Quote:
Originally Posted by Commander Wallace
You have that right. The F-15 Eagle is ahead of it's time and the engineers who designed it are beyond exceptional. The firing of the missiles may not have been the pilots fault. There were cases where static electric buildup overcame the resistance in the firing circuit and the missiles fired by themselves.
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Good point about the side-winder problem. I did a bit of searching to see if this was the cause of the 2 incidents in my post. I'm not having much luck though. Seems any search involving an accidental shoot-down with F-15 in it brings up the Blackhawks incident. Do you know of a site that goes into more detail about the sidewinder problem.
I was also curious if you have ever read "Yeager". I stumbled on it when it first came out and bought the hardcover which I usually avoided back then when I was in school. Great book and it really heightened my appreciation for him. Especially when he went to all the effort to get back in the fight during WW2 after being shot-down over France. However, I found some parts of it to be a bit hard to believe. For instance when he described the time Neil Armstrong and him got bogged down in a salt-flat while doing a touch and go that according to Yeager, he strongly advised Neil from doing. From all I had read about Armstrong up to that point, it sounded pretty out of character for him to do something like that. Just a few years ago, I read "First Man" and Neil mentions that it was more the other way around with the salt-flat incident. Seems old Yeager wasn't above tall tales when it came to embellishing his book.