Thank you for sharing!

I was working in the flying qualities simulator lab at EAFB during the program. We had fun competing in the simulator to see who could land in the shortest distance.

So freaking interesting! Thank you so much for sharing!!!!

I think the F-15 STOL/MTD is the coolest plane ever and your sharing this is valuable. Thank you dude. You're awesome

So, what designation is Y? I basically assumed C means Cargo but I have no clue to what to assume Y means... A,B, and F are all rather standard, and found it hilarious while learning about this they actually categorized a bomber as a fighter just to get the best pilots to fly it because of some (mostly justified) "better than thou" thinking among fighter pilots. Not really sure why though, does the nighthawk pull extreme G maneuvers? I can only assume this was during R&D before it was self stabilizing and had fire and forget laser guided munitions...

…and come to find out the Mig25 is crap and over rated.

@@JT-ee1ii Glad you said it! The Foxbat was the result of allowing the Soviets to infiltrate the Avro Arrow program in Canada, then canceling it before Canada wound up with a useless generation one POS, but the Soviets copied it anyway! Biggest prank of the Cold War.

@@JT-ee1ii but very fast crap, mach 2.8 all the way to the scrap yard.

The MiG-25 would be a superplane if it weren't made of stainless steel

Direct your thanks to Mr. Pierre Sprey, John Boyd and Thomas Christie for developing E-M theory and massively guiding the design of the f15 and f16. Sadly the US has forgotten all about this, and has become reliant on overweight, over budget, nonfunctional turkeys like the f35, that are reliant on fantasy technology like stealth

But gen 4….like it or don’t, stealth is the future…F-15 40yo design.

@@Blovi-qd4lh Most countries nowadays can't even afford a full fleet of stealth fighters. Let alone even make a decent one. There's a decent fleet of F22s and F35s. Russia only has like 6 actually usable Su57s. China had to steal F22 and F35 plans to make the J20. Yeah they maybe the future... but that future isn't for a long long long time from now 4th Gen is here to stay.

@@Blovi-qd4lh you're Right, but actually you're wrong. Yeah, I'm aware how retarded that sounds, but an air war of today the gen 4 F15 is the Anchor of American power. If/when we find the need to wipe out an enemies eyes an ears you are 100% correct that is where our stealth planes and drones come in protected by stealth fighters like the F22. Once said threats are neutralized our all mighty F15 comes in as a pure bred work horse with enormous balls and an even bigger c0ck to match, literally d1ck whipping all-any-every target into non existence...... So again, you're Right, but you're actually more Wrong. 🇺🇸👍 May God bless America 🇺🇸👍

@@Blovi-qd4lh stealth is the present

@@Blovi-qd4lh 'stealth' is overrated

Big facts. What wing loss? It’s just cloaked.

I seem to recall the same thing happening to the A10 as well.

Solo wing landing

@@dlm9477 i highly doubt that is possible for a straight wing aircraft. f15 could do the trick because fuselage provides big chunk of the lifting force.

@@drzerg2 nope, it actually happened to a P 47 during WW2 but the A10 story is a bit hard to confirm but I heard it happened during the first Iraq war.

Was born and raised off and on during the 90s on Scott afb. Oh what a thrill it is to see a bunch of them go full scramble launch it shakes your bones.

God bless america, superb war planes but no health care.

See the footage of the F-15A "Streak Eagle" time to climb records.

I saw this once. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie.

@@NoahSpurrier - Being in the factory was like a scene out of Star Wars and the X-wing fighters. Incredible birds.

The F-15 is a tank in the sky, commanding everything it sees. The F-18 isa sharp and precise fighter.

What was better the F-14 Tomcat or the F-15 Strike Eagle

@@donnyokeefe3098 - Clearly, the F-15, as it is still being built and still in the air defending our nation and the nations of many others. Further range, 1200 miles vs.

@@tommissouri4871 boo-boo. I love the Tom cat. They named it after Tom Cruise. (Fact). Also, the f14 had substantially longer range than 600 miles in all applications. No idea where anyone gets

@@agnosticmoron6711 - Combat range. F-14 -- Range 1800 miles, combat range 580 miles, t-o & l wingspread 64 feet, take-off roll - 2500 feet. F-15 -- Range 3500 miles, combat range 1200 miles, t-o & l wingspread 42 feet, take-off roll - 900 feet. So Maverick's take off from a taxiway in that movie was impossible.

