Yup, like that. No more cold war classic of "pilot captured, tortured, and made to read a script on TV".Oh right, like the Triton, that Iran shot down, right?
Yup, like that. No more cold war classic of "pilot captured, tortured, and made to read a script on TV".Oh right, like the Triton, that Iran shot down, right?
You cannot have constant 100% satellite coverage. There will always be gaps as they orbit. A plane can give you coverage of a location exactly when you want it.Is simple, not useful anymore, with the possibility of lots of cheap, low orbit sats...
Tech turned them obsolete/redundant.
I have been bringing up agility this whole timeFor the same reason you don't fly the SR-71 over non third world countries anymore. It may be fast, but now there are missiles with a good chance to catch it anyway.
Meanwhile the tradeoffs for being so fast are terrible in terms of payload, agility, maintenance, nevermind total, absolute lack of stealth.
Here's a rare treat for y'all:
This is one of between two and five Mitsubishi J2M Raidens which were brought to the United States for testing and evaluation by the Army Air Corps. Around 1952, it was acquired by the City of Los Angeles and placed on outdoor display as part of the "Travel Town" collection in Griffith Park before being donated to the Planes of Fame museum in the early 90s when Travel Town was revamped to be a train museum rather than mixed vehicles.
The plane had been misidentified as a Zero and the Griffith Park collection was incredibly obscure as it was basically just a handful of old vehicles on the back lot of the Los Angeles Zoo; needless to say, aircraft historians flipped out when L.A.'s beat-up old Zero turned out to be the only known Raiden left in the entire world.
Edit: BTW, that's a real Long Lance torpedo in the same picture, too.
There's also a MXY-7 Ohka and a MXY-8 Akigusa(training glider for the J8M1 Shisui, the Japanese iteration of the Me-163 Komet) in the picture.
You are joking,right? even average americans could not be that stupid.Every japanese single-engine monoplane fighter was mistaken for Zero
Except for the Kawasaki Ki-61.Every japanese single-engine monoplane fighter was mistaken for Zero
Except for the Kawasaki Ki-61.
The Allies thought those were a licence-built version of something Italian. They weren't.
Indeed.And Dunno how somebody could mistake Raiden with Zero.
There's also a MXY-7 Ohka and a MXY-8 Akigusa(training glider for the J8M1 Shisui, the Japanese iteration of the Me-163 Komet) in the picture.
Obscure? everybody had photos from WW2,including those of Zero.Because it was out there in 1952 when there was no Internet you could use to easily look up incredibly obscure niche information.
Close but not quite — that is an actual J8M1 Shisui, one of only two surviving examples out of the seven prototypes built.
Here's a better look at the Shisui, and Planes of Fame's replica Komet for comparison; you can see that while the J8M1 is directly based on the Komet, it's an evolved derivative rather than a simple copy: