One of the few good uses for solid rocket motors

[DeltaV]

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... et-crashes

Note the different Variable Exhaust Nozzle settings in the top picture. The more open one also emits flame in the next to bottom picture. Maybe lost one engine, then stalled the other.

[choff]

Right before Canada got the CF18s, the old CF105's almost seemed to be crashing at a rate of one per month. I remember one|TV news report of a crash right before the cut to commercial, a recruiting ad with the voiceover, "There are a lot of planes on exciting missions in the Canadian Armed Forces."

[Aero]

Right before Canada got the CF18s, the old CF105's almost seemed to be crashing at a rate of one per month. I remember one|TV news report of a crash right before the cut to commercial, a recruiting ad with the voiceover, "There are a lot of planes on exciting missions in the Canadian Armed Forces."

So the camera person wasn't so lucky then. All he/she needed to do was keep focused on a Canadian airplane and wait for the accident. Not so much luck as patience.

[93143]

Do you mean CF-104s? 'Cause the CF-105 never got into active service... real shame too; it would've kicked the ever-lovin' tar out of the entire Century lineup...

[choff]

Do you mean CF-104s? 'Cause the CF-105 never got into active service... real shame too; it would've kicked the ever-lovin' tar out of the entire Century lineup...

Quite right, it was the CF104 Starfighters that were dropping like flies, kept in service way too long until replacement. There's a whole mythology built up about the CF105 Avro Arrow.

The Soviets ran a beautiful decoy operation that the Canadian Airforce fell for hook, line and sinker. They produced a 4 engined delta winged bomber and claimed it was supersonic and intercontinental, when actually it could only make a short subsonic flyby at the MayDay parade. Then they claimed it was going to be mass produced.

Eisenhower, and a handful of trusted people with access to the U2 flight photos, knew it was all bluff, and they prevented the U.S. aircraft industry from building and selling super expensive mach 2.5/3 interceptors to the U.S. airforce.

Meanwhile the Canadian government just about bankrupted the economy building the CF105 to interdict the nonexistent bomber threat. It severely crippled the budget for the rest of the military and created a huge tax burden for most of the country. When it was cancelled, people in the industrial heartland cried foul since they were the only beneficiaries of all that spending.

[93143]

There's a whole mythology built up about the CF105 Avro Arrow.

Two competing sets, apparently. One side believes it was superior in every way to every other fighter ever developed before or since, and that the CIA got it cancelled because it could shoot down the U-2. The other believes it was a sideslipping pig that couldn't quite hit Mach 2, had a ferry range of 200 statute miles, and would have cost more than a billion dollars just to finish developing, plus twelve times as much to produce as an American interceptor.

Then there's the Phantomheads, who seem to think the F-4 of all things was comprehensively superior to the Arrow... but I digress...

The Soviets ran a beautiful decoy operation that the Canadian Airforce fell for hook, line and sinker. They produced a 4 engined delta winged bomber and claimed it was supersonic and intercontinental, when actually it could only make a short subsonic flyby at the MayDay parade. Then they claimed it was going to be mass produced.

Eisenhower, and a handful of trusted people with access to the U2 flight photos, knew it was all bluff, and they prevented the U.S. aircraft industry from building and selling super expensive mach 2.5/3 interceptors to the U.S. airforce.

Meanwhile the Canadian government just about bankrupted the economy building the CF105 to interdict the nonexistent bomber threat. It severely crippled the budget for the rest of the military and created a huge tax burden for most of the country. When it was cancelled, people in the industrial heartland cried foul since they were the only beneficiaries of all that spending.

The above is not true.

Avro got a requirements document in early 1952, before the first flight of the M-4 Молот. In fact, the Globe and Mail got wind of the plan to replace the CF-100 almost as soon as there was a plan, in January of that year IIRC. The AIR7-3 spec was issued in early 1953, before the "Bomber Gap" hysteria started, well before the first public display of the M-4 on May Day 1954 and long before the multiple-flyby stunt (not to mention the U-2's first flight) in mid-1955.

The Arrow project was started for roughly the same reasons the 1954 Interceptor project was started, and the differences between the F-106 and the CF-105 were due largely to geographical differences between the U.S. and Canada, not to a difference in threat perception. The advanced U.S. interceptors you're probably thinking of were the XF-103 and the XF-108, both cancelled at roughly the same time as the Arrow (though they weren't nearly as far along).

