The F/A-18 Hornet: Unsexy but Unmatched

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no category of American Technology from Cars and Trucks to personal computers to even the very rockets that touched the face of the Moon that has captured the imaginations of nor instilled a sense of awe and Terror in the whole world quite like its military aircraft from the swaggering P-51 Mustang of World War II to the lumbering A-10 Warthog or the muscular predatory F14 Tomcat America warplanes of thrilled generations of little boys and girls but if we're Alice is mostly boys I was one of them with their dangerous looks their devastating weapons piloted by devastatingly sexy aviators these assassins in the skies are the backbone of American power capable of striking and destroying targets anywhere in the world in mere minutes for decades to Americans and really to Every Nation on Earth the life of a fighter pilot was one lived on the edge where anything with possible accidents were frequent and frequently catastrophic great Deeds were a daily occurrence on the decks of great hulking aircraft carriers and an environment soaked in jet fuel and testosterone the American Aviator was King but the American Aviator may have been King it was also vulnerable perhaps then it was something like a sigh of disappointment among purists that the U.S Navy that Supreme organization of air superiority on Earth first introduced the world to the fa-18 hornet in 1974 amid the very last gasps of the Vietnam War the worlds of the sky would change forever gone was a certain thrill of impending disaster that characterized the old American war plane and in game an era of stability of cost-effectiveness and of safety a boring era [Music] if danger defined the Golden Age of the American Aviator then the Hornet signified the end of that age for above all things though it was fast flexible maneuverable powerful and durable the carrier ready multi-role fighter attacker F a-18 was safe it was born into a new era of Naval Aviation an era in which the most valuable assets the U.S Navy had would be the pilots themselves born of the long unfulfilled dream The fa-18 Hornet was built to supplement and eventually to replace the vulnerable but slow grimmon Asics Intruder attack plane and the expensive grimmon F-14 Tomcat the same one immortalized in the first Top Gun film by the way and it was to do this in an air fighter role it represented the Leading Edge of what became the fourth generation of American fighter attacker aircraft it combined the agility and reach of a tomcat with the deadly accuracy and Firepower of the Intruder and it it all in a package that was both smaller and yet more powerful than its predecessors so these attributes it added to Simplicity with 50 fewer Parts than a Grumman F-14 reliability with an accident rate only a fraction of the previous generation of Navy Fighters flexibility with the ability to act in air defense a scout role electronic warfare and other roles as well as cost-effectiveness being capable of sustained service with only one quarter of the maintenance hours of an F-14 and costing just a fraction to build this added to its smaller size meant that the new fa-18 could be deployed at much greater numbers on the decks of Navy carriers fly many more sorties than previous craft and serve many more missions than any single existing plane yet it would take many years for the fa-18 to capture the public imagination in the same way that the either assassins of the sky once had in story decades past for all that it was flexible and ingenious in its design the fa-18 which is never as sexy as the A10 or the F-14 it didn't look mean in the way the public believed a military plane should if anything it seemed a bit Meek and unassuming compared to the Tomcat the Hornet didn't leap off the screen even Owen featured in hit films like Independence Day or Behind Enemy Lines an underappreciated Workhorse if there ever was one first detested by the Navy Airmen as a bean counter's dream of a thrift store aircraft but later nearly universally admired among aviators the fa-18 has become one of the most successful designs in aviation history and it did it all Without Really winning the love of the public it's all rather sad so today we're going to give it its full due we're gonna give you some reasons why the fa-18 is perhaps the single greatest American military aircraft ever designed making it way cooler than you thought and just as a quick note here we'll be referring almost exclusively in this episode to the fa-18 Hornet and its variants that predate the larger evolutionary design the fa-18ef Super Hornet which for the purpose of this video is a separate aircraft however as they remain a small number of existing F-18 Hornet a to d or other rare variants in service around the world we will be referring to the hornet in the present tense this is despite