The world’s worst air force | Hacker News Reader

The world’s worst air force

hushkit.net

273 pointsprotomyth85 comments

At the Battle of Midway, forty-one TBD Devastators were launched between 7 and 9 a.m. By 11 o'clock, 35 had been shot down. After the battle, all other Devastators were withdrawn from non-training units and they never again flew in combat.

The Devastator was so bad that the Navy destroyed all remaining planes by the end of 1944. So there are now no museum exhibits anywhere of what was at one time the U.S. Navy's frontline torpedo bomber.

They were terrible outdated planes that should have never been flown into battle, but they did at least serve one important role at Midway by diverting the Japanese fighters at just the right moment so that the US Navy's dive bombers could approach almost undetected.

And the torpedo they dropped barely worked.

Later in tests the US Navy found there was a 2/3 chance the torpedo would break up, not start or simply sink when it hit the water.

Looking at the conversation under the "Messerschmitt 163" entry, I wonder how many HN folks have had the software version of that conversation?

It reminded me the feature creep scene in HBO's Pentagon Wars, which is eerily similar to what can happen in the software world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

Without reading the actual article, I was going to say something like:

  "Even the worst air force 
   might be better than no air 
   force at all, unless of 
   course, you consider how much 
   money gets wasted, and how 
   many lives a fleet of death 
   traps needlessly costs a 
   country."

But that was maybe in the sense that an odd third world country might have been nurturing some money pit of a vehicle pool.

Having read the article about a hypothetical air force, I kind of like the look of all those ineffective airplanes. It reminds me of that web page with the simulator video game, where the polygonal race cars evolve to endure a randomized terrain, according to a genetic algorithm.

Well, the South or Central American country with the longest-lived and most stable democracy is the one that abolished its professional millitary, so at least sometimes "no air force" is the right answer.

(Similarly the Spanish republic might have lasted a big longer if they hadn't had an air force...)

Costa Rica.

Yes and no https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Vigilance_Service

There's a common theme for just about all of those aircraft: they're ugly. There's truth in the saying that good aircraft are always beautiful aircraft.

Beauty is truth.

That's an incredibly subjective metric.

Or is it that we associate beauty with 'conventional' planes, which by definition fly well.

Google "A10 warthog". This is probably the exception which proves the rule. The air force hates it because it's ugly, but they can't eliminate it because it's amazing at doing what it does.

Congress funded the Warthog in spite of what the Air Force requested, a request that had little to do with appearance.

I actually find that to be a reasonably attractive plane: unusual to be sure, but not ugly.

I would like to one up you, I find it to be quite a sexy plane! I can’t even put my finger on why it does, but I just find it way better looking than regular figher jets.

I too think it is beautiful, especially when you watch it performing aerobatics at low speed.

Correct: it is fantastic at being vulnerable to air defenses, leaving it unable to engage the Iraqi Republican Guard in 1993.

http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-100927-061...

They don't hate it because it's ugly. I think the simplified version here is they hate it because they don't want to fulfill the role it does.

Which is baffling. It's your job, guys. Your entire organization with all its staggering budget exists to provide certain specific services to the nation. Deciding which of those services you feel like providing is not in your job description.

Every air force in the world is run by fighter pilots. Even well-meaning serious-minded people tend to emphasize what they know best. Hence air superiority tends to get far more attention than any other aspect of air combat operations.

Frankly, I think the US might be better off allowing the US Army to set up its own units for close air support. I suspect if they were allowed free choice of equipment they would operate some type of rugged STOL fixed-wing airplanes for that purpose.

Does anyone else think that the whole idea of different branches of the military is a stupid one? Why have different chains of command for different pieces of hardware used in the same mission?

Canada tried merging the different branches and found that it didn't work too well.

Well of course if you shove it on them after the fact it won't go well. Everyone gets their egos ruffled. You would have to start from scratch.

I'm assuming you're talking about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_the_Canadian_Ar...

Isn't the US Navy basically fulfilling all branches to some extent?

