Лу Дрендел — новинки

The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II is in its 30th year of operational service as this book goes to press. That is a remarkable accomplishment for any aircraft and is usually reserved for more staid types, such as the Douglas DC-3. For a front-line fighter to serve that long, where combat is fast, furious, and survivable only by those at the leading edge of technology, is even more astounding. The McDonnell Aircraft engineers designed an aircraft in the late 1950s which surmounted an aerodynamic design plateau which has endured to this day (with only minor modifications). This book is not a 'nuts and bolts' design history of the Phantom, but since the Phantom II was originally designed for the Navy, it seems appro­priate to include a brief pictorial design history in 'U.S. Navy Phan­toms in Combat".
Ironically, the most prolific fighter of modern times began life as a loser. The fledgling Phantom II came in second to the Vought F8U Crusader in the Navy design competition to acquire its first super­sonic fighter. The Crusader was a prototypical fighter; single seat, single engine, armed with guns, and having no fire-control radar. It was a fighter pilot's dream...a pure VFR supersonic dogfighting machine, designed for one-on-one combat in the supersonic age. The losing McDonnell entry had also been a single-seater with a gun. but it came at the dawn of the age of the missileers...the pro­ponents of the missile armed interceptor. Their reasoning went something like this; "Why get in close and grunt under heavy G while you went round and round with the enemy, when it was much easier to blast him out of the sky from long range with a sophisticated air-to-air missile?" As a result, the follow-on McDonnell fighter design diverged radically from accepted fighter aircraft design criteria of the day.

The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter is a single-engine, high-performance, supersonic interceptor aircraft originally developed for the United States Air Force (USAF) by Lockheed. One of the Century Series of aircraft, it served with the USAF from 1958 until 1969, and continued with Air National Guard units until it was phased out in 1975.

As is often the case with an innovative invention, the offensive potential of the helicopter was largely overlooked during it's early operational employment. The vision and foresight of Army planners was stifled by several factors. The prototype Sikorsky XR-4 was tested by the Army Material Center at Wright Field, but the inherent instability of the first helicopter was discouraging, and the immediacy of mid-1942 problems dictated development of more conventional aerial gun-platforms. The helicopter gunship was not completely forgotten during World War II, for the promise of tactical mobility and firepower kept testing programs alive.
It took the creation of the United States Air Force, and the emasculation of Army Aviation to halt development programs in the United States. The Air Force jealously guarded their newly won sovereignty, and it was not until 1950 that the Army and Bell collaborated on experimentally arming the OH-13 helicopter. The first use of the armed helicopter in combat is variously credited to the U.S. Army in Korea, (an OH-13 with a bazooka) or to the French in Indochina. (Either an OH-13 with machine gunners riding the side-mounted litters, or H-21's with 20mm cannon, depending upon whose version you believe.) The French are also credited with employing a wide range of weaponry in a variety of helicopters during their abortive struggle to maintain their hold on Algeria. Several of these experiments, which were often the result of imaginative tamperings, provided the basis of later and more formal developmental work on the helicopter gunship. But without official sanction, or high-level impetus, the armed helicopter development program floundered in limbo. It took a visionary with enough faith, and enough rank, to put the program on it's feet.
Brigadier General Carl Hutton had the rank, the vision, and a healthy determination to get the Army back into the sky. The Army wasn't thinking of limited wars in 1956, but General Hutton envisioned a 100 percent armed mobile force for employment on the nuclear battlefield. He asked Colonel Jay D. Vanderpool to form the prototype unit.