the fact that the vast majority of original hornets have been retired as of 2019. oh and the U.S Navy flew its final sortie of Hornet's D we just had to make a decision and that's how we're running it in the video [Music] by the early 1970s it had become clear that the age of dogfighting in which dashing Ace Pilots matched wits Toe to Toe in small squadrons of maneuverable Fighters was becoming a thing of the past fast improving radar and future plan missile systems like the aim 120 amran promised a future in which air combat would occur largely over great distances usually further than visual range at the same time the Advent of sea and Airbase cruise missile systems and stealth technology such as in the B2 spirit in large part spelled the end of so-called area bombing in which large Wings bomber aircraft dropped hundreds of Bombs over their targets defended by a few fighter aircraft air-to-air dogfighting was swiftly losing much of its relevance by the end of Vietnam War and the air superiority type aircraft was largely relegated after 1975 to defending carrier groups or very occasionally escorting cargo airplanes there just wasn't that much use anymore for the king of the sky grim and F-14 Tomcat which must have been a disappointment to the U.S Navy it having invested tens of billions of dollars in the plane's development with a top speed of back 2.4 and as many teeth as a great white shark the Tomcat was truly the reigning monarch of the Sky by the late 1970s but it was a kingdom in Decline the Tomcat had been built just in time to be made irrelevant indeed through the entire life of their service worldwide spanning nearly 50 years the F-14 Tomcat managed to shoot down only five enemy planes in air-to-air combat five kills in nearly 50 years just for context in the Top Gun series Tom Cruise's Pete Maverick Mitchell is purported to have shot down five enemy planes across his entire career and with 712 Tomcats ever having been made and 68 accidental deaths directly attributed to the F-14 the plane was far deadlier to its own Pilots than it was to an enemy in the sky the Tomcat was not only increasingly irrelevant but also somewhat of a liability for the U.S Navy therefore team was expensive hard to service and complex in its design it was also quite large which is an obvious problem when you're deploying planes from an aircraft carrier in addition to all that the F-14 had never been equipped with any kind of ground attack weapon system and though that would come later in the 1990s and 2000s by then the planes were on their way out replaced with the Hornet or the new F-22 Raptor style Fighter the Hornet despite entering service later than the F-14 actually began development at pretty much the same time in the mid-1960s while grimmon was working on the F-14 destined to be the Navy's mostly wasted air superiority fighter of the future then rival Northrop was developing their yf-17 concept to radically redesigned fighter project that emphasized Speed and Agility over Firepower and size the original concept plane would be made out of aluminum and carbon fiber composite making it light and lightning quick with two extremely powerful turbojet GE 15 engines the product of over a million man hours of development and 5 000 wind tunnel testing hours to develop the yf-17 into a versatile fighter attack aircraft Northrop partnered with McDonald Douglas who strengthened the airframe and added folding Wings catapult and hook attachments to make the plane suitable for Carrier operations in addition McDonnell Douglas also added 96 gallon fuel tanks to each Wing which added 4.5 tons fully loaded to the now nearly 17-ton aircraft leaving it still lighter than the F-14 by nearly 10 tons the original plane was so light and Powerful in fact that it suffered from a significant problem not yet faced by any other military aircraft one that caused Northrop to Begin work on a brand new system that would become the world standard that problem was g-forces the fa-18's twin engines together offered up about half of the thrust of the Mercury rockets that brought the first Americans into space though it would never be as fast at top speed as a Tomcat the Hornet could fly with a seeming alacrity of its insect namesake the F-18 would be one of the first military planes capable accelerating straight up towards the sky without stalling the light and Powerful fa-18 even after the added weight of fuel weapons and carrier hardening was capable of over 9 G's of acceleration more than any service plane ever built before and unmatched by any until the introduction of the F-22 Raptor in 2005. this made the fa-18 capable of a turn rate of 19.2 degrees per second under an average load of fuel and weapons meaning it could make a 180 degree turn at full speed in under nine seconds very nearly as fast as the F-14 and the Grumman F14 was no slouch itself it was a powerful