Originally posted by AquaShrimp
You'd never hear of an F-16 breaking up in flight. Of course, the F-15 wasn't designed as a 9-g fighter. It was originally a 7.5g plane that at the last moment they tried to convert into a real fighter. Well at least we still have our F16 fleet to keep us safe.
Hah... Funny. BS, but funny.
The last set of F-16s that fell out of the sky... A batch of bad welds in the afterburners caused the AB section to literally fall off the plane. Since it's a single engine piece of..., losing one AB section means the plane fall down go boom.
They lost a few F-16 from this before they grounded the fleet and returned a few dozen megabucks worth of engine parts to the manufacturer.
The F-15 can lose one of pretty much anything and can usually still fly home.
The F-15... What, one inflight breakup in 30 years or so? Big whoopdee do.
Oh yea, the F-15E has demonstrated the ability to take 12+ G's with essentially no damage. One guy did this in my squadron (12ish G's during a bombing run pullup) and after thorough inspections, the plane flew again about a week later.
Even the F-15A and C are pretty durable. An early F-15 pulled about 11 G's and the only thing that flat-out broke was the fwd motor mount. The engines just klonked down to rest on the engine bay floor (the main mounts did not fail), and the plane flew home.
