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Constant Peg
The 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron (4477 TES) was a squadron in the United States Air Force under the claimancy of the Tactical Air Command (TAC). It is currently inactive. The product of Project Constant Peg, the unit was created to expose the tactical air forces to the flight characteristics of fighter aircraft used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The declassified history of the squadron shows that it operated MiG-17s, MiG-21s and MiG-23s between 1977 and 1988, but it was not formally disbanded until July 1990. The mission of Constant Peg was to train Air Force, United States Navy and United States Marine Corps pilots and weapon systems officers, in air combat tactics against these foreign aircraft and was instrumental in the re-development of dissimilar air combat training (DACT) methods developed after the Vietnam War. Today's USAF aggressor training squadrons can symbolically trace their histories back to the 4477th, as well as the paint motifs on their air ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
USAF
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its origins to 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Signal Corps, the USAF was established by transfer of personnel from the Army Air Forces with the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947. It is the second youngest branch of the United States Armed Forces and the fourth in United States order of precedence, order of precedence. The United States Air Force articulates its core missions as air supremacy, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance, global integrated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, airlift, rapid global mobility, Strategic bombing, global strike, and command and control. The United States Department of the Air Force, Department of the Air Force, which serves as the USAF's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lockheed U-2
The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed the "''Dragon Lady''", is an American single-engine, high–altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since the 1950s. Designed for all-weather, day-and-night intelligence gathering at altitudes above ), the U-2 has played a pivotal role in aerial surveillance for decades. Lockheed Corporation originally proposed the aircraft in 1953. It was approved in 1954, and its first test flight was in 1955. It was flown during the Cold War over the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam War, Vietnam, and Cuba. In 1960, Francis Gary Powers, Gary Powers was 1960 U-2 incident, shot down in a CIA U-2C over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile (SAM). Major Rudolf Anderson, Rudolf Anderson Jr. was shot down in a U-2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. U-2s have taken part in post-Cold War conflicts in War in Afghanistan (2001–2021), Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Have Blue
Lockheed ''Have Blue'' was the code name for Lockheed's proof of concept demonstrator for a stealth fighter. ''Have Blue'' was designed by Lockheed's Skunk Works division, and tested at Groom Lake, Nevada. The ''Have Blue'' was the first fixed-wing aircraft whose external shape was defined by radar engineering rather than by aerospace engineering. The aircraft's faceted shape was designed to deflect electromagnetic waves in directions other than that of the originating radar emitter, greatly reducing its radar cross-section. To design the aircraft, the Skunk Works' design team leveraged the mathematics published by Soviet physicist and mathematician Petr Ufimtsev regarding the reflection of electromagnetic waves. A stealth engineer at Lockheed, Denys Overholser, had read the publication and realized that Ufimtsev had created the mathematical theory and tools to perform finite element analysis of radar reflection. The eventual design characteristically featured faceted surfa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yakovlev Yak-23
The Yakovlev Yak-23 (; USAF/DoD reporting name Type 28, NATO reporting name Flora) is an early Soviet jet fighter with a straight wing. It was developed from the Yak-17 in the late 1940s and used a reverse-engineered copy of a British engine. It was not built in large numbers as it was inferior in performance to the swept-wing Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15. Many Yak-23s were exported to the Warsaw Pact nations and remained in service for most of the 1950s, although some were still in use a decade later. Development and description On 11 March 1947, the Council of People's Commissars ordered several design bureaux ( OKB), including that of Alexander Yakovlev, to develop a single-seat, straight-winged jet fighter to be equipped with a single British Rolls-Royce Nene or Rolls-Royce Derwent turbojet engine. The aircraft should have a maximum speed of at sea level and a speed of at an altitude of . It should be able to climb to that altitude in 3.5 minutes or less and should have a maxi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet Union, it dissolved in 1991. During its existence, it was the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country by area, extending across Time in Russia, eleven time zones and sharing Geography of the Soviet Union#Borders and neighbors, borders with twelve countries, and the List of countries and dependencies by population, third-most populous country. An overall successor to the Russian Empire, it was nominally organized as a federal union of Republics of the Soviet Union, national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian SFSR. In practice, Government of the Soviet Union, its government and Economy of the Soviet Union, economy were Soviet-type economic planning, highly centralized. As a one-party state go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mikoyan-and-Gurevich Design Bureau
