes are due to pilot error, but a HUGE portion of the total F-16 crashes were due to engine failure.

When an engine fails on a single-engine aircraft, guess what happens??

Per capita, twin engine jets do not have a better attrition rate, you can go into to your routine of ceaselessly repeating of the same fallacy over and over, but that does not change the attrition rate of the F-16 vs twin engine US fighters, the F-18 crashes more than the F-16 does, when number of air frames and hours flown in factored in.

You're talking out of your ass right now. The stats don't support you. At all. The F-16 rate is between 3 and 4. That's the rate. Not the total. It's normalized and when you compare that to something like an F-15, it's nowhere in the same ballpark.

Single-engine aircraft are not a good idea in military aviation.

All this budget shit gets sold up by these Shamwow marketeers at Lockmart too. "It's fly-by-wire! wooooo!" What that really means: we stripped it of half the flight control system and now it's only fly-by-wire instead of the more resilient and survivable integrated flight control system that an F-15 has (i.e., both fly-by-wire *and* mechanical flight control rods and cables).

There's no way I have ever seen to sell-up the single-engine, though. That's just a turdball right out of the gate.

[Smitty-48]

The F-15 is fly by wire, the F/A-18 is fly by wire, all fourth generation jets are fly by wire, you're just propagating misinformation based on fallacies, if the FBW flight control system on the F-15 fails, it crashes just as much as the F-16 does, I'll leave it to the reader to decide for themselves, because going round and round with you for page after page, is a pointless exercise, as per usual.

[Speaker to Animals]

F-15 has both mechanical linkages and a dual-channel fly-by-wire system (actually there is a utility channel too). The F-15 can fly even with the FCC damaged if the linkages still work and the PRCA is still functioning and you have hydraulic pressure to move the actuators. This is my world now.

The F-16 has jack shit. It's just a fly-by-wire system. Electronic failure of it's primitive flight control system results in lawn dart. Engine failure results in lawn dart. Failure of many kinds, that to an F-15 pilot would be a nuisance, result in lawn dart.

The F-16 is a fucking lawn dart, and the F-35 is it's lawn dart descendant.

[Smitty-48]

Doesn't make any difference, if the FBW fails, the F-15 cannot fly, all fourth generation jets are inherently unstable, in order to make them more maneuverable, but as a result, they cannot be flown manually, only the FBW can control the jet, if the FBW fails, the jet flies out of control and pilot has to eject, doesn't matter what type of servos are being driven by the computers.

[Speaker to Animals]

Lawn dart:

[Smitty-48]

By your own words, the F-16's loss rate is 3.0

Just for our readers at home; the F-15 loss rate is 2.93

If the F-16 is a Lawn Dart, then so is the F-15. /shrug

[Speaker to Animals]

It goes almost to 4.0. I was referring to the annual loss rate. The total loss of F-15 is nowhere near 3.0. LOL

[Smitty-48]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_F-15_losses

"123 USAF F-15 aircraft had been destroyed in mishaps, with 52 fatalities. This was a lifetime average of 2.93 aircraft destroyed per year, or 1.99 aircraft destroyed per 100,000 flight hours."

[Speaker to Animals]

Here's the problem:

Once you go single-engine, you necessarily just dispensed with redundancy. Redundancy depends, for most systems, on having more than one engine. For each engine you can have a primary power system. The F-15, for example, has two primary power systems, two primary hydraulic systems, two flight control channels dispersed across both electronic and mechanical flight control systems. in addition to the redundant primary systems, it has the utility/backup systems. It basically has three different systems that can pick up the slack from damage.

An F-16 has only a primary power system and a backup system running on, last I was in, hydrazine. It has one flight control system, and that system is susceptable to loss because not only is it not redundant, it's got no mechanical linkages at all. That's not a plus, that's a detraction, no matter how the shamwow marketeers want to spin it at Lockmart. It has only one engine. That alone makes it a poor choice. But it's all the other consequences of having only one engine that makes the F-16 not very survivable.


Case in point:



An F-16 and an F-15 collided in the air. the F-15 lost it's left wing and left stabilizer. It landed and was repaired. The result for the F-16: lawn dart.

Lawn darts. Not even once.

[Smitty-48]

Case in point is that the jet is only flying because of the FBW flight controls, has nothing to do with two engines.

The lack of redundancy in the F-16 is cost based design choice, because the F-15 was too expensive to buy 4500 of them, but the loss rate difference between the two jets is negligible.