Nope, especially for the poor young 2nd Lt F16 driver who had to confess that he'd porked trying to do an F3 style departure at PSAB - mini rotation followed by landing gear and accel to 600kts at low level. Sadly for the poor 2nd Lt copying he forgot that the F16 has autoflap with gear and so on raising his gear he sank back onto the runway for a bit on his rear fuselage strakes - impressive set of sparks though!
Brig Gen made him confess to the whole Coalition Air Wing, followed by a "Gentlemen, knock this sh!t off!" debrief to us all. Sadly for us we had no choice but to get some "smash on" at low level and then to expedite climb above the MANPADS threat whereas those with more poke in their Eagles could accelerate in vertical from rotation within the airfield boundary - b¥gger!
So the sh!t was definately not knocked off by the F3 det
LJ
Kind of what I was told when I got to get a look around the F3 Det out there just before the PSAB went totally anal in early 03.
To be honest the people who are complaning about Typhoon not desigating its own targets or not being able to use anything smaller are talking out of their hoops. You have an airframe that can carry 1000 lb bombs and both the in service AAMs, plus an good AD Radar. You also have an airframe that can carry everything else. Why on earth don't you send a pair of each up in one mission, Let the Tiffys bomb first, then they can bug off and do No-fly CAP, while the Tonka's with their longer endurance carry on with the armed recce. Ok it's a liitle more invovled than self desigation, but we have done it in most of the wars in which we have used LGB's. The one plus of this plan is that every RAF FJ sortie could get at least two weapons on to ground targets and its the sort of improvisation that the RAF is good at.
Why did the Typhoon not get multi role from the git go???? My reply will be directly from a Tiffy Pilot who's last tour had been on GR9's "There was no need to spend the money on getting Typhoon bombed up to the hilt straight away to do Afgan, as we have two excellant GR aircraft that are fully capable of doing the task right now".