The cost of the CF-105 was not excessive. The projected incremental cost per airframe at the time of cancellation was $3.75M - comparable to that of the significantly-inferior F-106 - and the development program had already spent ~70-80% of what it was going to. With Astra-1/Sparrow-2D (a very advanced radar coupled with what was essentially an AMRAAM), the program would have been far more expensive - assuming the troubled Sparrow-2D had been successful at all. But Astra/Sparrow was cancelled in 1958 in favour of the existing Hughes MA-1/GAR-3 Falcon system, as Avro had been insisting it should be.

The incremental cost to finish and deploy the Arrow was actually less than the projected cost of a proposed replacement system (which comprised an equal number of F-106s combined with SAGE/Bomarc) plus cancellation charges. Of course, under NORAD the SAGE/Bomarc system was just about mandatory, even though the CF-105 didn't need SAGE, and Bomarc was virtually useless with only two bases...

Actually, with the savings from not paying cancellation charges taken into account, the total cost of switching out the 100 F-106s for 100 CF-105s in the proposed replacement system would have been only a couple hundred million dollars extra, in a roughly billion-dollar multi-year expenditure. The American offer to pay for the missiles and fire control systems, if accepted, would have made up a good chunk of the difference, even discounting their offer to buy us a squadron (or more) of the planes. Hundreds of millions of dollars would have been spent in Canada instead of the United States, and the interceptor force would have been much better suited to its task... of course, ultimately even the F-106 option was scrubbed due to poor understanding of the strategic environment, and stayed scrubbed due to potential political embarrassment...

The national defense budget in 1959-1960 was actually higher than the previous year ($1672M versus $1635M). The Army and Navy were not agitating to cancel; they wanted a review of the program first, since obviously national security trumped budget concerns. The cost problem was not with the aircraft itself, but with trying to finish and deploy it and do SAGE/Bomarc at the same time. And at this point, both Canada and the U.K. were under the impression that manned bombers and interceptors were on the way out, and that missiles were the future. Canada got sold a bag of goods on that one... of course we found out we needed interceptors anyway, and got stuck with a bunch of used F-101s, more than two years later due to political issues with reversing on the "we don't need interceptors" nonsense. It's just as well nuclear-tipped Bomarcs weren't our sole line of defense against Tu-95 incursions over the next half century...

[choff]

So, we needed a mach 2.5 interceptor to catch a turboprop bomber, and other countries that wanted to export their aircraft would just scrap production and buy ours. I've talked to guys in the service in the 60's who told me they had to make sure too use up both sides of writing paper to control stationery costs. That was the legacy of expensive projects.

Another boondoggle was the CANDU reactor exports, practically bribing other countries to purchase nuclear plants and build up market share. That's one of the reasons India and Pakistan are in a nuke standoff.

Ontario and Quebec believed in a model of Canada where the other 8 provinces were the hinterland, providing the raw material and captive home market while they kept the big ticket manufacturing jobs and created a huge high tech market for themselves overseas, it was a crock.

[kunkmiester]

If missiles hadn't taken over first strike and such, bombers would have gone mach 3+ eventually, as the B-70 and the Russian equivalent were intending to do.

There was an impression when the SAMs and ICBMs came on the field hard that no plane could survive in a SAM environment(total bull), and that ballistic missile defense was impossible(also bull--look at the records of the Nike-Zeus project, and the Navy's current SM-3 program). Because a SAM could supposedly shoot down even a mach3-4 bomber like the B-70, bombers couldn't be used as the main trident point. And because ballistic missiles shouldn't be able to be shot down, they would make a better first strike.

The numbers also looked better for MacNamara and his Whiz Kids, who didn't take into account recall ability for bombers versus missiles, or the fact that it's a lot easier to put conventional weapons in a bomber for other purposes besides blowing the Soviets to smithereens.

Back in the fifties, it was still looking like bombers would keep going higher and faster. If bombers were going higher and faster, then obviously interceptors would have to. It was a race, and it sounds like the CF-105 was intended t keep a bit ahead in that race with a domestic program, and they didn't need a mach 3 threat to know they'd eventually face one. I'm not sure when ICBMs took center stage, but once that happens intercepting bombers is much less important.

[GIThruster]

I'm not sure when ICBMs took center stage, but once that happens intercepting bombers is much less important.

