This really raised my...

[petermcleland]

...adrenolin!...WOW!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/40935850

It runs for about nine and a half minutes but I loved it all and even the music seem to enhance the experience

[NigelC]

Fantastic Peter. As there callsign was "Cock" there was a definite "Ooeer missus" moment as they disengaged from the first engagement with a call of "Cock's out!"

I'll bookmark this and will link to my brother. I'm sure he'll enjoy it too.

The F-15 has been around near on 40 years now, I always admired how they seem to manouever so effortlessly for a big aircraft (64 ft long and a MTOW of 30 tonnes).

I remember a book by Ian Black (Lightning pilot) of air-to-air photos he'd taken, underneath the F-15, he'd written "Never pick a fight with the flying tennis court (the big flat top of the Eagle), coz you'll lose!"

[Chris Trott]

When the boys at St. Louis designed the F-15, one of the things they did was take the data they got from various NASA experiments, including the X-23/24 (done by rival Martin Marietta, now Lockheed-Martin) on lifting bodies and their effect on the overall performance of a vehicle. Similar to the Grumman use on the F-14, the F-15's body is designed in such a way that it generates a large fraction (approx. 45%) of the total lift of the aircraft, in effect cancelling all drag it creates and adding lift to the vehicle. Because of that, both the F-15 and F-14 are extremely nimble for their size. The F-14 suffers from loosing much of its lift advantage while carrying the Phoenix missile in the "tunnel", but once those are gone, the plane becomes very much an "energy fighter" like the F-15. Many like to say that the F-16 was the first fighter capable of sustaining a 9G turn. That's incorrect. The F-16 was the first DESIGNED to sustain a 9G turn. The F-15 is perfectly capable of doing it, but it's not part of the design. The plane is phenomenally maneuverable, and the USAF's dedication to "dissimilar training" using smaller, more agile aircraft to fight the bigger F-15 much as the US Navy did with the F-14's (and before it both with the F-4) means that its pilots know how to get every last ounce of energy out of that airplane.

[NigelC]

Indeed, that lift from the fuselage coming to the rescue when an Israeli F-15 lost a wing in a collision during DACT.