* Posts by jrwlynch

2 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2011

US to stage F-35-versus-Warthog bake-off in 2018

jrwlynch

Re: versus?

TeeCee, quite a few aircraft have taken SAM hits and lived, the A-10 doesn't actually do very well in that regard (it was designed to withstand 23mm shells, not SAM warheads). It also, being lower and slower, gets hit a lot more often and is much less able to evade enemy fire.

During Desert Storm, the A-10s took four times the losses per sortie compared to the F-16 - 20 casualties in 8,640 sorties compared to seven in 11,698 for the Vipers. However, this is even worse than it looks, because while most of the A-10 missions were to the lightly defended front line "killboxes", the F-16s were ranging across all of Iraq (including downtown Baghdad and similar high-threat targets), and using the killboxes on the route home to expend any remaining weapons.

RAF Eurofighter Typhoons 'beaten by Pakistani F-16s'

jrwlynch

Second Anonymous Coward's post

It's interesting that Lewis, between bouts of Typhoon-trashing, also condemns the Tornado F.3. Has he never heard of the exercise a few years ago, where two Tornadoes defeated eight - count'em, eight - of the mighty US Air Force's F-15 Eagles without loss?

Now, there was the petty detail that the F-15s only had their own eyes and radars, while the F.3s had AWACS support - sending its Big Picture straight to their cockpits by Link-16 - but trivia like this don't matter much compared to the final score...

As has been repeatedly stated - the setup and exercise rules are key to the score, otherwise we'd have proved that the F-22 Raptor is hopelessly inferior to the F-16. (F-16s beat Typhoon in an exercise, Typhoons have beaten Raptors out at Nellis, therefore the F-16 is superior to both).