I remember hearing about that one. If i recall correctly, those guys did all that on intuition, and dumb luck. There was no procedure for such an incident, they just had to figure it out as they went. Truly amazing work.

Ripped off from a mid air collision, not shot off.

@@tommissouri4871 Still bad-ass 😎😎

@@tommissouri4871 was the mid-air collision with a friendly fighter plane or enemy plane? or something else?

@@atlastanker - It was an Israeli fighter in a training flight, and they collided with their target aircraft, IIRC. Anyway, it was a friendly flight. The other plane went down. There was so much vapor of liquids streaming out, the pilot couldn't see the wing was missing. There are several videos on KZfaq that are worth watching. Just search Israeli F-15 lands with one wing.

@@Mightymoose02 - Even more so. Shot off would mean the wing was cut off. Midair collision means the whole aircraft took a huge impact.

Oh that’s cool, what part of the project were you on? This video title’s sorta misleading, but regardless the S/MTD project is visually iconic and a real cool one among them all. Not the most internally extreme, just slick

@@yeetyateyote5570 I was an avionics technician, so I worked on all the test F-15's there at the time late 89-93, I left in early 1994 to go write post-flight data analysis software for the B-2 CTF.

Did you guys really took F-18 horizontal tail surfaces for the canards ?? Is it common to rip off parts of some planes and use them for other aircrafts ? This seems so odd

@@eSDK67 yes, they took the rear stabilators off an F-18 and slapped them right up there. I was really wild to see on take-off, the plane would be straight and level but climbing like it was on an elevator with the front and rear stabilators providing lift.

I also worked on STOL/MTD in the F/A-18 Flight Controls group - on the Fiber Optic anti-lock brakes at McDonnell Aircraft in St Louis. More than just the canards (Hornet Tails) the entire Fly by wire flight controls system including hydraulic rams and LVDTs was modified from the F/A-18 D made by GE and fitted into an old F-15B. It was one of the 5 ATF proposals, but it was an evolutionary design and didn't have enough revolutionary technology to be down selected in 1986 for the 2 aircraft fly off of the Lockheed YF-22 and the Northrop YF-23. Non-STOL versions of the F-15 and F/A-18 are still in production while the F-22 production stopped in 2011. Last time I was out at Edwards in 2018 I saw the STOL/MTD aircraft on static display at the NASA Dryden museum, near Edwards AFB north gate.

aka the 5EX Eagle...

Incroyable.

Pardon my nitpicking but I thought we were already well into the 21st century?

@@davidkelley5382 OK! Let me rephrase...With the new F-15 EX this amazing plane will continue to fly for decades to come.

@@davidkelley5382 🤓

Dude, I was at Holloman from "86 to '89. I was avionics with the 8th AMU. When were you there?

I was at Holloman from '85 to '89. When where you there?

I was there from '77 to '80 with the spanking brand new F-15A's. Previously, I was an avionics tech for the F-111A/F, and the F-15A was like stepping into the future.

@@Bdub1952 I'll bet. I worked B-shop on the F-15A and B models with the 8th. I married late and have kids that are 7 and 11 years old now and think it's pretty cool that if they ever choose to go into the military they could be working on the F-15 EX. I used to love morning launch. There was just something haunting about the noise of a dozen JFS's screaming away and echoing off the buildings lining the ramp.

@@tonygryboski8593 I was there for 87 to 89, worked Jet Shop and then Test Cell. As an Airman, I was basically just a ground guy, and I was tasked with the boring stuff, LOL

HenryDoily 22@gmoytfh

Ace Combat 4, 5, Zero, 6, 7 and Infinity

Also Project Wingman, but under a different name

@@aaronsanborn4291 fictional variants based on it also appeared in AC2 and AC3

Ah i see a comment full of Aces! >

@@crayondevourer2267 I see you are a man of culture as well

...and you would have been home on christmas? I think, I heard this quite a few times

I just read your post, after posting about it's being the only warplane that can pull against 90 degrees of the earth's gravitational pull, and still gain speed. I know of two that did it, one stretched and broke the airframe, and the second disintegrated in flight. There may have been more, but if memory serves me, that one that disintegrated was the last to do it, and they banned the maneuver afterward.

@@elmerfudpucker3204 So it can go straight up, but not accellerate while doing so?