Politically Starship Troopers is problematic in many ways, but one thing I do like about it is that generals in the military had to qualify as an officer in both the army and the navy on the basis that it gives them the required insight into what's involved on both sides.

Redundancy is a feature. What happens if army brass go off the rails?

The A-10 is obsolete. It is too vulnerable to ground-to-air missiles and too slow to get to the right place to drop smart bombs on pickup trucks.

I get your point, but it seems to be an unfair comparison. Of course the A10 is not suitable for roles that it was not designed for. But that does not inherently mean the particular capabilities are obsolete. Or that the F35 does not have significant comprimises in its own design.

The role that the A10 was designed for no longer exists. An attack helicopter can hide behind cover, everything else needs to fly high enough to avoid MANPADS which means that the big gun is just dead weight.

The US Air Force was created by the strategic bomber boys, though, and they held the reins for a long time, even when long-range bombers became the weakest leg of the nuclear triad.

See also how many hundreds of bombers and thousands of crew were lost to Messerschmitts over Germany before the Army Air Force would admit that, yes, they did need fighter escorts. https://warisboring.com/arrogant-u-s-generals-made-the-p-51-...

It's not that the Air Force doesn't want to fulfill the CAS role, they wan't the F-35 to do so instead which won't be truly CAS capable in a high threat contested environment for at least another 4-6 years. So, they want the F-15 and F-16 community to take over the role in the meantime -- a job the A-10 was built for and better equipped to handle (which is why it's the most requested asset for CAS). The Army would have been a much better place for these rugged jets, but they have no budget capacity for it and the Air Force is not going to allow them to have a fixed-wing CAS aircraft.

The RAF is the same; they would much rather the nation not even have a capability at all, than allow the Army or Navy to operate it.

It is not a plane with a gun attached. It is a gun that someone built a plane around.

Brrrrrt.

To be "fair", they hate it because it's not a dogfighter.

The F-35 isn't a dogfighter either.

Depending on ones view of the program, it could be described as the first half of dogfighter.

They "hate" it because it is completely useless against an enemy that has anything even vaguely resembling a military.

It's a great plane for the "war on terror". It would be completely useless in any other war.

The same war we've been fighting for 15 years with no signs of stopping.

Every government needs an enemy... We're just fortunate that there aren't any real ones around right now.

When that day comes, hopefully our military tech is up to the challenge. The A-10 most certainly isn't, and I'm not convinced we have a real replacement coming any time soon.

I don't think anybody is arguing it should the only plane in the arsenal; complaints against its retirement are that a country with the ambitions of the USA should be able to fight any war, and, since it has chosen to enter this one, should deploy the best it has there.

Back to the article: if the military were as agile as it was in World War Two, it would have built something better than an A10 within a few years of entering the war in the Middle East. In the search for that better product, it also would have designed, built, and deployed quite a few strong candidates for this 'worst air force' article, killing quite a few of its own pilots in 'field testing' the various designs.

I'm not sure the F35, with its "we can design a plane that will work great in any war, if you give us a few decades" is an improvement over that. If it ever has to go to war against something "even vaguely resembling a military", and it turns out to come up slightly short in the first few encounters, what would the next step be? If it would take another decade to fix that, chances are the war would be lost before a fix was deployed.

You don't have a single fucking clue about what you're talking about.

Please provide an substantive argument rather than attack the commenter. There's never a need to be uncivil on HN.

Just about every airplane achieves a certain state of grace by taking to the air - though it is illusory if it has nasty handling characteristics.

The F16 is probably the best illustration. In my opinion no modern aircraft surpasses its elegance from a pure design point of view. And it is still being produced now, 40 years after its first flight!

If we're talking American fighters, I think the P-51 is an even better example. It was obviously obsoleted by the jet era, but it was one of the sexiest planes in the air at the time, and could outfly just about anything else.

This article reminded me of the RAF banter sketch from Monty Python.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myIB1TrPpTE

I've often imagined WWII's "best" air force. The worst, somehow, I didn't consider.

