Sooo, What is the actual stall speed on the LimaLima? My personal dream bird is the F 104 Starfighter with the monster afterburning Turbofan like in The Right Stuff. OK. So it was a movie. Did Chuck Yeager really set the unofficial insanely high upper ionospheric altitude record in this incredible Aircraft? Not due to its own involvement, a Starfighter was sadly sent to the scrapyard after doing an inverted lambada on the top side of the Prototype XB 70 A as they flew for a photo shoot. The Valkyrie pilots, forerunners of the near recent day Habus of the Skunk Works Finest Product Ever. The SR-71. AKA the Blackbird. Kelly's Killer. Who needs defensive armaments when once at altitude just like in a Dyne, goose the throttle and except for a few rogue space aliens and see the next state or three...
I have always wanted to fly an F-15 and do the vertical climb to 50000 ft (faster than a Saturn 5 Rocket). I never got to do that but when I put the F-16 into stage 5 afterburner I was amazed that the fuel consumption went from 4000 pph to 44000 pph! I guess that is why a VietNam era F-4 could only last 15 minutes in air-to-air combat. I did do some cloud surfing in an F-18 and that was really cool and totally illegal. What is really fun is to take a hot helicopter like an Apache and drive it just over (and sometimes in amongst) the tree tops at 130 kts. If you want a speed thrill that is it. Jets at 30000 ft cannot compare.
The F14D was a heck of a plane. It almost did not need the catapult on the ship to get off the deck. I mostly worked on the E2C Hawkeye but some of the equipment (JTIDS) was on the F14 also. It has been almost 10 years not since I have been in the Navy. In fact my ship teh Carl Vinson has been through a refueling since then. I spent a few weeks on the Nimitz after a refueling, a bunch of guys that thought they knew what was going on at sea. That was a scary time, I choose to go back to the Vinson after that.