No F-22s are operational outside USAF.

@@winternow2242 thanks for clarifying. That’s why I said (I think) 👍🏼

That incident is where literally everyone that plays DCS got the phrase "Ehh, just trim it out, you'll make it back" from regarding the F-15's ability to take extreme damage and keep going. The A-10 was designed to do that from the start, the F-15 was not, and yet they're about equal on "how much damage can you take and still make it back to home plate" A-10 uses armor and it's geometry for this purpose, F-15 uses the fact that basically it can fly in "missile with a man in it" mode if the wings break off because the inlets and fuselage can generate enough lift to keep it airborne significantly under the speed of sound, and the all-moving tailplanes were already blending roll commands into the equation, so you don't even really technically need the ailerons either. Of course, you're gonna have to land faster than usual, but that's a fair sight better than going down in enemy territory.

​@@44R0Ndin I love it when I can learn something from other people!! Thank you!👍😁

It was only a research aircraft, they had to remove the gun to fit the canards.

And with advanced controls and vectored trust the canards we're not needed.

The engineering was meant for testing purposes, not manufacturing and deployment purposes. You'd be a lot better off redesigning an entire aircraft around the technology since it's a radical departure from the intended design.

They should keep one flying to do major air shows...

It was also immensely due to that pilot's skill.

"He was fighter pilot they called Solo Wing Pixy, this man was hid buddy" >

@@joeh4295 oops yep yur obsolutley right...thank you.

Checked the references, looks like 42mph was the lowest velocity at rotation and not at lift off as the script suggests.

the front canards or whatever they're called come straight from the viggen

@@yonakatsu4878 That’s not even a little bit true. Many canards have been used since the Wright brothers. Yes the Viggin has them but no, they were not exclusive to that or the Draaken.

Haha, valid point. Almost! Actually, the J3 cubs published stall speed in it's FAA approved owners manual, is absolutely false. It comes from a bygone era, its actually the stall speed of the J2 or else the prototype or 1937 40hp J3 of 1000lb maximum wt. there were some of 1k, 1100, 1170, 1220 depending on mods. All share the same "stall speed" which is incorrect but nobody seems to correct it. Proof: USA-35b (and similar but "better" Clark Y) airfoils wind tunnel data shows a CLmax around 1.4-1.6, iffy old wind tunnels in the 1920s. Attaining a CLmax above 1.7 requires lots of aft camber or small flaps. Larger than 1.8 requires normal flaps. 38mph = 55.733...ft/s Rho = 0.00237717 1/2(rho*v^2) Dynamic Pressure (q) = 3.692 Lbs/Ft^2 Piper Cub: 1,220lb Wing area (S) 178.5ft^2 =6.854 Psf wing loading. Over 3.692 = CLmax of 1.856. Not possible for that airfoil even if it was made to perfection in a controlled environment, it would be around CLmax 1.5. But, in reality it is fabric covered with stitching, paint, etc. plus must also factor in the reduction of lift due to aspect ratio. CLmax for the airplane will be around 1.35. 6.854/1.35 = 5.06 = Q = 65.25 Fps = 44.5mph FASTER than the F-15s stall speed. Which corresponds to my personal experience flying an un-flapped J3 cub, two up, half tanks, at around 1220lbs. Its interesting to note that a 65hp cub cruises barely faster than its climb speed and only 1-2/3 its stall speed. Little or no margin for tomfoolery.

Actually Dale Brown's book came out after the plane already existed. Flight of the Cheetah was a great read though.

@@mpeugeot thats my point

Excellent explanations of modern engagement in the air.

Excellent points. I would add radar cross section also suffers due to canards. So does missile range when fired from a slower, lower flying fighter. Higher and faster means more miles of effective weapon range in BVR.

It also looked like a chicken trying to glide.

Did price factor into this as well? Because at this time wasn't the development and deployment of the F22 finished?

The only 2 gripes for the F-35 is its expensive, and took way to long to develope. However its very capable dont kid yourself

Countries like UK and Australia would love a long range, all weather air superiority fighter and as substitute for the F-22 Raptor. This could be combined with the Silent Eagle concept and built with modern materials and manufacturing technique.