air-to-air weapons platform and its variable sweet Wings made it highly maneuverable but its weight and size made it capable of pulling no more than about six G's of acceleration in contrast the fa-18 had a much tighter turning radius since it could turn at lower speeds before accelerating again with its powerful afterburners and its low weight and high acceleration meant that it was punishing for Pilots to control a full tilt imagine flying at jet fighter so powerful and so quick that turning too hard to the left or right would result in a concussion as your head snaps to the side or that can knock you senseless just by thrusting the engines and pulling back the stick Pilots reported broken ribs Whiplash concussion and other injuries just from the g-forces that the fa-18 was capable of generating Northrop had to develop the world's first fully digital flyby wire system with quadruple redundant backup systems just to make sure that the g-forces themselves didn't rip the plane apart or render it unable to be controlled by a pilot who finds him or herself blacking out while experiencing up to 9 G's of force this phenomenon frighteningly known as g-lock could create a situation which a pilot is overwhelmed by the force of the plane's acceleration and would be unable to release the control stick to level out the plane thus the fa-18 became the first plane ever to feature an Adaptive Auto leveling autopilot feature which was capable of recovering the plane from a spin that had rendered its unconscious due to extreme G-Force a plane that can knock you senseless and break your bones this little fighter bomber was in other words a bit of a beast to drive [Music] all right we've talked a lot about how the Hornet stacked up against the Tomcat well one of the main points of interest to the US Navy especially was cast the F-14 Tomcat was undoubtedly the finest air superiority machine of its era but it was also quite expensive Not only was each plane pricey at 38 million dollars or over 200 million dollars in today's money but so were parts and maintenance as the plane needed to be frequently serviced and rebuilt the fa-18 would eventually reach a unit cost of just 29 million dollars that's 56 million dollars today by the mid 90s it was also much cheaper to operate requiring only around a quarter as much maintenance and having fewer than half as many parts it consumed significantly less Fuel and this combined with its ability to carry up to five external fuel storage tanks and to be refueled in the air made it extremely versatile as a carrier or land-based fighter useful for long-range scouting and air defense alert roles in addition to its combat duties these were among the reasons that the plane was adopted by the U.S Marines and Air Force in addition to the Navy the cost Effectiveness meant that more Hornets could be deployed and more quickly allowing carriers to operate for longer in theater while flying more sorties than ever before [Music] lower cost of fuel and maintenance also means the planes can be used more and they have been fa-18s have carried out nearly 5000 sorties over their service lives with only three planes being lost including two pilots being killed again this is nearly double the number of sorties for the F-14 Tomcat and it's an astonishing 33 times fewer deaths during their operation despite being giant death machines that fly through the sky at nearly double the speed of sound flying the fa-18 is statistically safer than driving a car another of the major safety features is The Hornet's Innovative heads-up display or HUD which Owen combined with later upgrades such as full color electronic Maps laser range find as an automated Target designated computers makes a single fa-18 pilot capable of flying and deploying complex Ordnance or other complicated tasks all alone [Music] foreign [Music] to its Chief historian Dennis R Jenkins in fa-18 Hornet a Navy success story The Hornet was proven time and time again including during one incident in which it took direct hits to both of its engines but still managed to fly over 200 kilometers back to base be repaired and be flying again within a couple of days a U.S Navy horn its entire engine assembly could be changed in the space of just 20 minutes with no specialized equipment meaning even heavily damaged pieces could be fixed right on the deck of a carrier if needs be I've already mentioned that the fa-18 required a quarter of the maintenance of the F-14 it could also serve much more frequently and for longer periods Hornets regularly served up to eight months or longer in the U.S Navy and near continuous use doing tours of Duty in the Persian Gulf the South China Sea in the North Atlantic a hornet properly maintained could spend up to half of its time in the air allowing Pilots to spend as much as 12 hours in a single day operational if necessary far more than any other carrier-based