I like the articles they have about planes and the quirky things some do. My brother has told me about several first hand experiences. One of the best was sitting in the back seat of an F-106 and letting a test pilot in training get a familiarization flight. He'd done a few before and said the guys were all very capable, so this day he didn't really crank down on the harnesses as much as he would if he planned to do any real maneuvering. The F-106 had a habit at full throttle of wanting to climb - eventually getting to the point that full forward stick and full down trim wouldn't compensate. So they were cruising along over the Gulf out of Tyndall, and the guy in front had everything pushed down and they were still climbing, so my brother told him it was time to throttle back a bit. The guy apparently pulled the throttle almost to idle, and my brother said the next thing he knew was he's jammed against the top of the canopy, can't get his hands on anything, and staring at water. He said he finally got to the trim button on the stick enough to get the negative G's under control and get the nose coming up.
He also said most recent fighters don't slow down very fast when you throttle back, but he flew an F-4 once at Tyndall while setting up an exercise. He said you pull the throttles back on an F-4 and it's like hitting the brakes. I remember back when the F-4 was new, comments like if you use big enough engines, you can make a brick fly, so they all fly differently in one way or another. Somebody said with respect to Republic and the F-105 that Republic could make a plane that would fly around the globe, but you'd have to have a runway that went a third of the way around to get it in the air.
because the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world would automatically default to unencrypted SMS texts instead of any number of STU/STE secure telephones to discuss their just executed terrorist acts, Moe!