Thank You for the reminder of a fine book I should re read

The F-15 Active was also featured in the game "Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. 2". sadly both HAWX and HAWX 2 are now "abandonware"

It's cool, isn't it, to point out an aircraft that you actually were on. Not just one of the same type, but THE aircraft. Many don't understand that. I worked at Goodyear Aerospace for a short time, and my new boss was quick to point out they built the F-15 simulators. As we walked the hall, he was asking how much I had been around them. I pointed to a picture on the wall and said "I've been in that plane several times." He said so I had been in F-15Es? I said, "no, THAT plane. Of course, it was blue when I was in it. That is 71-291." He couldn't comprehend tail numbers.

@@tommissouri4871 I also spent time with 71-0291 B-2 as a Flight Test Engineer (Dept. 271) during the Strike Eagle program. Many exciting times and memories supporting that program and the men and women that dedicated so much time and energy to make it happen. I was lucky enough to get a ride in the back seat with Glen Larsen up front. An incredible experience.

So could the much earlier 1950s English Electric Lightning

Never heard of this but it's fascinating, thanks for sharing that. There was another poser here in the comments who was a tech and said they couldn't do anything in the NASA F15 cockpit because it was all different, and that got me thinking about how you can't just add tons of features without considering overwhelming the pilot with controls. I would assume they're close to their limits already as to what they can manipulate in a reasonable manner under stress. To get deep down the rabbithole, there is a quote attributed to Ben Rich of Skunkworks that UFOs operate on consciousness itself.

@@airthrowDBT It’s about making better interfaces to meet the requirements of the aircraft. Companies spend unbelievable amounts of money on designing interfaces for ease of use. For example a cell phone is just an interface to lots of information. That’s why people can do more than they could before there were cell phones.

That doesn’t really make sense unless the programmers had no idea how to write optimized code. That seems like a standard calculus optimization problem.

@@PinkFZeppelin Oh really? You ever done sensor fusion in a 4-D space to predict the flight path of multiple targets and then compare that to all the instrument & flight control data for your own aircraft and calculate the optimum flight path AND the flight control inputs to achieve that route??

@@bumpedhishead636 Actually yeah I’ve written some code for self driving cars. The system combines 360 degree radar signals and vision. It then classifies the objects in the observation space and selects a path. It runs on the equivalent of a Samsung s8. It uses a trained agent rather than a simple mathematic function to be more dynamic so it is a lot more computationally intensive than a generalized function. There are simple pid loops that enact the desires of the agent on the controls of the vehicle. The agent predicts 3 potential potential paths each processor cycle to predict where adjacent cars might be in the future. It has temporal behavior. But in a one on one dogfight it seems you could just use a generalized function as the optimal vector is known for a given vector of the enemy. The latency best case latency which is achieved for our stuff is just the cycle rate of the processor. There is still a ton of optimization to be had in our code as well. Recently we reduced resources consumption by 20%. Which is nice because it reduces heat and leaves headroom for more complex agents. I probably used too strong of language I’m sure those programmers were very smart for their time. But generally industrial automation programmers are a bit behind the times in my experience. I used to write code for manufacturing plants. Also algorithms are always advancing so what is general knowledge in the community is probably more optimized these days. Mainly from the increase of scale and distributed technologies being commonplace. I couldn’t find info on the flight computers of the late 90s which is what I assumed your timeframe would be. So it’s hard for me to say what they had to work with. But more computation is often just a bandaid for code that isn’t optimized well. There was the darpa self driving challenge around 2000 and those vehicles were able to cross a desert with the available tech.

I was an engineer there from 86 to 94. So much cool stuff going on! ... but then we beat the USSR and lost a few contracts. Very tough times! The F-15 STOL/MTD was just a small part of the fascinating projects in the works back then!

I helped with wind tunnel testing then, too of this beautiful bird!

@@SkyhawkSteve Do you remember an engineer called KZ? He won the Reserve Grand Champion Ultralight in 1993 Oshkosh. We were buddies back in the day!

@@timgarrett203 Hey, Tim! Quite a coincidence to see your name pop up here. This is Chris, also a former McAir Wind Tunnel Test Engineer. I did the hot gas ingestion test on the SMTD.

@@randyhager2054 Don't know him, but MDC was a big place! I was in the electronics company, so didn't interact with a lot of McAir folks.

Americans predating on vietnamese children 😈

F15 was to best the mig 29 Su 30 beats the f15 as newer and better dog fight In short complete different birds

@@scottsuttan2123 wrong, the MiG-29 was made to counter the F-15 and F-16, seeing it wasn't put into production until 1983.

