Here are 20 Interesting Facts About Fighters jets
In 1956 due to high speed a F11 fighter shot itself because it was faster than its own bullet .
F4 Phantom II was called “World’s Leading Distributor of MiG Parts” because it destroyed so many MiG fighters.
During WW2, Russian Fighter pilot T. Kuznetsov flew himself home after being shot down by stealing a Nazi fighter plane.
The German pilot landed near his crash site to scrounge around the wreck to look for souvenirs. During WW2, while parachuting from a damaged bomber, an American aviator downed a Japanese fighter plane by shooting the pilot in the head with his sidearm
In 1989, a Soviet pilot ejected a perfectly working MIG 23 thinking the plane’s engine had failed. It flew over 560 miles, crossing Germany before running out of fuel and crashing into a house in Belgium killing one teenager.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird strategic reconnaissance aircraft was so fast, the designers did not even consider evasive maneuvers; the pilot was simply instructed to accelerate and out-fly any threat, including missiles .
The Lockheed U-2 is so hard to land that on every landing, the plane is paced by a chase car such as the Camaro SS with an assistant “talking” the pilot down and since 2001, more than a dozen pilots have suffered the effects of decompression sickness and nine were reported to have suffered permanent brain damage.
In 1970 Russian MiG-25 Fighter had a majority of its avionics implemented in vacuum tubes to resists nuclear electromagnetic pulse .
Every last F14 Tomcat America has in flyable storage is being shredded to prevent spares reaching Iran, who are still flying the ones sold to them by the US in the 70’s
The F-15 Eagle in all Air Forces has a combined air-to-air combat record of 104 kills to 0 losses. No air superiority versions of the F-15 (A/B/C/D models) have been shot down by enemy forces. In 1983, an Israeli pilot successfully landed an F-15 with only one wing. In fact, he didn’t realize the extent of the damage until after landing, and stated he would have ejected had he known.
A McDonnell Douglas F-15 once shot down a satellite .
Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, revived his feat on October 14 2012 in an F-15 Eagle, to celebrate the 65th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier. He was 89 years old.
During WW2, a single American P-51 fighter plane held off 30 German fighters from attacking a squadron of B-17 bombers for over half an hour.
The test pilot for America’s first jet fighter dressed in a disguise, so that if trainees at a nearby base saw this new “propeller-less” plane, they’d be more likely to think they were hallucinating if it was being flown by a gorilla wearing a derby and smoking a cigar.
When the first time an F-22 Raptor flew over the International Date Line it had a massive system failure and had to turn back to Hawaii. The pride of the USAF, the F-22 raptor, has a mysterious fatal flaw. Its pilots often experience oxygen deprivation, and partly due to this the aircraft has the highest accident rate in the air force. The cause is unknown, and the issue is so severe that two pilots seek whistleblower protection.
The F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon have been pitted against each other in mock dogfights in the past. The Typhoons proved to be surprisingly effective against the American Aircraft, and after such an encounter the USAF declared “they didn’t want to play any more” as a result
During WW2, Royal Air Force fighter pilots started a rumor that excessive carrot consumption gave gunners night vision. They did this so as not to alert Germans of RAF’s new radar technology after they shot down German aircraft on night raids and the Germans believed it. Germans fighters then started eating large quantities of carrots
The expected cost of the F-35 Program alone is nearly 7 times the total cost of the International Space Station
