Re: [OT] USAF plane nomenclature

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002 19:10:46 +1000 Alan and Carmel Brain 
<aebrain@webone.com.au> wrote:

> From: "Phillip Atcliffe" <Phillip.Atcliffe@uwe.ac.uk>
>> And then there are the "sports", generally caused by some iggorant 
politician, e.g., the SR-71 which was given that designation after LBJ 
(I think) messed up the correct version in a national broadcast and 
no-one was game to contradict him... And it has to be said that the 
Pentagon is not as rigorous about this as it perhaps might be. <<
 
> SR-71 - was supposed to be RS-71 till LBJ JBL'd it <

Even weirder, the XB-70 was supposedly retermed the RS-70, hence the 
-71 number.

Actually, the whole saga of the Blackbird designations is a mess. I've 
seen articles claiming all sorts of weird things, like the A-11 company 
designation actually being "AI-1", the first in a new series of 
Interceptor types as distinct from Fighters... And then there's the 
question of why, since the USAF is so determined to call any combat 
aircraft that it has a fighter or bomber, why the operational 
Blackbirds weren't RF-12's, after the YF-12A designation was given to 
the fighter version.

> TR-1, TR-2 and rumoured TR-3 - SR became by common usage "Strategic 
Recon", so they used TR for "Tactical Recon" as far as I can remember. <

That's right.

> Minor miffs:
[Snip]
> F-117 should probably be something like A-12. But since the F-105 and 
F-111, (both of which carried internal bomb bays...) F is used for 
anything which is capable of air-to-air other than self-defence, even 
if it's not the primary mission. <

That's the USAF for you. They are all fixated on the fighter jock 
mentality there. The A-10 is the ONLY aircraft specifically designed 
for the USAF that has an A designation. All the others were originally 
USN designs that the AF adopted later.

In the case of the F-111, there's the excuse that the B model was 
intended to be the Fleet Air Defence aircraft for carrier groups, so it 
had a fighter-like role.

> The F-35 should be AF-35 or even A-something.

The "F-35" should be the F-24 (or -25)! Or are the Pentagon going to 
completely jump 11 numbers in the type list for no good reason? Why the 
heck were the JSF demonstrators given X-numbers anyway? What was wrong 
with XF-24 and XF-25?

I suspect marketing stupidity here, just as F-19 was skipped because 
Northrop wanted the Tigershark to be "different" from the "old" 
teen-series fighters. And don't get me started on the stupidity that is 
the F-117...!

Phil
----
(Dr) P.A. Atcliffe
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
University of the West of England, Bristol
Phone: +44 (0)117 344 2496
Fax:   +44 (0)117 344 3800