Russian Aircraft Corporation "MiG" (), commonly known as Mikoyan and MiG, is a Russian aerospace and defence company headquartered in Begovoy District, Moscow. Mikoyan was the successor to the Soviet Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau (Микоя́н и Гуре́вич, МиГ; OKB-155 design office prefix ''MiG'') founded in 1939 by aircraft designers Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. Mikoyan were notable for their fighter and interceptor aircraft which became a staple of the Soviet Air Force and Russian Air Forces, nations within the Soviet sphere of influence, and other nations such as India and many Arab states. Mikoyan aircraft were frequently used in aerial confrontations with American and allied forces during and since the Cold War, and have become commonly featured aircraft in popular culture. Mikoyan aircraft were the most produced jet fighter family. In 2006, Mikoyan became a division of the United Aircraft Corporation in a merger with Ilyushin, Irkut, Su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cold War
The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term ''Cold war (term), cold war'' is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars. In addition to the struggle for ideological and economic influence and an arms race in both conventional and Nuclear arms race, nuclear weapons, the Cold War was expressed through technological rivalries such as the Space Race, espionage, propaganda campaigns, Economic sanctions, embargoes, and sports diplomacy. After the end of World War II in 1945, during which the US and USSR had been allies, the USSR installed satellite state, satellite governments in its occupied territories in Eastern Europe and N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aggressor Squadron
An aggressor squadron or adversary squadron (in the US Navy and USMC) is a squadron that is trained to act as an opposing force in military wargames. Aggressor squadrons use enemy tactics, techniques, and procedures to give a realistic simulation of air combat (as opposed to training against one's own forces). Since it is impractical to use actual enemy aircraft and equipment, surrogate aircraft are used to emulate potential adversaries. The first formal use of dissimilar aircraft for training was in 1969 by the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School (better known as "Topgun"), which used the A-4 Skyhawk to simulate the performance of the MiG-17. The success of formalized dissimilar air combat training (DACT) led to transition of Navy Instrument Training Squadrons equipped with the A-4 into Adversary Squadrons at each master jet base. The United States Air Force followed suit with their first aggressor squadrons at Nellis AFB equipped with the readily available T-38 Ta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina wars and a proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. The Vietnam War was one of the postcolonial wars of national liberation, a theater in the Cold War, and a civil war, with civil warfare a defining feature from the outset. Direct United States in the Vietnam War, US military involvement escalated from 1965 until its withdrawal in 1973. The fighting spilled into the Laotian Civil War, Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, which ended with all three countries becoming Communism, communist in 1975. After the defeat of the French Union in the First Indoc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dissimilar Air Combat Training
Dissimilar air combat training (DACT) was introduced as a formal part of US air combat training after disappointing aerial combat exchange rates in the Vietnam War. Traditionally, pilots would undertake air combat training against similar aircraft. For example, pilots of single seat Vought F-8 Crusaders would seldom train against the dual seat McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs, and almost never against Douglas A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft and never as part of a formal syllabus. From 1965 to 1968, US pilots found themselves over the skies of North Vietnam pitted against the smaller, more nimble subsonic Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 and the supersonic Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21. Pilots in US Air Force (USAF) Republic F-105 Thunderchiefs were barely able to exceed parity and pilots in Phantoms and Crusaders were not able to achieve the hugely lopsided win–loss ratio achieved over Korea and in World War II. In fact, air combat maneuvering (ACM) was not practiced by all fighter s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Weapon Systems Officer
A Weapon Systems Officer (WSO), nicknamed "Wizzo", is an air flight officer directly involved in all air operations and weapon systems of a military aircraft. Historically, aircrew duties in military aircraft were highly specialised and rigid, because the relevant controls, instruments/displays, and/or weapons were concentrated in front of particular seats, panels or positions. That included two-seat variants of fighter or attack/strike aircraft (including late 20th century types such as the F-4 Phantom II, A-6 Intruder, F-111 Aardvark, F-14 Tomcat, Panavia Tornado, Su-24 Fencer and Su-30MK Flanker-C, Dassault Mirage 2000N/2000D). From the 1970s onward an aircraft with two-member crews, such as the F-15E Strike Eagle, F/A-18F Super Hornet or Su-34 Fullback and Dassault Rafale B have often featured programmable multi-function displays. These programs allow roles to be more flexible than previous generation aircraft. Multiple crew members can be responsible for detecti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