After Congress approved $290 million of B-70 "add-on" funds to the President's 12 May 1960 modified FY 1961 budget, the Administration decided on a "Planned Utilization" of only $100 million of the add-ons. The Department of Defense subsequently presented data to Congress that the B-70 would add little performance for the great cost.[43] However, after becoming the new Air Force Chief of Staff in July 1961, Curtis LeMay increased his B-70 advocacy, including interviews for August Reader's Digest and November Aviation Week articles, and allowing a 25 February General Electric tour at which the press was provided artist conceptions of, and other info about, the B-70. Congress had also continued B-70 appropriations to (unsuccessfully) resurrect development of the bomber. After the Secretary of Defense explained again to the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) on 24 January 1962 that the B-70 was unjustifiable, LeMay subsequently argued for the B-70 to both the House and Senate committees—and was chastised by McNamara on 1 March. By 7 March 1962, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC)—with 21 members having B-70 work in their districts—had written an appropriations bill to "direct"—by law—the Executive Branch to use "the full amount" of the nearly $500 million appropriated for the RS-70. McNamara was unsuccessful with an address to the HASC on 14 March, but a 19 March 1962 11th hour White House Rose Garden agreement between Kennedy and HASC chairman Carl Vinson retracted the bill's language[44] and, notwithstanding their earlier campaign and budget advocacy, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson subsequently left the bomber canceled.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Amer ... 0_Valkyrie

This of course says nothing about the blacker "Blackbird Bomber" that Kelly Johnson was trying to sell to USAF. A combination of that and the Valkyrie technologies would have been formidable indeed. Afterward though, it's good to recognize we moved to the low and slow B1 approach and that probably was better for avoiding SAM's for a time, and then the stealth approach. Both made those super-birds of the 50's obsolete so canceling when we did was probably better than canceling later, and not as good as if we'd canceled sooner.

And of course, ICBM's are much cheaper than bombers.

All of this is supposedly obsolete with hypersonic bombers, about which we can only wonder. . .unless you have clearance.

[Tom Ligon]

I watched all this unfold. I recall the F-14 and F-15 both were originally touted as capable of Mach 2.8. Evidently this was mostly for show, and operationally the real situation is, "not if you want to keep flying them."

All subsequent fighers have had much lower top speeds.

Once they had the Mach 3 Blackbird flying, the downside of ultra high speed set in. Word has it that it takes three states to turn the SR-71 around at that speed, and the states are Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii. Dogfighting becomes moot at those speeds.

We did build the supersonic B-1, but not in any quantity, and they're mostly used at airshows. The B-2 was subsonic but stealthy. But the workhorse of our bomber fleet is still the venerable B-52, and likely will continue to be for decades. They're cheap to keep, and apparently work fine as long as the fighters are so dominant nothing else can play with us.

[GIThruster]

I recall the F-14 and F-15 both were originally touted as capable of Mach 2.8. Evidently this was mostly for show, and operationally the real situation is, "not if you want to keep flying them."

The problem is they can't go that fast once you strap missiles to the wings. This is why the F-22 has an internal weapons bay.

[Tom Ligon]

I'm sure that helps the F-22's speed, but I was under the impression the more valuable benefit of internal stores was stealth. When the weapons bays open, the Raptor is suddenly visible on radar, but by then you are about to be dead.



Older fighters with weapons hanging externally show up beautifully on radar. But if there are enough of them and you're dumb enough to engage them, you're still about to be dead.

[choff]

About ten years ago a major magazine ran an article on declassified U2 recon photo's. Only 20 people in the U.S. including Eisenhower had access to these photos in the late 50's early 60's, and what they showed is that the Soviet bomber threat was a colossal bluff. That's why XF106 Rapier got nixed, and that's probably why the CF105 got the axe after Eisenhower went on a fishing trip with then Canadian prime minister Diefenbaker.

It matter's not how effective bombers could be, if the Soviet's weren't building any we didn't need expensive interceptors to chase them. The myth perpetuated for the 30 years before declassification was that Dief the Chief made a huge mistake scrapping the Arrow. People in Ontario want to believe that because they were riding the gravy train of federal spending on the program. The rest of us Canuckleheads just got a share of the tax bill.

As pointed out, pilots can't dogfight at mach 2.5 because they can't see each other to do it.

[GIThruster]

I'm sure that helps the F-22's speed, but I was under the impression the more valuable benefit of internal stores was stealth. When the weapons bays open, the Raptor is suddenly visible on radar, but by then you are about to be dead.



Older fighters with weapons hanging externally show up beautifully on radar. But if there are enough of them and you're dumb enough to engage them, you're still about to be dead.

I'm sure that's true too. There's also the advantage that you have much more combat range in the craft from putting the missiles and bombs inside. I doubt the craft could supercruise with missiles strapped to the wings. Lots of advantages there. . .

[ladajo]

External Weapons pylons add significant drag.
The F-18 even has a cant to the pylons which increases drag further.