"The F-111, hard done by or overrated?" Topic

I must admit that I love the "Pig". Growing up I remember seeing the F-111 on Royal Australian Air Force recruiting ads My fondest memory was work experience at Richmond Airbase here in Sydney, one day when i arrived for my work experience they told us they were going to fly us to Amberley in Queensland for lunch in a Hercules. I was 15 and I remember seeing the Aardvarks taking off up there. So yes I have a soft spot for them.
Having read a few books on the F-111 and associated operations i realise that early in its life it had a lot of political enemies. Any failure was trumpeted in the press. Their first deployment to South East Asia was tragic but forgotten is their later sterling service at the end of Rolling Thunder and during the Linebacker campaigns.
The bombing in Libya is seen as a bit of a flop but given how far they had to travel to then drop their bombs it was a monumental effort.
In the Gulf War of 91 their great service was overshadowed by the PR machine winding up about the F-117.
So what do you think- overrated or hard done by?

Jason

Overrated.

The bombing in Libya is seen as a bit of a flop but given how far they had to travel to then drop their bombs it was a monumental effort

They were designed to penetrate enemy air space to deliver a payload accurately.

Actually, it's a superb aircraft for what it finally became assigned to do.

Very complex and expensive, but a very superb design, nonetheless.

My take on its enduring success in Australia is that it provided a long range bombing capability none of our neighbours had.

In the Gulf War they had a higher success rate per sortie than any other US strike aircraft. So, probably fairly successful, on that measure alone.

They never got drop nuclear weapons on Soviet tank columns in Germany, so like so many other nuclear delivery systems so of that era, it never really got to operate in the conditions it was designed for.

I have a soft spot for them too. Grew up in the Amberley flight path; so many memories. Of course, that has nothing to do with how good they actually were!

A lot of the bad publicity was about how often they crashed, but they actually had fewer crashed that other contemporary, conventional aircraft over their development cycle. Lots of industrial infighting too.

They took a lot of bad press for their first actions in Vietnam, but once the kinks got worked out and the pilots adjusted themselves to what at the time was new technology, they were outstanding deep strike aircraft. If there had been a WW3 they would have played a critical role in knocking out Warsaw Pact railways, bridges, supplies, etc., deep in enemy territory. Their ability to carry a huge load of ordnance, a variety of ECM/countermeasures, and their high speed would have been huge advantages.

I love them, but like others there's a childhood element to it – they used to service them in the Brabazon hangar at Filton, Bristol, so I saw a lot of Varks as a kid. :-)

My late father was the one of the in-cockpit evaluation crews for EW applications. He disliked the plane, but considered it adequate for the task.

There were some design flaws, most critical was that the wing sweep point was too close to the fuselage (compare F111 to the F14). But what do you expect for the first operational swing-wing?

The really big problem during the design phase was the insistence that a low-altitude penetration bomber also be capable of high-altitude air-to-air combat. While the F4 was a surprisingly good fighter turned bomber, the opposite doesn't work out anywhere near as well.

The story of the F-111 sounds a bit like the rehearsal for the F-35. A highly advanced plane incorporating new tech and a very shaky start.

The F-111 wasn't a bad plane once they ironed out the kinks. The future will tell how this tale goes on for the F-35.

The big difference is that the cost blowouts for the F111 are small compared to the F35, the final price tag to get the first gen up in the air is eye watering!

I seem to recall that the F111 was the first operational aircraft with an after-burning turbo-fan engine, but I could be wrong.

My recollection of reading the startup problems of the F-111 had to do with trying to make it into an air superiority fighter for the Navy and dual use in the Air Force. The NAvy couldn't make it go so they got the F-14. In the end the Air Force worked its bugs out and used it as a precision strike and bomber aircraft. I look at it as a hard luck bird.

I remember when I was on my Rapier training course at RAF West Raynham in Mar – May 1990 when we were tracking an F111, it suddenly burst into flames and we followed it tracking it until it hit the ground. The first thing our instructor did was count that we had four Drill missiles still on the launch beams.

luckily the crew survived.