PMC wrote:
Buccaneer is another great example of damned fine engineering, after a much needed power plant upgrade, it showed what it really was capable of in the gulf, again, like the Jaguar, it could take an awful lot of damage before it'd die. It was a superb bombing platform, increadible range and verisitility. Replaced by the more nimble, but shorter ranged Tornado GR1, which whilst a good aircraft in its own right, couldn't carry as much ordinance as the Buccaneer.
During Gulf War 1, the MOD had yet another botch job with their laser guided bombs. The Tornado couldn't carry the laser designator pod and the Buccaneer couldn't carry laser guided bombs... Solution?
Send in the Buccaneers first to illuminate the targets while the Tornados drop the bombs. Two planes doing the job of one. Brilliant! Only in Britain folks...
Don't mistake MOD buerocracy foulups with the basic aircraft's capabilities. Buccaneers dropped freefall bombs and air to ground missiles... Same goes for Tornado. Paveway weren't used untill later for good reason:
Niether Tornado nor Buccaneer had ever been tested with paveway, due to budget cuts it was unlikely to have been tested out for a good five years. As it was, between the two of them they got the job done with basically untested equipment with the mechanics hacking and patching everything to fit because in wartime, you don't have the time to get everything working as it should. With that in mind, they didn't do too badly. Its ironic that a lot of our best equipment only really showed its worth when things had to be done on the fly!
However,
both Buccaneer and Tornado carried pavaway during the Gulf war. Indeed, the pictures of iraqi aircraft being destroyed on the runways was due to buccaneers alone.
As for American Aircraft... Their kit is very advanced, and in a lot of cases fairly durable, but as frequent training excersises in Canada have shown, their kit hasn't got a patch on ours.
Hmmm... American kit is superb, although a Lightning could keep an F15 honest in terms of performance and perhaps manoeverability, it's frankly nowhere when compared as a fighter. The F14 is IMHO one of the finest aircraft ever to fly and looks damn cool to boot. Shame it's about to leave service.
The Tornado GR1 is perhaps the finest attack aircraft in service (the USAF did briefly consider buying it at one point), but no-one's ever going to say the F3 is as accomplished a fighter as an F15. Or indeed an SU27....[/quote]
Again, in excersise against American, Canadian and German pilots, flying F15's, F16s and a mixture of the former respectively, the Tornado F3 was a match for anything else out there and consistantly scored highly in dogfights. Su 27 (Flanker) lacks the manuverability of the Tornado at lower altitudes, though tornado looses in range to it. Flander was designed to be a very long range intercepter with ground attack capabilities, Tornado is and was a bit of a jack of all trades: Intercepter, succesful dogfighter, maritime patrol and reconnecance... Like everything the MOD get their beancounter mitts into, they produce something that can do a bit of everything. It may not be the best for a given role, but it generally can do more then most and do it well. Tornado has been dubbed by its pilots "All things to all people", a phrase not used to describe an aircraft since the De haviland Mosquito of WW2.
the F14 is good at what it does, it, like the Flanker is a long range interceptor (and a damned fine one at that), with little or no capability for anything else, its manueverability is poor, even when compared against the F15 at any altitude. It like the F15 is very rugged, but up against anything like a Tornado or F16 in a dogfight and the pilot may as well cut his or her losses and just eject.
The F15 has never really flown against anything in wartime that was remotely comparable in terms of manuverability, speed or capability. Do so and very quickly it would loose its "no losses in wartime" record. Like the Su 27, it too looses out in lower level air to air combat due to its larger size. But like the Tornado, the basic airframe is damned reliable and very adaptable.
Now, if you'd said... Su 37, I would have conceded, the damned thing would give a Harrier a run for its money in the stupidly manueverable stakes! But then again, in a one on one with any of the other aircraft I've mentioned, I suspect that the Su 37 would be the one to place your bets on...
