Well, at least, "Good News, Brian M!"
My historical wonkery and/or pedantry is gradually ramping up again.
On the good end, I finally unpacked (many of) my boxes of books. By "I," I actually mean, "My sister," but, y'know, the point is that my books are no longer languishing in well-nigh unreachable cardboard boxes. This means that I'm finally reading Expedition Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z. I will probably have nothing to say about the book, but it's only the second straight-history-type-thing I've read since I moved back from Dallas. I bought it because it looked interesting, then never got around to reading it and it went in a box for a year. Things like that happen.
For the record, the other straight history book I read was James Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno: The US Navy at Guadalcanal. I'd previously read Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, about Taffy 3's stand against overwhelming odds off Samar, and had high expectations. They were not disappointed in any way, shape, or form. I have little to say about either book, but if you're even remotely interested in WWII naval history, I highly recommend Hornfischer.
Then there's the bad, most involving television.
See, I was watching a rerun of Ancient Discoveries on the Bullshit Squared Channel (A/K/A History Channel 2) and getting annoyed in the most purely pedantic ways possible. They were talking about ancient superships and at no point did anyone even mention the possibilities that ships for which we have no direct evidence might have been exaggerated or not even real. This is kind of an issue, since the limitations on wooden ships are based on a well-known problem: over a certain size they literally cannot support their own size and they buckle. Even the keel of a wooden ship with iron or steel bracing can only get so big. We have zero evidence that the ancient Greeks or Romans had the same level of ship building technology as the Americans or Brits in the 19th Century, so the idea of, say, a Ptolemaic super-ship with a length a quarter again that of the HMS Orlando really should be greeted with skepticism, rather than a, "Hey, guys, look at this awesome CGI animation!" Not once, however, was the fact that a 425 foot long wooden hull is probably actually impossible in a seagoing vessel mentioned. This in spite of the fact that the only historical record we have of the ship says that it was just a big ol' vanity project. And that's right at the front of the Wikipedia article.
I switched over to the Military Channel's countdown of the top 10 fighter planes of all time and was okay until number 4, which was a tie between the MiG-15 and the F-86 Sabre. This one actually annoys me now more than it did last night. And it annoyed the hell out of me last night. For this we need pedantry.
The MiG-15 was really the first modern jet fighter and was another in a long line of Sputnik moments for the United States. It was simply better than anything the Americans had in the air at the tail-end of the 1940s and at the beginning of the Korean War. It could fly circles around the P-51 Mustangs and F-80 Shooting Stars that were the front-line American fighters of the time. The closest counterpart was the F-86A variant of the Sabre, which still had that new fighter smell.
The MiG-15 could out-turn, out-climb, out-accelerate, and basically outfly the early Sabres. The main advantage that the F-86 had was that it was faster in a dive and, ultimately, better at maneuvering at high speed. The main advantage American pilots had was that they were much better trained than their Korean and Chinese counterparts, although the Soviet pilots who secretly participated in the war were the equal of the Americans.
Anyway, there are two aspects to the mystique of the face-off between the F-86 and the MiG-15 that should cause a certain amount of cognitive dissonance: there's the bit where the two fighters were almost perfectly evenly matched in an aggregate sense, but there's also the bit where the F-86 pilots had 792 kills to only 78 losses. This is a 10:1 kill ratio. To put that in contrast, the Me-262 had a kill ratio of roughly 5.5:1 total against both fighters and bombers in spite of the fact that the Me-262 was nearly invulnerable to the Allied fighters it faced. Of course, the losses to the Me-262 I'm tracking from are total, which includes fighters lost to ground fire or on take-off or landing, which was the most common way they were shot down, since a P-51 Mustang was literally incapable of fighting a Me-262 on even remotely even ground.
The only aerial combat I know of where a major engagement resulted in a better than 10:1 kill ratio was the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in World War II, where the US had roughly 350 kills to 30 losses. Those numbers, however, include losses to ground fire and losses to bombers being shot down by fighters. They also include the fact that the primary air combatants in the engagement where the F6F Hellcat on the American side and the Zero one the Japanese side, which was basically obsolescent at the time. The Japanese also sorely lacked properly trained pilots at the time, while the American fighter pilots were at the top of their game.
