Captured Warplanes | Hacker News Reader

Captured Warplanes

hushkit.net

69 pointssmacktoward27 comments

I wanted to like this article but it was all over the place. More attention was paid to the color schemas than how the airplanes were actually captured.

Bizarre writing, too. I can't stand when writers enjoy their owner "clever" writing more than the storyline.

i'm glad somebody else felt this way. i was having so much trouble focusing i was worried i'd forgotten how to read

It recycles old inaccurate tropes too, such as the MiG-25 being designed to combat the SR-71.

It was actually prompted by the US Navy deploying the Mach 2 A-5 Vigilante attack aircraft; the MiG-25 had enough of a speed advantage to make interception of that type and the B-58 possible.

I remember that during the Falklands war one British fighter ran out of fuel and landed in Brazil. The Brazilians returned the plane, but without one of its missiles - it turns out that it was equipped with an American missile (officially, the US was not involved - Brazil itself gave some help to Argentina too). Edit: found a source, it was a Shrike missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck#Black_Buc...

Technically not a fighter, but a bomber. And I'm surprised that it was a concern being armed with an American weapon. We provided AIM-9 Sidewinders to the British during the conflict.

I believe the concern was that they retained the missile (and probably disassembled it or shared it)

That seems correct [0]. But the replacement for the Shrike was already in development (AGM-88 HARM), and deployed the following year. Unless the HARM and Shrike shared a lot of tech, it wouldn't seem like it'd be much of a risk.

[0]https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/621106/Margaret-Thatcher-F...

I'll add Ju 88 R-1 W/NR.360043, which is remarkable because the defection required coordination among two of the crew (who held the third at gunpoint).

https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/documents/collections/78-AF-953...

My all time fav that time Iran spoofed GPS and made an american drone land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

There’s also the P3 Orion SIGINT plane which emergency landed in China and was shipped home in crates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

Also funny that the "Soviet Enemy MiG-28"s from Top Gun were in fact F-5's with red stars painted on them, making that a bit less far-fetched :D I never knew they actually captured one of those.

Yes, as all the kids obsessed with military hardware noticed right away. I'm sure real captured Soviet planes were too valuable to risk for a movie, not to mention their existence was probably kept secret.

(Another common error that warplane buffs immediately recognise is the replacement of Bf 109 by Ha-1112.)

Have a look at the Wikipedia article about the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron and Constant Peg :) [1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range_Airport#447...

They used F-5’s as MiGs in lots of 80’s TV, even McGyver iirc. Probably related or repurposed footage.

Never heard this story before

“In June 1942, after shooting down a Spitfire, a Luftwaffe pilot named Armin Faber landed his Fw 190A-3 at RAF Pembrey in Wales (believing it to be France). Because of an unfortunate inability to distinguish the Bristol Channel from the English Channel said Armin let his plane get into the grubby hands of the RAF, with barely a scratch. Given its total superiority to any Allied fighter then in service, this unexpected gift was insanely valuable to the technical experts of the RAF. In fact, so desperate were the British to get their hands on one that a Commando raid had been planned to steal an Fw 190 from a French airfield.”

It’s really a pity planes of that era didn’t have cockpit audio recorders.

Because of an unfortunate inability to distinguish the Bristol Channel from the English Channel...

Wouldn't it also take the inability to distinguish North from South to mistake Wales for France on that basis?

There is a better one than that, one night two Me109’s got lost and landed at the same British airfield, they captured one of them in an armoured car when the pilot landed, realised his mistake they blocked the runway the other crashed.

Bet the sentries got a shock when an enemy fighter landed and then taxied to the hanger waiting for ground crew.

TP814 iirc, they called the branch that flew it (and other German planes) the Rafwaffe.

Another good one is when two British agents stole an entire Ju88 with the latest radar of the time by holding the third crew member at gunpoint and flying it to Scotland.

When it came to the spying the British had a ridiculous run of good results like that, we turned every single German agent in the UK and then had them do things like systematically lie about V1’s over shooting London by 60 miles, then faking craters so that when the Luftwaffe sent a reconnaissance plane over it looked legit, the Germans then altered the targeting such that the V1s landed short of their target.

For all that people vaunt the Nazi’s for their advanced technology it’s actually a much more mixed picture, the cavity magnetron was discovered and perfected in the UK then taken to the US because we didn’t have the resources to build them at scale, German radar output 40W with a klystron, the cavity magnetron could output 25KW.

It completely changed the picture for night interceptions.

Also lots of people don’t know that Britain built and put intro production a proper radar based ground scanning system for targeting during WWII, it was called H2S and allowed accurate navigation and targeting.

> Combined with intelligence gathered from the surviving crew, they learned it was a mapping system and were able to determine its method of operation. When they pieced one together from parts and saw the display of Berlin, near panic broke out in the Luftwaffe.

> systematically lie about V1’s over shooting London by 60 miles, then faking craters so that when the Luftwaffe sent a reconnaissance plane over it looked legit,

Interesting that after D-Day the Luftwaffe could still manage any reconnaissance flights over England. Where can I read more about this?

Soviet B-29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

A super interesting piece of history is how the British ended up selling their Rolls Royce jet engines to the Soviets.

https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/ussr-won-jet-engine-b...

The RQ-170 is another big one, and very recent too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_inc...

The US captured a Japanese Zero intact and it was heavily evaluated and helped inform the design of the Hellcat.

The USSR famously captured a B-29 and Stalin ordered replicas made. This bootstrapped the entire Soviet airframe industry.

It helped them build new long-range bombers, but the Soviets were already making a lot of planes before that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

Making a lot of planes and using advanced technology in them are orthogonal. The B-29 was a huge leap forward in advanced technology.

Analysis of the captured Zero forced the US to uprate the engines on their marine aircraft.

I think of the Soviet Aircraft industry as having won the Most Improvement Award between 1939 and 1945. Started with aircraft that were hopeless outmatched and by 1945 were producing aircraft that would take a skilled German pilot to defeat. Of which the Germans had fewer and fewer.

Also the US was shipping the Soviets a lot of aircraft grade aluminum during the war.

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