Landing an F-15 with only one wing | Hacker News Reader

Landing an F-15 with only one wing

businessinsider.com

21 pointsdnetesn9 comments

Here's the video, a 2009 clip from the History channel show _Heavy Metal_:

I skimmed this twice and I didn't actually see footage of an F-15 landing with one wing, just sappy reenactments of it. Is there a time marker I should look at?

There is a brief History channel ad in the middle of the video....so just play through that.

> The F-15... was designed to go head-to-head with the Soviet’s MiG-25 and was the top dog for years...

However, the MiG-25 was an interceptor, primarily of the SR-71, so it didn't have the maneuverability of a fighter, but could approach the speed and service ceiling of an SR-71. The West didn't realize this until Victor Belenko defected w/ a MiG-25 in 1976, well after the F-15 had been designed. Belenko's biography is a good insight into the MiG-25 and Soviet life, or @ least that's my recollection from reading it as a teenager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

http://www.amazon.com/Mig-Pilot-Final-Escape-Belenko/dp/0380...

The pilot says he noticed he doesn't have a wing after already landing... so he most likely didn't feel the difference at all!

Perhaps it shows the flaw in design... that no wings are needed at all /joke

no wings are needed at all

In fact, if you watch the video this is the conclusion the engineers reached -- at sufficiently high airspeed, the F15's wide body makes the wings unnecessary.

he most likely didn't feel the difference at all!

He knew that something was wrong, because he crossed the runway threshold at 250 - 260 knots, rather than the typical 130 knots. He wouldn't have gone that fast just for grins, but because that's what he needed to do to keep stable and airborne.

That's a big difference.

That's not terribly different from a rocket in concept, is it?

And a lifting body, of course.

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