One fighter in the world has actually done far, far better than a 10:1 kill ratio: the F-15 Eagle. That particular fighter has a roughly 104:0 kill ratio through its entire service, mostly with the Israeli Air Force. Those kills, however, were primarily against MiG-21s, MiG-23s, MiG-25s, Mirage F-1s, and F-4E Phantom IIs, with the F-15s either in the hands of the Israelis or Americans fighting in the war against Lebanon and Operation Desert Storm, respectively. Every single one of those fighters is inferior to the F-15. The F-15 was designed to kill the MiG-25 and replace the F-4, which, in turn, was a contemporary to the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 (kinda). Most of the rest were bombers or helicopters.
The F-15 does have nine recorded kills against the MiG-29, its closest competitor. Four of those were Yugoslavian MiGs shot down over Kosovo. The other five were Iraqi planes shot down during Desert Storm.[1]
Given these data points, that 10:1 kill ratio for the F-86 against the MiG-15 is, to put it bluntly, unbelievable. Anything that's unbelievable requires investigation. At least, that's how historians should think. Some of them have, in fact. Again, Wiki-frickin-pedia points out that the Chinese and Soviets claimed 647 downed F-86 Sabres, whereas the United States claimed they lost only 78. The combined Chinese and Korean forces appear to have claimed another 211, which gives a total of 858 kills, meaning that the US actually lost over ten times as many F-86s as it claims. And, assuming that most or all of the credited kills against F-86s were by pilots in MiG-15s (which is a good assumption, as the F-86 would have enjoyed the same advantages over a La-11 or a Yak-3 that the MiG-15 enjoyed against a P-51, namely all of them. It also means that the combined Russian/Chinese/North Korean MiG-15 forces actually won the war against the USAF's F-86s, with a 858:792 kill ratio.
Or, of course, one could assume that if the Communists overinflated their numbers then maybe the Americans did, too, and it might be best to find out how many losses the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans claimed. Those numbers appear to be around 524, with 300 combat losses claimed by the Russians and 224 by the Chinese and Koreans. That puts the number at a still quite respectable 6.75:1 ratio for the F-86. The MiG-15s might not have all been shot down by F-86s, however. Ground fire and B-29 tail gunners undoubtedly got quite a few. F-80s, F-84s, and Gloster Meteors got some. Even a few kills were credited to A3D Skynights, a F4U Corsair night fighter, and a British Sea Fury. Even with all that it's still likely that the kill ratio for the F-86 to the MiG-15 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4:1.
Meanwhile, the 78 combat losses number for the F-86 is in some dispute and I've seen numbers of up to 103. There also seems to be a hard statistic of 139 total operational losses, but that would include planes that crash on landing and whatnot. It's not a big shift, but it's a shift.
At that point we also have to discuss the qualitative differences between the pilots and strategies. The Americans were, by every single account, far better than the Koreans or the Chinese. They were probably on par with or slightly better than the Soviets. This meant that if a Soviet pilot wasn't in the engagement the chances of the F-86 pilot winning an engagement went up drastically.[2] American pilots were also often on the offensive and engaging in fighter sweeps and bombing runs over the Communist airbases. This means that they got some of their kills in surprise attacks, taking out planes that were still scrambling, or taking out planes on landing. This, if you recall, is how the Allies managed to take out the vastly superior Me-262s in Germany.
Anyway, this massive wall o' text is way more thought than anyone on the show put in to the whole MiG-15/F-86 debate. That's not overly surprising, since the show had all of, like, 6 minutes to cover two of the classic fighter planes. The thing that annoyed me, though, was that they called the two fighters at a tie and then had the presenters call a winner, anyway. They said that it was no contest and the F-86 was obviously the better fighter. One then said that the MiG-15 looked like "a tractor" and there was no way an American would be caught dead flying one.
