Aviation Week has a nice cover story on the AT-6, a newish light fighter. It's a single engine two place turboprop that looks pretty much like the classic WWII P51 Mustang. Such an aircraft is much cheaper and has better loiter time than a pure jet. So long as it never encounters enemy jet fighters, it's good cheap air support for your ground forces.
The Aviation Week article doesn't talk much about those issues. They do a lot of talking about the "network centric" features that allow rapid data transfer. Not that I would buy a fighter plane to do rapid data transfer, I buy fighter planes to put ordnance on target. Then they enthused about the "intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance" (ISR) capabilities, in simple words you can load camera pods on the wings and do photo recon with it. That's nice, and versatile and all, but that's not the reason I buy fighter planes.
Then they opine that something like this can be superior to UAV's, which is true. Two sets of eyes in a cockpit is better at spotting ground targets than any amount of camera pods.
2 comments:
It doesn't make a lot of sense. UAVs have an incredible endurance time, you don't have to worry about pilot fatigue, and you don't have to worry about what happens if the UAV gets shot down over Trablekistan.
Considering the Global Hawk has an endurance of 30+ hours, if you want eyes on the target go with that.
If you want to blow the hell outta something for CAS, go with an A-10 or a 130 that is loaded out with CAS cannons.
Manned aircraft also have great endurance. Lindbergh demonstrated that in the 1920's. Burt Rutan was able to circle the earth without landing or refueling a few years ago.
The single engined turbo prop AT-6 is a whole bunch cheaper than the twin jet A10 or the four engined C-130 gunship.
Modern smart bombs and missiles allow a single aircraft to do as much damage as whole fleets of B-17's, or Thuds. I was in Viet Nam,when a single smart bomb took down the Paul Domier bridge into Hanoi, after dozens of wing sized missions had failed to drop it with iron bombs.
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