The Flying Pig - F-111 Aardvark

Love this!!! Well with just shy of 2200 hours in the aircraft I know we a little bit about it. Always hated that pig name because the aircraft was anything but. Loved the video of the Navy version because I flew the FB-111 which retained the heavy duty landing gear and tail hook after the Navy bowed out but kept the Air Force lines, that Navy one looked weird. As I said the pig name was absolutely nonsense, we could get away from any aircraft of the era. Red Flag exercises proved that many times over. ROE at Red Flag prevented us from performing our combat scenario with fighters which was a nose over vertical full afterburner descent. The F-15s and F-14s that we played with would claim all these high altitude kills but if they tried to stay with us in the controlled TFR descent that ROEs said we had to use they couldn't hang in. Low level with them was a joke, we got to the point where we didn't care about their claimed kills. We'd let them come up along side, wave, wag the wings, set 400' TFR, hit afterburner and left them in a cloud of dust from which they never found us again. Fun airplane for sure, thanks for the memories.

Come on there Chip. I'm old and have built a model of this baby. Muammar Gaddafi sure didn't like the F111.