AN ABSOLUTELY stunning video
I never knew it was so complicated.
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This is specifically for @Troll and all the Viggen lovers.
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I kind of got the gist of it when he started talking about ”anybody stupid enough to screw around with their borders”… Oookay… These borders he talks about were screwed with pretty regularly, during the cold war.
Anyway, he tried. 
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His channel is more about the nerdy circuitry stuff than the nerdy aeroplane stuff… I did still appreciate the video, and also his video on the F-14 CADC which gave a nice overview of how that was achieved when microprocessors were only just emerging on the market.
When I was young I just assumed adding capability to a jet would be as simple as reprogramming it… that’s true nowadays maybe but back then I simply didn’t understand how limited and therefore dedicated the hardware and code was. It’s a testament to SAAB that they achieved what they did!
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Ah, the good old days 
Good friend of mine sent me this link a few minutes ago. Been a long time since I watched it. He was an Eagle driver in this squadron (his first). He missed the filming by a few months. He did send me a hat. I was in the control tower at the same time - just a different one
I’d forgotten how long they let us keep our hair in the USAF in the 70’s-80’s. Shoot, I keep it shorter now
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The NATO light strike fighter is back!
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See a lot of similarities to the F-86.
Wheels
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The Italians did indeed use their experience in working with the F-86 in the design.
But don’t be fooled by its looks! This thing won NBMR-1, a competition for a NATO-wide highly survivable light strike fighter, held in the second half of the 50s.
It beat the Étendard and the F-5 because of its quick turnaround, rough field capabilities and low maintenance requirements.
Most countries decided to purchase their own aircraft, with France developing the Étendard and the US marketing the F-5 to allies, while the UK focused on the Hawker Hunter.
The Italian government had also placed an order for the G.91 even before the winner of the competition was announced. Only West Germany ended up buying the G.91 because of the NBMR-1 result.
As a European, I feel very proud that an independent competition for the NATO standard light strike fighter was won by an Italian design. 
In a turn of events that shows everything that’s wrong with Europe, the only G.91s that saw combat:
- were originally made for Greece and Turkey, who cancelled their orders, and were then sold to West Germany
- differed enough from the other German G.91s to cause maintenance problems
- were then offered to Portugal when the Portuguese sought to buy Canadair Sabres
- because the Portuguese were delaying the decolonization of (among others) Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique with bloody wars and were being embargoed for it by the U.S. which caused maintenance problems with their F-86s.
The wars lasted from 1961 until 1974 (!) and the G.91 bombed and napalmed African freedom fighters for the last 8 years of it.
To end on a positive note: the reason the wars stopped is that the Portuguese dictatorial government was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and I am looking forward to flying the DCS Gina over Central Germany in the rough environment it was designed for: a Cold War gone hot with Soviet tanks everywhere and most airfields and infrastructure destroyed.
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And why wouldn’t they? Numbers don’t lie 
But to be honest: This plane is one of the very few cases where the Italians botched the design, imo.
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This is a wild program I never heard about:
I also love this channel for working in DCS footage.
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I always thought the whole “manipulate the system so we don’t have to buy more blunt nosed jets” was the worst part - and forcing the pods into service with the ANG despite them being basically impossible to aim (variously, because a podded weapon is never as good as a fixed weapon, and the aiming symbology was never sufficiently developed) … typical bureaucracy I guess?
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Obviously the program had some hurdles… but you have to admit, the Viper looks good in that Euro 1 camo lol
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With the Germany map in production for DCS, watching this movie made me want an F-16A even more, and an updated A-10A…
Pleeease, @wagmatt!
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Yeah, my research says that’s the one DCS should’ve started with (hi-fi version) for most historical scenarios before mid 2000’s or so. The A-10CII has the ‘look and feel’ so you just have to pretend, or restrain yourself
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Was at Holloman (large desert airspace - nearly as large as the NTTR), or Eglin (conventional air-to-ground weapons testing) and you’d see all manner of ‘experiments’ pop up on the ramp.
I don’t recall which base it was but the flight plan IIRC (ACID: ‘GUNNR1’, type; A-16) made us poke our heads out the back door and take a peek, '…looks like an F-16 to me, carry on".
This was about the time the US Army “trolled” the USAF; had a squadron of those attack aircraft at Holloman briefly too. Looked like a tri-geared P-51. Really loud for a ‘fan driven’ aircraft.
Lets see if the Net has that one…
Seems this one has stumped Google. The only quick ref’s I find are on the Tucano-like variant; the dates on all articles are less than 10 years old. This was the early 80’s. To my knowledge that program didn’t last very long either.
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Sounds like the Piper Enforcer, but that was a tail dragger.
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That’s it! For some reason I recalled it having a conventional gear config. I’ve slept since then so memory isn’t that great
As mentioned it was really loud, to me, and I recall those ‘fat’ prop blades too.
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