This is a MiG-15:
This is a F-86:
This is a tractor:
Now, this might be (is) overly pedantic. But the point that was made was that American pilots would never fly such an ugly plane, even though the F-86 and MiG-15 are actually really similar looking planes. This, it should be noted, was on a program that only had one Soviet Bloc fighter on a list of 10 that included 5 American (F-22, F-86, F-4[!], P-51, F-15), 3 British (Sopwith Camel, Supermarine Spitfire, Harrier), and 1 German (Me-262).
They then completely ignored this argument with their number 3 airplane, the F-4 Phantom:
That, right there, is one of the ugliest fighter planes of the jet era, if not all of fighter history. The funny thing is that none of the talking heads had anything nice to say about the Phantom. One actually referred to it as a turkey. Yet it got number 3 on the strength of its longevity. That's kind of like making a Top 5 basketball players list of all times that looks like this:
1. Michael Jordan
2. Larry Bird
3. Karl Malone
4. Magic Johnson
5. Kobe Bryant
Karl Malone does not belong on that list. Sure, he played for a long time and was pretty good. But he was not the third best player of all time. Period. And building a TV show around that list, where the experts say, "We can't believe that Karl Malone is number 3. He actually pretty much sucked."
And so but anyway, this was a Top 10 fighters of all time list that did not include the Mitsubishi Zero or the Fokker Albatros, but did include the Harrier, the F-22 (which, on purely technical terms, is probably the best fighter of all time. It's also super-expensive, loaded to the gills with unnecessary stuff, and has yet to display any actual value compared to, say, continuing use of the F-15), and the freaking F-4 Phantom. It pretended to be subjective, but was really just a rah-rah exercise in jingoism.
Also, too, don't even get me started on the Top 10 bombers that called the Handley-Page 0/400 the first strategic bomber even though the Russians had an entire squadron of Ilya Muromets over a year before the Handley-Page's first flight. Also, the Ilya Muromets was a four-engined sci-fi beast the Germans were afraid to actually engage in the air. The first time the Germans actually managed to take a Muromets down it came at the cost of three Albatros fighters. Oh, and the Italians put the Ca.1 into combat between the Muromets and the Handley-Page, too.
But, hey, the list did include the Tu-95 Bear bomber. Which they claimed was just an enlarged version of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. That's untrue, as the Tu-4 was a carbon copy of a B-29, the Tu-85 was a larger Tu-4, and the Tu-95 was a completely new design that Tupelov developed when it became obvious that the Tu-85 was never going to be an actual intercontinental strategic bomber.
And so but anyway, I could talk about this for about a week. I think I'll stop.
I'd like to add, though, that if you think that I can get pedantic about silly lists of ranking the best airplanes in the world, you don't even want to know what I'm capable of doing with this. Or do you?
----------------
[1]The F-15's amazing levels of success cannot be attributed to the plane or its pilots alone. Really, the last time that a plane could be counted solely by its attributes was in the Korean War. Missiles, radar, and ground control now play a huge role in determining success or failure. If a P-51 Mustang equipped, somehow, with AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles managed to get the jump on a F-15 Eagle and got a good firing solution, the Mustang would get the kill. It's really that simple.
Indian Air Force MiG-29s and Su-27s actually have achieved success against F-15s in war games. They did so, however, because the USAF agreed to not use AIM-120s in the exercises.
On the other end of the scale, at the outset of the Vietnam War, MiG-21 Fishbeds and even MiG-19s managed to succeed in combat against F-4 Phantoms because the early Phantoms weren't equipped with guns, as it was decided that missiles had made them obsolete. The early AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided missiles were notoriously terrible, often refusing to arm and, if I recall, occasionally likely to not even ignite and would just fall off the plane. The early AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seekers had an unfortunate tendency to lock on to the Sun and were not all-aspect missiles by any stretch of the imagination, requiring the firing plane to be pointed almost directly up the target's tailpipe. Also, the Phantoms were equipped with four of each and usually ripple-fired two, as that meant if one failed the other might do the job. That meant that a Phantom pilot generally only had four chances to get a kill.
[2]The MiG-15 pilot would always have two disadvantages against an American in an F-86, however: the sights and the guns. The MiG had WWII vintage sights and was armed with two 23mm and one 37mm cannon. The F-86 was armed with a radar rangefinder attached to a modern sight and six Browning .50 caliber machine guns. The MiG's armament would have been deadly on a WWII battlefield against piston-engined fighters flying at less than 500 MPH. Against a fighter jet maneuvering at close to the speed of sound, however, the sight was, at best, a hinderance and the guns simply fired too slowly. The F-86 could see and shoot better, basically.
The thing about air combat is that it's all about trade-offs and who can take better advantage of their own strengths and the enemy's weaknesses. So the MiG-15 was, by all accounts, a better dogfighter, but the F-86 could separate faster and was technologically much improved.
My historical wonkery and/or pedantry is gradually ramping up again.
On the good end, I finally unpacked (many of) my boxes of books. By "I," I actually mean, "My sister," but, y'know, the point is that my books are no longer languishing in well-nigh unreachable cardboard boxes. This means that I'm finally reading Expedition Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z. I will probably have nothing to say about the book, but it's only the second straight-history-type-thing I've read since I moved back from Dallas. I bought it because it looked interesting, then never got around to reading it and it went in a box for a year. Things like that happen.
For the record, the other straight history book I read was James Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno: The US Navy at Guadalcanal. I'd previously read Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, about Taffy 3's stand against overwhelming odds off Samar, and had high expectations. They were not disappointed in any way, shape, or form. I have little to say about either book, but if you're even remotely interested in WWII naval history, I highly recommend Hornfischer.
Then there's the bad, most involving television.
See, I was watching a rerun of Ancient Discoveries on the Bullshit Squared Channel (A/K/A History Channel 2) and getting annoyed in the most purely pedantic ways possible. They were talking about ancient superships and at no point did anyone even mention the possibilities that ships for which we have no direct evidence might have been exaggerated or not even real. This is kind of an issue, since the limitations on wooden ships are based on a well-known problem: over a certain size they literally cannot support their own size and they buckle. Even the keel of a wooden ship with iron or steel bracing can only get so big. We have zero evidence that the ancient Greeks or Romans had the same level of ship building technology as the Americans or Brits in the 19th Century, so the idea of, say, a Ptolemaic super-ship with a length a quarter again that of the HMS Orlando really should be greeted with skepticism, rather than a, "Hey, guys, look at this awesome CGI animation!" Not once, however, was the fact that a 425 foot long wooden hull is probably actually impossible in a seagoing vessel mentioned. This in spite of the fact that the only historical record we have of the ship says that it was just a big ol' vanity project. And that's right at the front of the Wikipedia article.
I switched over to the Military Channel's countdown of the top 10 fighter planes of all time and was okay until number 4, which was a tie between the MiG-15 and the F-86 Sabre. This one actually annoys me now more than it did last night. And it annoyed the hell out of me last night. For this we need pedantry.
The MiG-15 was really the first modern jet fighter and was another in a long line of Sputnik moments for the United States. It was simply better than anything the Americans had in the air at the tail-end of the 1940s and at the beginning of the Korean War. It could fly circles around the P-51 Mustangs and F-80 Shooting Stars that were the front-line American fighters of the time. The closest counterpart was the F-86A variant of the Sabre, which still had that new fighter smell.
The MiG-15 could out-turn, out-climb, out-accelerate, and basically outfly the early Sabres. The main advantage that the F-86 had was that it was faster in a dive and, ultimately, better at maneuvering at high speed. The main advantage American pilots had was that they were much better trained than their Korean and Chinese counterparts, although the Soviet pilots who secretly participated in the war were the equal of the Americans.
Anyway, there are two aspects to the mystique of the face-off between the F-86 and the MiG-15 that should cause a certain amount of cognitive dissonance: there's the bit where the two fighters were almost perfectly evenly matched in an aggregate sense, but there's also the bit where the F-86 pilots had 792 kills to only 78 losses. This is a 10:1 kill ratio. To put that in contrast, the Me-262 had a kill ratio of roughly 5.5:1 total against both fighters and bombers in spite of the fact that the Me-262 was nearly invulnerable to the Allied fighters it faced. Of course, the losses to the Me-262 I'm tracking from are total, which includes fighters lost to ground fire or on take-off or landing, which was the most common way they were shot down, since a P-51 Mustang was literally incapable of fighting a Me-262 on even remotely even ground.