I assume that would be a hypothetical best created by combining aircraft from many different countries? What do you imagine that would look like?

Yes, exactly. P51 D-H Mustangs, Spitfires, Messerschmitt 109s for fighters. Serious shame they didn't have midair refueling. I consider jets, ie Messerschmitt 262s to be outside the idea.

For bombers Lancasters, B17s, and B29s, of course.

But picking an air force of the worst is much funnier.

It's interesting to consider where jets fit into the picture versus the best prop-driven fighters. The Me262 was amazing but it also had some major disadvantages. Maybe you'd want to have it as a part of a healthy mix of different types.

If the ME262 had come earlier and was built in large quantities it might have made a difference. But it was developed too late to build in large numbers, it needed another generation of engine development and it needed to have better airfields and support and a better understanding of how to use it in a group. Still every time I see a real one it's one sexy airplane. Like the Tiger it scared people when it showed up, but given the numerical advantage of the Allies it had no chance.

You'd also have to figure in the Allies introducing jets earlier as well, if they'd decided to push on ahead with that to counter.

Hitler's insistence on it being given a bombing capability (and therefore be 'offensive') delayed its use.

Funny that higher-ups' insistence on making otherwise decent aircraft "multi-role" was as much a problem in WW2 as it is today

It also wasn't produced in significant numbers until many of the best Luftwaffe pilots were already dead. Excellent equipment can't make up for lack of training and experience.

My favorite crazy Luftwaffe aircraft has to be the He-162. The premise was, strap a jet engine on top of a cheap, lightweight plywood plane, simple enough that it could be built underground by slave labor. Oh, and it was supposed to be operable by minimally trained Hitler Youth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162

I was impressed by the Vought F4U Corsair since it was still in use during the Korean War.

"F4U"

One of the best descriptions why F4Us win the day has to do with the engine. @WalterBright describes here about his Dad flying P51s/P47s [0], the later having a radial engine like the F4U and why it was liked by pilots (engine reliability being one) [1] ...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829666

[1] Thread on restoring a Spitfire ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828694

I remember watching a long documentary series on WW2 aviation and the host, with zero fanfare, mentioned that a downside of the B-29 engines (and I think also some of the P51 engines) was that they had a tendency to catch on fire.

I was like, wow, okay, that's a risk you don't really think about in today's planes but I guess when you have to churn out a lot of very powerful engines very quickly that sort of risk is just seen as acceptable.

We've become spoiled by how incredibly reliable modern turbofans are (ETOPS etc.). I recall reading that before jets took over in passenger planes, it wasn't entirely uncommon that planes arrived with one engine failed. Big turbocharged (or even turbocompounded in some cases) multi-row radials are just very complex machines operating pretty close to their design limits.

Yes, failures were pretty common. According to this article, the Lockheed Constellation averaged 2-3 engine failures per year:

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/longest-airline...

And from what I can dig up, the Constellation had one of the more reliable engines at the time

According to this press release, the GE90 engine which powers the 777 has a mean time between failure of one million hours:

http://www.geaviation.com/press/ge90/ge90_20120119.html

If an airplane had four of those engines, it would expect to see an engine failure roughly every 30 years if it was flying 24/7. That makes it two or three orders of magnitude more reliable than the Constellation engine.

One visible consequence of this is that it's now common to see twin-engine airliners on long overwater routes far from any emergency airport. It used to be that these routes were served by airliners with three or four engines, because the risk of a twin losing both engines before it could make the long flight to the nearest airport was just too high. Thus the popularity of the 747 on Pacific routes. These days, the risk of losing two engines is low enough not to be a worry, and aircraft like the 777 can serve those routes.

No FW-190? I read the autobio of Ginger Lacey, and he commented he was shocked and appalled at how it could control the air.

The FW190 was a better plane than the M109. The P47 and F4U and Yak-3 should be on that list.

