FV - surely the universally-despised Tornado 'ADV' was intended to be just a forward area beyond visual range Backfire-plinker, never to mix it with air superiority fighters? Hence the feeble little engines and dismal 'knife fight in a phone box' performance??
I remember seeing 'certain information' about aircraft referred to as the Ram-J, -K and -L a while ago in JDW; didn't they eventually emerge as the Fulcrum, Flanker and Frogfoot?
Did you ever, as I did, have fun doing max rate turns in the Vulcan at FL 500+ knowing that none of our so-called air defence aircraft had a cat in hells' chance of getting a missile kill.......??
Training, tactics, agility, weapons....and luck!
As a footnote, I flew the first ever 'mission' against a couple of MiG 29s coming into the UK FIR for that Farnborough Air Show in the mighty Vickers Funbus. We were told to keep it v. quiet - which we did. Even the boss didn't know (which is just as well as he'd only have pinched the trip!). All went well and we met our 'Aeroflot' callsign MiGs as advertised - the F3s with us were a pain in the ar$e and wanted to be all aggressive, having struggled to do the 'intercept' all they then did was to get in the bŁoody way of most of our camera shots, but the journos in the back got what they wanted and the piccies appeared on that night's 6-o'clock news on ITN and BBC. The journos with their conventional cameras got the best shots - Janice from Flight in particular. We felt a bit sorry for the poor $od from TASS with his Siberian pig-iron Zenit cameras though!
[ 20 August 2001: Message edited by: BEagle ]