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Eagle (Modern Military Aircraft 5008) By Lou Drendel

The 1960's were one of (he most difficult periods in the history of the American military. They found themselves increasingly committed to a war in the Southeast Asia that American politicians were increasingly unwilling to fully support, and yet were not willing to end. As the war escalated, the Air Force discovered that their airplanes... airplanes that had been designed in the 1950's for all-out nuclear war, left a lot to be desired when it came to fighting a conventional...or in the case of Vietnam, a semi-conventional war.

One arena in which the mission requirements of Vietnam con­flicted heavily with the mission capabilities of the aircraft was air superiority. Post World War Two America had been in love with its nuclear sovereignty. Strategic Air Command would keep the peace with its big stick, and if the other guys developed long range bombers, we would knock them cut of the sky with missile carrying interceptors. But when it came time to bomb the other guy in North Vietnam, he sent up nimble interceptors to contest the skies. His tac­tic was to sneak up behind you, then blast away with guns! Guns! Our airplanes didn't even have guns! And if you managed to turn into him, the chances were that you would be either too close to shoot your missile, or have too much angle-off or G for the missile to han­dle. The envisioned sophisticated radar-directed push-button air war quickly degenerated into an old fashioned dogfight over North Viet­nam. Clearly, what we needed was a dogfighter that had the power and agility to outmaneuvcr an enemy, and the sophisticated avionics to spot and attack him before he could sneak up on you.

There were several people in the Air Force who realized this very quickly once the war in Vietnam settled into a daily grind against tough targets. There were even people who had predicted the need for such a fighter before Vietnam. However these ideas were not held in high regard by the Defense Department of Robert McNamara. McNamara and his whiz kids were determined to apply the buy to serve commonality. The first Air Force version, the F-4C, was practically identical to the Navy F-4B, it wasn't until the later D and E versions that the Air Force got a Phantom that was designed around Air Force missions.

There were rebels in the Air Force who kept the dream of a pure air superiority fighter alive throughout the McNamara years. They fought hard for Research and Development funds for the FX...tht fighter ex­perimental. But there were politxs involved in keeping the dream alive. McNamara was intent on his airplane for all seasons — the TFX — becoming the be-all, end-all in tactical aircraft. But after the Air Force agreed to buy eleven squadrons of NAVY A-7 Corsair lis, thereby paying homage to the great God Commonality, he acceded to further funding of the FX as a follow-on interceptor to the Phantom. With that chip in hand, the Air Force Systems Command went over­board in its specifications for the new fighter, finally coming up with a proposed airplane that was uncomfortably F-lll like. However, that was not what the chumpions of an air superiority fighter had in mind, and they finally made their voices heard.

If any one man could be considered the lather of the F-15 it would be Ma­jor John Boyd. He had been an instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School in the 1950s and had written a tactics manual entitled Aerial Attack Study. Boyd had developed theories that went beyond just pulling Gs during a fight. His energy maneuverability concepts shaped air combat for the future, taking air-to-air combat out of the horizontal plane and making modern air combat truly three dimensional. Boyd, with the assistance of mathematician Tom Christie, used computers at Eglin AFB to refine his theories and gel his conclusions on paper. The resultant report was such an articulate argument in favor of the pure, air-to-air fighter that Boyd was in­vited to apply his expertise to the design of the FX.

What finally emerged from Boyd's studies was a fighter with high thrust to weight ratio and low wing loading. It was optimised...not to necessarily go high or fast...but to maneuver. That required some rethinking as far as air­frame design was concerned. The designers were in love with the swing wing.

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