WN was half right. The F/A-18 was a pile of shit, but so is the v-22.

MC should look toward US-101 and similar birds. H1 program was actually a mild success.

No one in his right mind knowingly goes into a gunfight riding in an aluminum/composite pillbox. A good shot during short final is a raw deal in any helo. The Osprey mitigates most of the threat during the enroute and egress phases. It still has to deal with landing–as does any aircraft.

i beg to differ:

V-22 vs. Helicopter:

If you get spottet on the way into the theater, you are most likely dead anyways. In case you do not get shot down by Air-force or ground based air-defence you if is not because you can fly 250 kts instead of 100 kts, it is because you have effective cover. The V-22 can fly faster, the helicopter deeper. But the real downside of the V-22 is that it takes an awefull long time from forward flight to touchdown and that it has a severe limit on its rate of decent due to the risk of of getting into a vortex-ring state. This is the phase of any operation where your vehicle is most vulnarabe: within the range of anything from shotgun, AK-47, RPGs, Manpads and AAA. In this phase the osprey is much slower than a Blackhawk or a
The simple fact that israel did not buy the osprey should tell you all you need to know. Espechially since helicopters can be refuled in flight now, the V-22 advantage in speed still stands, but not for the intendet SOF Raids. It has to stay out of the theater.

F-16 vs. F/A-18

You have a quite optimistic look at the F-16. While it turned out to be a formidable fighter/bomber plattform, it did not start that way. The PW-F100 needed time to develop into the most reliable fighter engine. As for a dog-fighter the F16 is great at higher mach speeds, but is however very limited in regards of AoA compared with the F/A-18, leading to the simple fact that the F/A-18 wins most dog fights against F-16 without having to pull even 7G. And in the BVR Arena, F-16A/Bs didn´t stand a change against the hornet, they simply had no BVR capability (ADF variant aside).

Belive it or not, there are reasons why Spain, Australia, Finland, Kuwait, Canada & Switzerland went for the more expensive Aircraft even without needing carrier capability.

Well hell if all i gotta do is imagine an outcome of an event that never transpired and it will prove whatever half-wit point i have to prove then by god, i think i’ll just pretend i would have won the lottery last week if i bought a ticket.

And this is directed at the article, if i had a choice after knowing the track record of the osprey i’d take my chances with a f-18 and a flock of seagulls over that piece any day

How come nobody even tries to pretend that the other major world navy that embraced this doctrine – the Soviet Union’s – could have beaten the USN?

How are the Marine Corps supposed to use the V-22 to fly into hostile territory to do their stuff if we don’t have carriers? Are amphibious assault carriers also “useless”?

It would have been interesting to see a navalized F-16.

If the Navy is so all-powerful or vindictive, how was it willing or forced to abandon its beloved F-14 (replaced with the far less capable Super Hornet) and accept the F-35, with its lone engine, in place of the regular Hornet?

Are the Chinese bumbling, unserious amateurs? Are their Su-27s, Su-30s, and the local equivalents mere sitting ducks? I think not; they’re credible challenges for our aging F-15s. Russia and China are selling Su-27 and its derivatives to anyone who’ll buy. Yes, AWACS, training, and fuel make a difference, but should we really be consciously choosing to send men into battle with inferior aircraft, and counting on those things to make up the gap?

The F-15 that is held up as so wonderful that we don’t need to replace it with the F-22 was in its own day scorned in favor of the F-4. Every generation some anti-hawk about-faces and claims to love a program he tried to kill 20 years ago, just to try to prevent us from advancing now.

People will say the the Navy needs two engines because it operates over water. Except for when that wasn’t true, which has been for most of carrier aviation’s history. Almost all the prop planes of old, not to mention the A-4, F-8, A-7, etc.

In most of aviation, the trend has been toward fewer engines again, based on the ever-better reliability of turbine engines. One big engine is more efficent than two small ones. You’re using weight and fuel to carry a flying spare that the stats say you’ll probably never need.

Some aircraft need more engines to power them, but adding one just to have a spare is silly.

As for the V-22, the cost issue is a very valid one, though at this point not useful, because switching gears would bring more costs now than continuing on this path. Don’t argue capabilities against it. The scuttlebutt you hear on the web is just that, and V-22s in Afghanistan and now Haiti are proving its worth every day.

BTW, Lance, if you’re a military pilot and your community calls it an “IFR probe,” then fine. I’ve been flying with one for some time now, and we’ll call it a “refueling probe” or “AR probe,” and sometimes just “the probe.”

And im not gonna get into the V-22

Long range missions can and will occur. As a helo pilot and a tiltrotor pilot, I can tell you which one is better to do that in, and it’s not a helo.

The Cobra actually predates the F-14 as it was an evolution of the F-5 with a high wing and twin tails. Same forward fuselage and wing shape. The F-5 was the result of building a fighter around afterburnning versions of the engine in the tiny Quail cruise missle/decoy.

You forgot that Cheney headed the “Hornet mafia” and ordered the F-14s AND tooling to be scrapped. And the debacle of scaling up the original lightweight YF-17 to the Phantom sized F/A-18A/C then scaled up yet again (with the deceptively same designation) and almost completely redesigned F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. Sure it’s got more range than a regular hornet, but nearly the size and more expensive than a re-tooled F-14 which is much faster has much longer range, and carries more than the aerodynamic mess that is a superbug with all the pylons loaded out.

What started as a lightweight fighter is now heavier than the weight that torpedoed the original F-111B (remember that disaster? The airplane that was spec’d to do everything EXCEPT dogfight once the Navy realized the big birds would be useless in MiG-cap against old Korean war tech MiG-17′s) McNamara’s “commonality” was killed by the Phantom being the fighter that did everything for everybody, and the model for every US fighter since then.

You should also note the Americanism that they will NEVER accept a lightweight fighter like the F-104 or F-5. The JSF has grown in weight so that it is BIGGER than the original monster F-105 that got jumped by MiG-17s that made the USAF swear they’d never try to dogfight in a plane that big again, and the Navy version is as heavy as the original Tomcat.

If we’re to get Awlaki in Yemen, we’ll have to do it with V-22s and AC-130 gunships, but it won’t happen as long as Obama “Hasan never talked to any terrorist” is in office.

And that is what makes the carriers useful. They are a mobile airbase that can be anywhere in the world. As expensive as they are, it’s still cheaper to have aircraft carriers that can be anywhere than it is to have land airbases in every possible hot spot.

The V-22 has had, and has always had, a specific duty: assault support. That’s about as clear a duty as it gets. Its dimensions are almost exactly the same as a CH-46 turned sideways, so I don’t see how it can be too big for a helicopter. It’s also twice as fast as a helicopter, so how can it be “too slow?” It’s faster than anything ever built that can land vertically to an unprepared surface. Slower than a jet? Yes, but jets can’t carry cargo. Slower than a cargo plane? Maybe, but C-130s can’t land in an LZ.