The only aerial combat I know of where a major engagement resulted in a better than 10:1 kill ratio was the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in World War II, where the US had roughly 350 kills to 30 losses. Those numbers, however, include losses to ground fire and losses to bombers being shot down by fighters. They also include the fact that the primary air combatants in the engagement where the F6F Hellcat on the American side and the Zero one the Japanese side, which was basically obsolescent at the time. The Japanese also sorely lacked properly trained pilots at the time, while the American fighter pilots were at the top of their game.
One fighter in the world has actually done far, far better than a 10:1 kill ratio: the F-15 Eagle. That particular fighter has a roughly 104:0 kill ratio through its entire service, mostly with the Israeli Air Force. Those kills, however, were primarily against MiG-21s, MiG-23s, MiG-25s, Mirage F-1s, and F-4E Phantom IIs, with the F-15s either in the hands of the Israelis or Americans fighting in the war against Lebanon and Operation Desert Storm, respectively. Every single one of those fighters is inferior to the F-15. The F-15 was designed to kill the MiG-25 and replace the F-4, which, in turn, was a contemporary to the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 (kinda). Most of the rest were bombers or helicopters.
The F-15 does have nine recorded kills against the MiG-29, its closest competitor. Four of those were Yugoslavian MiGs shot down over Kosovo. The other five were Iraqi planes shot down during Desert Storm.[1]
Given these data points, that 10:1 kill ratio for the F-86 against the MiG-15 is, to put it bluntly, unbelievable. Anything that's unbelievable requires investigation. At least, that's how historians should think. Some of them have, in fact. Again, Wiki-frickin-pedia points out that the Chinese and Soviets claimed 647 downed F-86 Sabres, whereas the United States claimed they lost only 78. The combined Chinese and Korean forces appear to have claimed another 211, which gives a total of 858 kills, meaning that the US actually lost over ten times as many F-86s as it claims. And, assuming that most or all of the credited kills against F-86s were by pilots in MiG-15s (which is a good assumption, as the F-86 would have enjoyed the same advantages over a La-11 or a Yak-3 that the MiG-15 enjoyed against a P-51, namely all of them. It also means that the combined Russian/Chinese/North Korean MiG-15 forces actually won the war against the USAF's F-86s, with a 858:792 kill ratio.
Or, of course, one could assume that if the Communists overinflated their numbers then maybe the Americans did, too, and it might be best to find out how many losses the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans claimed. Those numbers appear to be around 524, with 300 combat losses claimed by the Russians and 224 by the Chinese and Koreans. That puts the number at a still quite respectable 6.75:1 ratio for the F-86. The MiG-15s might not have all been shot down by F-86s, however. Ground fire and B-29 tail gunners undoubtedly got quite a few. F-80s, F-84s, and Gloster Meteors got some. Even a few kills were credited to A3D Skynights, a F4U Corsair night fighter, and a British Sea Fury. Even with all that it's still likely that the kill ratio for the F-86 to the MiG-15 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4:1.
Meanwhile, the 78 combat losses number for the F-86 is in some dispute and I've seen numbers of up to 103. There also seems to be a hard statistic of 139 total operational losses, but that would include planes that crash on landing and whatnot. It's not a big shift, but it's a shift.
At that point we also have to discuss the qualitative differences between the pilots and strategies. The Americans were, by every single account, far better than the Koreans or the Chinese. They were probably on par with or slightly better than the Soviets. This meant that if a Soviet pilot wasn't in the engagement the chances of the F-86 pilot winning an engagement went up drastically.[2] American pilots were also often on the offensive and engaging in fighter sweeps and bombing runs over the Communist airbases. This means that they got some of their kills in surprise attacks, taking out planes that were still scrambling, or taking out planes on landing. This, if you recall, is how the Allies managed to take out the vastly superior Me-262s in Germany.
