is this real??

Sure is...Israeli!

REAL fighter pilot stuff! The guy must have been lucky that day.

Or maybe he just had an outstanding FBW system?

It was on Discovery a few weeks ago. Apparently the speed it kept up prior to and during landing made the lift to the middle of the frame eough to keep the remainder in the air.

Apparently, due to the wing and fuselage surface are/design, it produced enough lift to keep it in the air!!

No doubt a few sherbs in the BOQ after!

Damn right it's real!

Occurred during a dis-similar air combat trg sortie (dogfighting with another type jet if yu want to boil it down to absolute basics) with an A-4 Skyhawk somewhere over Israel. Can't remember what happened to the Skyhawk, think he may (probably?) decided he had had enough excitement for one day and parted company with his jet.

If what I have heard is correct, the f-15 recovered to base with fuel, flames and smoke chuffing out of the right wing. As such, neither crew were aware that they were missing said wing! On landing, and immediately after shutdown, the Nav had a shuffty at the damage and had great difficulty in persuading his pilot that they had landed minus wing.

Boeing, on hearing about this were chuffed to bits - after all, what an advert for a combat ac; if it can survive a mid-air collision and make it home safely, what are it's chances of surviving a combat sortie. Cue Boeing share price through the roof and lots of enquiries about buying F-15.

The crux of it, as discovered by the Boeing engineers, was that the F-15 was so wide thanks to those huge intakes and engines, that if you kept up enough speed the airframe performed like a rocket / missile. You wouldn't have a huge amount of directional control, but go fast enough in a straight line and the thing would still generate enough lift to fly.

Not so fast...


If the pictures were numbered:

1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8

look at 3 and 5. It's a different wing that's missing Good try but it didn't fool me

ONAN
Surely it's the starboard wing in each piccy - one coming towards the other going away from the camera????

Look again, Onan.

Onan old boy,

You've been fooled.

*sigh*

That was so easy, I don't even know why I bothered

Zivi Nedivi was the pilot of the Eagle.

The story I heard was the IDFAF phoned McDonnel Douglas as was, and asked
"Can an F-15 fly without a wing"
McD Man "God no don't be stupid"
So they sent them some photos.

Some of those images are not real. The second, third and fourth images on the left are mocked up images. The History Channel did a reconstruction of events with the pilot recounting the tale. They even mocked up a shot from the pilots perspective with fuel streaming from the torn off wing. If you look closely at these images that I mentioned you will see the discrepancies of the fuel tanks between the various shots. The film editors simply used stock footage for the flying shots and altered them to fit in with the pilots narrative.

Yep - this type of thing has happened a couple of times. Once in Israel, and the other was a Japanese F-15 (can't remember exact dates, but about 15 years ago). Could be why there are different piccys!

No. When you see the reconstruction footage on the History Channel it is clear that they have manipulated the images. They did their best, but you can clearly see where they edited out the wing on the video and added the streaming fuel.

yep, infact the arrangement has neatly divided them! The ones down the left all look photoshopped to me (aside from the pair obviously!)...


Onan.... Lambs to the slaughter!

Anyone got any pics of the F-14s that landed back on the carrier with assymetric wing sweep i.e. one forward and one back. Heard that it happened to aircraft from 2 different sqns on the same cruise and both were required to land on or eject as they were out of range of a land base. One was a relatively minor assymetry but the other was almost fully mis-matched.

So that's what they mean by "A wing and a prayer."