The Blue Angels got new planes in 2020. Upgraded from legacy Hornets to Super Hornets. So probably gonna be until the Super Hornet is completely retired before they change again.
Long run… I met many F18 pilots that were younger than the aircraft they were flying.
I was wondering about that as I watched the drone shows… do we need the pilots. I would in most cases say, yes.
AI is still not capable of making good decisions. It has no moral judgement. A single pilot with five drones on the wing with the capability of multitasking is the answer to the future fighter aviation.
Even the pilot requirements are clearly changing. We need technical thinking pilots that can manage several systems at once while making split second decisions. The F35 is a crappy plane to fight solo… the F16 can take it down one on one.
But, add in the tech and dozens of planes with sensors… it can take down any legacy aircraft before they know it is there.
The F35 is a fighter, but not in the sense of an F18 or the Predecessor planes, when true abilities to maneuver an aircraft into a kill position were needed.
The F35 is a super cool aircraft, and the Air Force demo pilot Wolf is a very talented aerobatic demonstration pilot. But, I don’t see it as an aerobatic team demo aircraft in the future.
Legacy demos will likely continue, like the WWII planes.
I would assume the theory is that when you merge two companies into one, the surviving name then IS the old company.
Would be easy to fact-check if Avweb linked to sources on releases like this but for some reason they stubbornly refuse to adopt that piece of basic internet courtesy.
The Top Gun curse.
Anytime a plane is featured in Top Gun, it gets retired in a year or two.
Yeah that kind of stuff doesn’t ring right to me either. I work for a great big company that has merged and swallowed up and so forth (including the original company I hired on with 20+ years ago). Somehow the history of the acquisitions gets massaged into “we” (the acquirer) did this or that. Well, not really. Might be easier to talk about like that, but merging and acquiring doesn’t include past history. IMO…
Mav is definitely hard on the hardware. Controller coffee shirt stains too.