Anyway, this massive wall o' text is way more thought than anyone on the show put in to the whole MiG-15/F-86 debate. That's not overly surprising, since the show had all of, like, 6 minutes to cover two of the classic fighter planes. The thing that annoyed me, though, was that they called the two fighters at a tie and then had the presenters call a winner, anyway. They said that it was no contest and the F-86 was obviously the better fighter. One then said that the MiG-15 looked like "a tractor" and there was no way an American would be caught dead flying one.
This is a MiG-15:
This is a F-86:
This is a tractor:
Now, this might be (is) overly pedantic. But the point that was made was that American pilots would never fly such an ugly plane, even though the F-86 and MiG-15 are actually really similar looking planes. This, it should be noted, was on a program that only had one Soviet Bloc fighter on a list of 10 that included 5 American (F-22, F-86, F-4[!], P-51, F-15), 3 British (Sopwith Camel, Supermarine Spitfire, Harrier), and 1 German (Me-262).
They then completely ignored this argument with their number 3 airplane, the F-4 Phantom:
That, right there, is one of the ugliest fighter planes of the jet era, if not all of fighter history. The funny thing is that none of the talking heads had anything nice to say about the Phantom. One actually referred to it as a turkey. Yet it got number 3 on the strength of its longevity. That's kind of like making a Top 5 basketball players list of all times that looks like this:
1. Michael Jordan
2. Larry Bird
3. Karl Malone
4. Magic Johnson
5. Kobe Bryant
Karl Malone does not belong on that list. Sure, he played for a long time and was pretty good. But he was not the third best player of all time. Period. And building a TV show around that list, where the experts say, "We can't believe that Karl Malone is number 3. He actually pretty much sucked."
And so but anyway, this was a Top 10 fighters of all time list that did not include the Mitsubishi Zero or the Fokker Albatros, but did include the Harrier, the F-22 (which, on purely technical terms, is probably the best fighter of all time. It's also super-expensive, loaded to the gills with unnecessary stuff, and has yet to display any actual value compared to, say, continuing use of the F-15), and the freaking F-4 Phantom. It pretended to be subjective, but was really just a rah-rah exercise in jingoism.
Also, too, don't even get me started on the Top 10 bombers that called the Handley-Page 0/400 the first strategic bomber even though the Russians had an entire squadron of Ilya Muromets over a year before the Handley-Page's first flight. Also, the Ilya Muromets was a four-engined sci-fi beast the Germans were afraid to actually engage in the air. The first time the Germans actually managed to take a Muromets down it came at the cost of three Albatros fighters. Oh, and the Italians put the Ca.1 into combat between the Muromets and the Handley-Page, too.
But, hey, the list did include the Tu-95 Bear bomber. Which they claimed was just an enlarged version of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. That's untrue, as the Tu-4 was a carbon copy of a B-29, the Tu-85 was a larger Tu-4, and the Tu-95 was a completely new design that Tupelov developed when it became obvious that the Tu-85 was never going to be an actual intercontinental strategic bomber.
And so but anyway, I could talk about this for about a week. I think I'll stop.
I'd like to add, though, that if you think that I can get pedantic about silly lists of ranking the best airplanes in the world, you don't even want to know what I'm capable of doing with this. Or do you?
----------------
[1]The F-15's amazing levels of success cannot be attributed to the plane or its pilots alone. Really, the last time that a plane could be counted solely by its attributes was in the Korean War. Missiles, radar, and ground control now play a huge role in determining success or failure. If a P-51 Mustang equipped, somehow, with AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles managed to get the jump on a F-15 Eagle and got a good firing solution, the Mustang would get the kill. It's really that simple.
Indian Air Force MiG-29s and Su-27s actually have achieved success against F-15s in war games. They did so, however, because the USAF agreed to not use AIM-120s in the exercises.
On the other end of the scale, at the outset of the Vietnam War, MiG-21 Fishbeds and even MiG-19s managed to succeed in combat against F-4 Phantoms because the early Phantoms weren't equipped with guns, as it was decided that missiles had made them obsolete. The early AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided missiles were notoriously terrible, often refusing to arm and, if I recall, occasionally likely to not even ignite and would just fall off the plane. The early AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seekers had an unfortunate tendency to lock on to the Sun and were not all-aspect missiles by any stretch of the imagination, requiring the firing plane to be pointed almost directly up the target's tailpipe. Also, the Phantoms were equipped with four of each and usually ripple-fired two, as that meant if one failed the other might do the job. That meant that a Phantom pilot generally only had four chances to get a kill.
[2]The MiG-15 pilot would always have two disadvantages against an American in an F-86, however: the sights and the guns. The MiG had WWII vintage sights and was armed with two 23mm and one 37mm cannon. The F-86 was armed with a radar rangefinder attached to a modern sight and six Browning .50 caliber machine guns. The MiG's armament would have been deadly on a WWII battlefield against piston-engined fighters flying at less than 500 MPH. Against a fighter jet maneuvering at close to the speed of sound, however, the sight was, at best, a hinderance and the guns simply fired too slowly. The F-86 could see and shoot better, basically.
The thing about air combat is that it's all about trade-offs and who can take better advantage of their own strengths and the enemy's weaknesses. So the MiG-15 was, by all accounts, a better dogfighter, but the F-86 could separate faster and was technologically much improved.
I do like the Phantom's jetpipe and tail assembly, particularly when viewed from below.
But yes, if you're not prepared to have a methodology, you end up with "a bunch of planes I like".
As I understand it, Gripens have had some embarrassing successes against F-22s, but it's not being talked about much and sources for this stuff are rarely reliable.
Posted by: Firedrake | 09/10/2012 at 02:09 PM
Actually, the problem is that they did have a methodology. It was just one of those faux-scientific methodologies that seemed like a good idea. They had a five-point matrix that ranked everything on a 1-10 (I guess) scale. The methods were -- as I recall -- longevity, kill ratio, innovation, "fear factor," and, um, something else.
The longevity thing is the only really sensibly objective measure, but that one kinda gets ruined by the fact that it was a very America-centric measure. There was no point when they mentioned that some fighters stayed in service long after they were officially retired by their country of origin. Weirdly, it was the F-4 that made this obvious, since they treated the US's retirement of the fleet as the end of its service time, even though it's still in service in Egypt, Germany, and a few other places.
This is really where the Russian planes get clobbered. MiG-17s or the Chinese J-5 equivalent are still in service in a few places, and there are still a bunch of MiG-21s out there. So if you're going to give the F-4 an award based almost entirely on its longevity you've got to give one to a Soviet-block fighter, too. Of course, you'd also have to talk about the Mirage F1 and the Mirage III. And the Saab 35 Draken. Also, is it weird that the four best countries for consistent jet fighter production were the US, USSR, France, and Sweden? I mean, the Brits are up there, but the Harrier and Tornado are the only truly notable planes they had. Although there's the thorny issue of the Eurofighter Typhoon...
Kill ratio is a surprisingly silly measure, too, since not all kills are created equal and kill numbers are often inflated by the pilots (:::cough::: F-86 :::cough:::). The A6M Zero against the Brewster Buffalo and the F4F Wildcat was wildly advantageous for the Zeros, but it couldn't stand up to the Corsair or the Hellcat. That's about the only reason I can imagine it wouldn't be on the list, since the Zero was terrifying in the early years of WWII and still quite respectable in the end, even though the great pilots were all long gone and the American fighters were just plain better (no pun intended).
And, hell, "fear factor" and "innovation?" You know what plane was terrifying and completely untouchable for a brief period? The Fokker Eindecker. The Eindecker was pretty much the worst plane to come out of WWI, but it was the first combat monoplane and the first with an interruptor mechanism, which meant it was the first plane that could legitimately shoot forward. Sure, it pretty much lost all lift and went in to a stall if the pilot tried to climb, but it massacred everything for six months, called the Fokker Scourge. Then, of course, there was the Albatros, which had a plywood skin and didn't need an internal structure, was the first attempt at an aerodynamic frame, and had two machine guns. That's pretty damn impressive, in context.
So...yeah. I'm not quite sure what I've accomplished here. But I think I'll stop now.
Posted by: Geds | 09/10/2012 at 03:40 PM