The US still sells the F-16, they don't want to put them into a warzone where they'll be shot down and hurt sales.
Lmao this is probably the case. They can just shrug and make excuses for the older planes breaking down
It is 100% the case. War is a racket, they gave them mountains and mountains of Javelin missile launchers because they know damn well how effective their Javelins are and there's really no downside to it for America when the things are damn good. But if it got out that Russian weapons could shoot down the F16s easily the sales would tank and Russian anti aircraft sales would go up a lot.
Lmao
Good plane for killing WWII tanks and shit
Bad plane for people who don't have air superiority
More things should be painted like sharks. What ever happened to that?
Paint adds weight to an airframe, decreasing fuel efficiency and in the case of warframes makes them easier to identify if you add garish colors and for stealth warframes makes them not very stealthy.
Okay that's a pretty good reason. But like, why not on commercial jets? Just the fuel thing? They told me capitalism breeds innovation.
It's mostly a fuel thing. Paint can add hundreds of pounds of weight to a commerical jet (and darker paints tend to be heavier as well so most go with a light colour) and factoring in how much fuel jets use, and the scale of operations for airlines, it saves a lot of money to go light on the paint.
Huh, when I'm painting at home, lighter coloured paints (white, yellow) require more pigment to avoid being see-through.
What @ultraviolet said. Planes made in the u.s use white paint as their default coat that covers up and smooths out to form the aerodynamic surface of the plane. From my understanding, all the other colors you see on planes, like DHL's piss yellow, Delta's naval blue with red highlights, America airlines' :amerikkka: and etc. All of those are painted onto the base coat.
The A-10 won't be able to operate like it did in Afghanistan. Probably won't be flying low enough to brrrt because it will get shot to shit by modern anti-air missiles. Russia realized quite a while ago that missile platforms and especially missiles are cheaper than top notch aircraft and pilots. "It's the economy, stupid!" but for war machines.
I still think the A-10 is baller and we should have invested the $1T+ on F-35s into an aerial armada of little flying machine-gun tanks instead.
i thought everyone thought the A-10 was a forever plane that should never retire?
Depends who you ask. Lots of Air Force brass hate the fucking thing and have been trying to kill it for years but the guys on the ground and pilots who fly it love the thing.
The version they offer Ukraine will be some real old stock with outdated avionics and targeting systems.
Part of that is that the A-10 is great at shooting people who can't shoot back, but put it against people with modern AA and it's a flying coffin, which a lot of pilots learned the hard way in the first Gulf War when Iraq shot them down in the first day and they got pulled from front line operations (those operations were given to F-16s).
Modern Russia is not a valid target for A-10 ops. Giving them to Ukraine is just throwing them in the trash with extra steps.
I've heard to the contrary, at least in terms of guys that have had the A-10 actually give them CAS instead of just watching it from a distance.
yea but it is not a multirole fighter, it's a support platform that flies the way a lincoln continental with bad shocks drives and has a top speed somewhere between "lazy" and "undisturbed by being late for work"
the A-10 gets it's "prestige" mainly by being very effective at carrying a LOT of ordinance through airspace completely sanitized of potential air or ground threats and then dropping that ordinance on between one and five targets, then returning for refit and round 2
It's a good plane at providing close air support to ground targets and destroying enemy armor and it's pretty well armored for a plane, but any kind of air support requires air superiority to be effective and the A-10 is very bad at being a fighter.
It won’t retire as along as the US is killing guys running around in the desert
Gamers are revolutionizing the warzone in Ukraine. Just strap them into a Microsoft flight simulator for a few hours and send them off to pilot a fighter jet
"Where's the global chat button for when I want to call the Russian pilot a slur?"
Ukraine claims it would be a 2-3 week training process
I don't know shit about military aviation but type ratings (aircraft specific ratings to fly specific, more complicated to operate planes) take a lot longer than that to acquire unless they're absolutely rushing it, which is probably safe to assume. Plus, using the gun is a whole other beast in addition to learning a new plane. That thing puts out so much power it significantly slows the plane down when you fire it.
This intern is the daughter of every journalist who looks at an armored vehicle and reports it as a tank.