plane is capable of doing [Music] the name of the game for the fa-18 has always been flexibility it's the plane's ability to play virtually any role that it's needed for that kept it flying in its various forms for decades The Hornet comes in a variety of flavors including one suit and two c versions Land and Sea base as well as planes specially designed for electronic warfare carrying radar jamming equipment and planes specifically designed for scouting with blazer rangefinders or other equipment in place of their standard Cannon it also served for decades as the demonstration plane of choice for the world famous Blue Angels the U.S Navy's flight demonstration Squadron which adopted the hornet in 1986. and finally even NASA gets in on the action operating the x-53 variant of the fa-18 its high altitude research vehicle used to demonstrate early thrust vectoring vein technology found on later versions of the Hornets those metal slats that change the shape of the engine exhaust to keep the thrust distributed evenly the F-18 Hornet is so flexible that it has even been adopted for dozens of roles in eight countries including Spain Australia Switzerland Finland Canada and Kuwait where they're still in use today even Malaysia has 34 of them still in use but by far the biggest customers have always been the US Navy and the Marines the latter of which still operate over 250 of the planes today the Navy retired their Fleet in 2019. through its various configurations during its service life the fa-18 saw upgrades to its engines computers radar avionics hydraulic systems and weapon systems it was capable of being configured for use in any kind of weather and could load dozens of different types of Ordnance and other payloads from camera equipment to fuel pods this plane just does it all one of the key attractions of the fa-18 was its ability to carry a vast array of Weaponry it is an exceptional 11 hardpoints meaning spots where weapons can be attached to it's Harlan and it can carry scores of combinations of weapons designed for any possible Mission this in contrast to newer stealthier planes like the F-35 lightning II or F-22 Raptor neither of which is capable of carrying more than four bombs or missiles seeing as they need to do it inside the protection of their radar resistant hulls thus what the US Navy has gained in stealth they've given up in range and Firepower Bogan it most often carries agm-84 Harpoon or lrasm long-range anti-ship missile capable of taking out an enemy ship from Beyond visual range as well as am9 Sidewinder and aim 7 sparrow and aim 120 amram at air missiles along with the boots of its standard Vulcan 20 millimeter cannon the fa-18 can be equipped with dozens of other weapons at a moment's notice antler we're not going to go into every single one of those weapons as each of them could probably qualify for a video of their own and let us know in the comments if you want that but suffice to say that if it goes boom The Hornet could probably deploy it for you it has the capability to bomb ground targets shoot down Airborne targets dogfight kill submarines hit ships at Sea and carry smart bombs laser guy to bombs dumb bombs cluster bombs basically a bomb that's pregnant with several dozen smaller bombs and even small tactical nukes yep [Music] The Hornet much forgotten and not a little unloved during its long life was a better plane than most remember yet as in all good things the Hornet has seen its time in the sun and it has seen that time fading the last variant of the original Hornet chassis was manufactured way back in 1999 but hundreds of examples continue to play their roles across the world perhaps it's fitting in a way that top gun Maverick would introduce the world to The Hornet's successor the fa-18e Super Hornet if you've just now fallen in love with the humble fighter slash attack I have no fear the future remains bright for at least the descendants of the Hornet since 1995 McDonnell Douglas and subsequently its parent company Boeing have been building its success at the fa-18e and the fa-18f Super Hornet the Super Hornet though it shares the name and designation of the old fa-18 was redesigned from the ground up to introduce boatloads of improvements that Engineers had thought up since the Hornet first entered service love it or hate it or even if you just think meh it's clear that the original fa-18 Hornet as well as its Super Hornet spawn will remain relevant in the world of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat for many years to come [Music] [Music]

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 583,718

Keywords: fa-18 hornet, fa-18ef super hornet, f-18 hornet, f-18 cd hornet, f-18 super hornet, f-18 ef super hornet, super hornet, fa-18, aircraft carrier, fighter jet, fa-18ef, u.s aircraft, aviation

Id: CgK9GwFlD9Q

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022