Your bomber choice is pretty inflexible... The heavies are great at flattening cities, but have little tactical use. For instance, it was the medium bombers (the B-25 and B-26, for example) that paved the way for the invasion of the continent (taking out the defensive emplacements and railways/bridges the Axis needed to resupply.

They also did serious damage in the Pacific, e.g. the Bismarck Sea.

I'd be more interested in seeing the exercise applied to modern or cold-war era equipment. There are some great lemons out there, but nobody dares mention them for fear of angering any living pilots. Sticking to the 40s makes that very unlikely.

F-104.

The modern list will start with the F-35.

The air defence variant (ADV) of the Tornado might be on that list as well - taking an aircraft that was designed for low level bombing and making it into an interceptor must have seemed like a good idea to someone.

And the tornado adv went into service before the radar was ready to be fitted, so the first squadrons had concrete blocks of equivalent weight in the nose. This was mockingly dubbed "blue circle" after the "rainbow" code-naming convention and the well-known cement company.

Luckily the Russians didn't come.

I'd say that, for the purposes of the exercise, the f-35 isn't yet a plane. It is a development program. The aircraft hasn't yet been deployed and so cannot be judged. Some very successful aircraft have come from questionable programs (f-15, U2 etc). We shouldn't blame the airframe for how it was created.

The first squadron of F-35As was declared operational in August. The plane is officially out of development and can be sent into combat.

Eh, the F-35 is more an example of how truly infinite time and money can eventually overcome even the worst development processes—at this point the LRIP 10 35As are coming in around the mid-$90m range flyaway with engine, which puts them solidly under the Rafale/Eurofighter price point and on par with the still-in-development Gripen NG. The Danish type selection report is worth a read.

Here's some actual contenders for a modern/Cold War list, though it should be noted that most of these aren't fatally flawed in some fundamental fashion, just designs that didn't turn out as hoped:

- the F-111: much too expensive and only good at long-range strikes - the original Hornet, but not the Super Hornet: not enough fuel and too immature a design for its intended role - the Eurofighter: mind-blowingly expensive, its AESA radar development program is older than the F-35 project and still isn't available, unfortunately timed (becoming a mature platform as VLO aircraft begin to enter service in many air forces) - the F-16/LWF as it was originally conceived: range-only radar, no real payload, more or less a target drone - the MiG-29, a point defense fighter that never really could be molded into a true multirole

How do you price something while ignoring the development cost? You can't really call it a less expensive plane and ignore the sunk cost can you? I'm far from an accounting expert as you likely realise.

The F-35 development program was terrible. It turns out that it might just be a decent plane though. Eg https://theaviationist.com/2016/03/01/heres-what-ive-learned...

"Its main tank could hold 300 gallons of fuel but it wouldn’t take off with more than 80 gallons on board"

Sounds completely useless but I guess at a pinch you could take of and then do a midair refuel. Maybe.

Isn't mid-air refueling a much later invention? Never heard of it being used during WWII..

Even the worst plane on here could take out the the NZ air force :-(

luckily nothing has the range to get here :-)

The headline makes me think what Stalin would have said about the air force of Vatican.

I immediately thought about Argentina's air force. Main reason for it being so bad wasn't technical, but political (corruption, etc...).

That seems a bit harsh - UK accounts of the Falklands War tend to be rather respectful of the performance of the Argentinian air force.

They were respectful of the pilots ( "good stick-and-rudder men" is a quote I remember ) but not of the tactics or overall strategy.

For example on 1 May 1982 a 'maximum effort' was launched again the British ships. But the Mirage & Dagger fighters were used to escort the attack aircraft, rather than first achieving local air superiority. In the resulting chaos none of the attack aircraft found their targets and three of the escorts attacked the ships instead.

With the disparity of air assets available to them versus those of the two small British carriers, in theory the Argentinians should have eliminated the surface fleet without much problem. Yet three weeks later the amphibious landings commenced...

Yes, good point - I did think that I should have changed it before seeing your comment but the edit link had timed out.

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