It was sold commercially as CCC/Harvest by Softool Corp starting in the late 1970's. Looks like Broadcom is the newest owner. It's still being used - the last time I encountered it was in 2009 at a large bank.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
(Was working at McDonnell Douglas at the time (mid 1990s), ISS related, had no idea about the F-15 connection. I do remember thinking CCC/Harvest seemed like a really strange choice at the time, but this F-15 connection... alright, so that's probably why.)
Also while the article vindicates Sprey's want of having a lightweight fighter, the reality is that while lightweight fighters did come, they quickly became exactly what Sprey would not have wanted (once the F-16 entered service, it quickly gained BVR capability for example) because the mission that Sprey envisioned (pure within visual range air combat) wasn't nearly as significant in the 90s and onwards.
"The Bradley was a tragedy waiting to happen. It was packed with ammunition, fuel, and people. The thinnest of aluminum armor surrounded it. So Burton sent the Army’s ballistic research laboratory $500,000 to test the Bradley, and he insisted the testing use real Soviet weapons. The Army agreed. But the first of the “realistic” tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than Soviet-made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets. To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley’s protective armor, no explosion would result. “What are you going to do about this, Jim?” Boyd asked. “If you let them get away with this, they will try something else.” Burton still believed his job gave him the authority to force the Army to live up to its word. He tried to use persuasion and logic with Army officials, but to no avail. When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas. They jammed pigs and sheep inside the Bradley to test the effects of fumes after a direct hit. But the fumes had hardly dissipated before the Army slaughtered the animals without examining them"
Really makes you wonder what procurement is actually about. I believe this was the basis for the movie The Pentagon Wars which I haven't seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond-visual-range_missile
BVR is kind of a cold war tech; "its WW3 shoot down all the soviet bombers" it doesn't have another mission at this time. To risky to use.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/buying-just-80-f-15exs...
In the early 90s I was a crew chief on the F15. I worked nights (what we called swing shift) and so slept during the day. Depending on which runway they were using the landing pattern would go right over the dorms. Some airmen in the dorms had car alarms with the sensitivity set so low that when the jets flew over the car alarms would go off. THAT got annoying!
Fairchild Republic F-X: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5032893d14a8556ef65b4...
General Dynamics F-X: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-725ce5a1fe83a987224ca...
North American Rockwell NA-335: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-aad2b19e0e947f1cc2a4a...
The Fairchild one looks incredibly Ace Combat (I think it's the super wide engine pods).
They make an inexplicable Top Gun/Tom Cruise reference which suggests they don’t seem to know the difference between the F-15, F-14, or F-18. Or perhaps even between the US Navy and USAF.
I’m not aware of any plans to send F-15s to Ukraine. I have only heard of F-16 and maybe F-35.
The video thumbnail shows F-15s with a single (offset?) rudder.
There’s a reference to the F-11 which seems to actually mean the F-111.
There is a reference to an F-22 Megaprojects video that doesn’t seem to exist. They may mean F-35 here.
They claim the F-15 was active in Vietnam when it didn’t enter combat service until 1976. This may be another mistaken F-14 reference.
The video claims the F-15 C and D are no longer in service with the US military but they are.
The gun is not in the nose, it is in the wing root.
The AIM7 and AIM9 were not new for the F-15C. Both are from the late 1950s.
F-15E weighs more than the F-15C/D.
The video suggests that the F-15EX and F-15 II are different planes but the F-15EX is the “Eagle II”, the same plane.
The F-15EX is not claiming to go mach 3+. It is mach 2.4 capable, similar to the F-15C/D.
Jordan didn’t have Mig-25s, the Syrians did.
It’s so egregious I unsubscribed from the channel before my Gell-Mann amnesia could subject me to further incorrect information. It’s a shame because I enjoyed these channels but now can’t trust them.
> It’s so egregious I unsubscribed from the channel before my Gell-Mann amnesia could subject me to further incorrect information. It’s a shame because I enjoyed these channels but now can’t trust them.
Kinda curious that a lot of people complain about "videos replacing text" yet these "inaccurately paraphrase Wikipedia out loud while playing a Powerpoint made from Wikipedia/Commons and other images" channels like the one you linked, Asianometry and so on are huge and popular. And those at least write a (highly derivative or essentially plagiarized) script and read it, there's channels that do the same thing but with GPT for the script and TTS for the voice, and even those are pretty big.
edit: Funnily enough both kinds of channels have the "GPT issue" in that they always want to sound confident and authoritative, so they never point out if they are unsure about something. Compare this to channels like Applied Science or Breaking Taps where they very clearly point out when they don't understand something or are unsure of their understanding.
