On 3/1/2010 1:58 AM, Daryl Hunt wrote:


"hcobb" wrote in message

I was answering your question about a fighter with a software
limitation on where on the map it could fly to.

The F-22 Raptor and the International Date Line was the only example I
could come up with.

Thank Goddess the tankers were there to escort the F-22s!

-HJC

And the F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, etc. over a long ocean overflight. This
also includes anything out of the old Soviet Union, China, Germany,
France, England and all other countries. Fighters burn brightly but with
a short duration. Tankers make lousy fighters.

He wasn't talking about range, he was talking about the fact that the
F-22s in question had serious computer failures (do to a programming
oversight) when they crossed the IDL, and could not navigate on their
own by other than dead-reckoning, and hence had to be guided back to
Pearl (IIRC) by their accompanying tankers.
The discussion is in regards to software affects on fighter aircraft
capabilities, not whether or not fighters can operate over long
distances without tankers.

As to the Taiwanese F-16s that sparked this sub-thread, my guess is
that they were probably delivered with the ground-attack portions of
their fire-control computers disabled (no HUD pipper for where the bombs
are going to go, for one thing), and without the gear required to
independently target PGMs, in order to mollify the PRC. With practice,
those planes could probably still drop iron bombs with some Vietnam-era
degree of accuracy, and of course LGBs only need to be dropped "into the
basket". But the big thing would have been to make the gesture of
mostly de-fanging them for any potential offensive use against the PRC.