Originally Posted by
ex82watcher
LOMCEVAK,a question if I may,in the event you have described,you say that you carried one sparrow to keep within c of g limits.What would happen in a wartime situation,if you had fired all missiles and dropped the tanks.Would you then be flying outside those limits ? would that be possible for very long ?
Without the Sparrow you were still always forward of the aft cg limit but handling was degraded. What I should have said above is that we carried a Sparrow to improve the flying qualities in pitch from those at close to the full aft cg limit. Flying without the Sparrow and using the published full back stick take-off technique I did once scrape the tips of the horizontal stab on take-off.