The MiG-25 "Foxbat" is a famous example. To succeed in it's role as an high-speed interceptor it should have been made from titanium. But it's a very expensive and difficult metal to work with, so temperature critical parts were instead made from stainless steel. In the west there were lots of jokes about it rusting in the rain and the use of vacuum tubes, but tubes allowed it to have a very powerful radar. Plus that's what they had to work with (the Soviets having great difficulties making high-current semiconductors).
There was single significant defection before the introduction of the "teen" fighters, codenamed HAVE DOUGHNUT, and even it was not actually Soviet (an Iraqi pilot defected to Israel). All the other defections (which there were several) happened using old/non-fighter aircraft (iirc there were several MiG-15/17/19 which were essentially Korean War era designs), or happened after the teens were designed.
The Mig-25 seems like a good example of a Soviet aircraft considered better than its US contemporaries, at the time. Misunderstanding and misinformation let the US to think they were far, far behind the Soviet Union. Viktor Belenko cleared that up! It was a plane good at just one thing, with downsides that would never let it through a (non-CIA-directed) US procurement process. On the plus side, competition, fear, and rivalry, drove the US to some amazing research, engineering, and innovation.
As a child at a local military airshow, the F-15 was awesome, dangerously beautiful. Shamed even the X-wings and Tie fighters I'd just seen on the big screen. Many years later, I had a similar feeling watching an Su-27 at Farnborough; Sukhoi captured some aesthetic that Mikoyan-Gurevich never seemed to get right, and did it better than any western contemporary.
The truth of this is again illustrated by the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 with its massive cost overruns and its reduced performance.
The F-4 Phantom, probably deserving the title of greatest Western multi-role aircraft of the cold war, had long successful service with both USAF and USN (and USMC), with fewer inter-service airframe differences than between the F-35A and F-35C. Multi-service aircraft are totally workable, the services just don't like having to play nice with each other.
The F-35 is better thought of as a family of tightly-related aircraft which share as many major systems as possible (avionics, sensors, engine, cockpit) while having differing airframes. Doing exactly the kind of reusable engineering a major project should be doing. You can claim that different project management might have been cheaper, but the idea that three separate airplanes, one for each service, could have been engineered and produced for less is just wishful thinking.
I'm not sure that's really the case. When we see successful cross-service adoption, it's because the aircraft simply was that so good the other branch saw a lot of value in buying it. So far the only program that has worked from inception is the F-35. The others failed to get traction in the other service (F-111, F-16). What all other aircraft that have crossed services have in common is iterative design resulting in a superior aircraft:
Air Force to Navy
- F-86 Sabre designed for Air Force, Navy adopted it as FJ2 Fury (straight wing) and FJ3 Fury (swept wing version of FJ2). The FJ3 was a counter to the MIG-15 and was a navalized F-86. It's performance was superior at the time.
Navy to Air Force
- F-4 Phantom II. Naval multi-role fighter was just that good... better than most mission-specialized Air Force fighters at their own missions. Iterative design from the McDonnel F3H Demon that borrowed some ideas from the Douglass F5D Skyray.
- A-7 Corsair II. Naval attack aircraft. It's primary value was that it was inexpensive to operate and hit a sweet spot for payload and range. Iterative design from F-8 Crusader (which was probably the best air superiority fighter of it's era).
The F-4 was built for the Navy and the other services saw what a great plane it was and bought in.
The F-35 is intended as a lightweight multi role aircraft, so it’s full of compromises already.
The F-111A/B as a shared USAF/USN aircraft is much harder as there’s not as much margin for compromise in something that is supposed to be the pinnacle of current performance.
(source attached to this post https://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=54012 )
F35 can hold their own quite well. Disregard the 2015 report with the limiting software, this is where they are at, and things will only improve with the new engine
The following article analyzes the F15EX buy that is being debated as compared to the F35.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/buying-just-80-f-15exs...
For such a poor performer, the F-35 is sought after by almost every country that can afford it and that the US will sell it to. Sales increased even more after Russia invaded Ukraine, when European countries perceiving a new threat switched their plans to the F-35.
