America Rebuilds Aircraft That Failed in Vietnam

A reputable US military analyst believes that the F-35 stealth fighter project is repeating the mistakes of the F-105 aircraft that failed in the Vietnam battlefield.

National Interest magazine quoted an analysis by military analyst David Axe - editor of the US website War is Boring - saying that the Pentagon has repeated past mistakes with the JSF F-35 joint strike fighter project.

Nearly half of the F-105 fighter jets produced were shot down in the Vietnam War. Photo: US Air Force

A look at the history of US fighter development shows that 50 years ago, the US Air Force faced a similar dilemma to what is happening with the F-35. At that time, the F-105 Thunderchief tactical aircraft program was also an advanced design to defeat enemy fighters.

But in reality, the F-105 was heavy and slow compared to its direct competitor, the Soviet-made MiG-21. The US Air Force had to adopt many tactics to ensure the safety of the F-105 in combat missions.

Previously, Australian military aviation analyst Carlo Kopp commented that the F-35 had many strange similarities with the previous F-105. Both were the most powerful single-engine fighter aircraft at that time. The empty weight of the two aircraft was about 12.2 tons, with a wingspan of 10.6 m.

The F-35 and F-105 both have internal weapons bays and underwing hardpoints. Their combat radius is about 740 km. Both aircraft suffer from the problem of low thrust-to-weight ratio in their engines. Air superiority or interceptor aircraft of the same time often use engines with high thrust-to-weight ratio.

The F-35 (front) proved to be inferior to the F-16 in dogfights. Photo: US Air Force.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US Air Force purchased about 833 F-105s. More than 334 were shot down in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1970. According to analyst Kopp, about 22 F-105s were shot down by MiG-21s of the Vietnam Air Force in air combat. The F-105s also shot down about 27 enemy aircraft.

Thus, the F-105's air-to-air victory rate was only equivalent to that of its rival, the MiG-21, while it was designed with the goal of overwhelming the Soviet Union's interceptor fighters. Faced with the F-105's huge losses, the Pentagon urgently conducted an air-to-air training campaign with Iraqi MiG-21s that had defected to Israel.

During actual air combat training, American pilots found that if the F-105 flew behind the MiG-21, it would have a chance to make a high-speed raid. But if the MiG-21 was behind, the F-105 was very vulnerable to being shot down because the engine did not have enough thrust to maneuver quickly and suddenly.

Recently, the US Air Force conducted a simulated air battle between the F-35 and the F-16 fighter, the most expensive fighter project in history, which encountered the same thrust problem as the F-105. Test pilots reported that the F-35's engines did not have enough thrust to perform the fast and sudden maneuvers in the dogfight.

According to Zing