Wrong, MiG29 was made to counter F16 and F15 was a competitor to Su 27 and Flankers

@@caelum2185 right as f15 was built in fear of the mig25

Yup, or "Johnny Cash Aircraft" after the song where he assembled a Cadillac out of stolen parts.

It mostly got that name because the craft borrowed parts from the Hornet and a few other fighters. The most prominent example are the canards, which were modified from the horizontal stabilizers of the hornet.

It sure is. So why only a 25% reduction in TO distance ? Surely doesn’t take 5,600’ to reach 45 mph. Something doesn’t compute. Even gliders stall at that speed

@@sidtp7307 EDIT: I know what we both failed to take into account. It's not just the canards, it's also the vectored thrust, so 42mph would be possible. Effectively it was a VSTOL. A bit like a Harrier.

Is a great aircraft

Still is

@@JohnCarlyle it's even better!

Yoda related to, are you?

@@mkaz3997 questions, have you?

@@JSFGuy Inquisitive, I am.

Lol, you guys... 😆👍

The problem with canards is that they completely ruin your radar cross-section, that's probably why it wasn't implemented. Even back in the 70s and 80s we were very conscious of radar cross-section, that's what drove a lot of F-16 modifications (probably F-15, too, but I've mainly worked F-16 so I'm most familiar with it). This is why I find it so funny to see Russian and Chinese "stealth" jets with great big canards, LOL.

One would think they would make the Eagle as capable as possible though, since the modifications were a resounding success, and the Eagle is still being produced today.

6:30 & 11:10 - They said it was a testbed for the next generation of aircraft in the video.

@@trailingrails9953 To make it a fighter, they would have had to find a different place in the airframe for the gun and its ammunition drum, since the M61 cannon was mounted in the wing root and that space in the demonstrator was taken up by the canard actuators. Today it wouldn't matter as much since they could mount a gun pod on the centerline pylon, but at the time the available SUU-23/A gun pod was notoriously inaccurate and consistently failed to remain stationary on its mount, making it difficult to aim, a problem that got worse as the mission progressed. Maybe a canard-mounted F-15EX+ variant could be developed that uses the GAU-22/A gun pod from the F-35, but more likely that coin is permanently spent.

@@trailingrails9953 My thoughts exactly.

It was originally proposed as a production vehicle (the "STOL"), not a research plane ("MTD" was where it ended up after being handed over to NASA). It was quickly kicked under the rug to prevent it being seen as an alternative, and having congress get into any funding debates regarding the ATF program. But yes, it was not "too weird", it was a threat to 5th gen funding.

Perhaps they'll get their chance when the EX gets put into production. Then again they do have their own aerospace industries. Maybe they want to support more local defense contractors.

@@mill2712 Already in production. The X and EX models are kind of a "last call, anybody else want an F-15?" befor closing the line.

The uk is going with typhoon and F35b. When tempest is ready it will replace typhoons. Something would really have to change for the uk to get F15s

The F-15 STOL/Maneuvering Technology Demonstration was a MCAIR/USAF/ PW/GE collaboration from roughly 1986 to 1991. NASA joined the effort in about 1994 and led the ACTIVE and later programs.

Yes, it's over in the circle display at Dryden research Edwards AFB.

@@JSFGuy How did you know?

@@danniserendret4301 I drive past it to and from work.

@@JSFGuy Oh alr

@@danniserendret4301 On his way to work, at Area 52.

😂 cultist

@@Feroce ah yeah, I maybe could've been more clear. " i _dot_ imgur _dot_ com/dGCSgFh.jpg " Very few youtubers allow links in their comments section for obvious reasons. but imgur is a widely used site which to my knowledge is completely safe, and this isn't spam, so I'm skirting the system hehe. I admit the tail booms look a little odd without horizontal stabilizers. And really, the deletion of the rear horizontal stabilizers was just something being explored, as the canards and the 2D thrust vectoring pretty well have that form of control very thoroughly covered. The tail booms could be reshaped (and lightened), if not needing a mating surface & structural rigidity to mount horizontal stabilizers. But that would add a bit of extra expense to redesign. The canards angling up, and the thrust pointing down, allows it to stay airborne (or take off) at extremely low speeds. Ergo the runway length requirement is a fraction of the regular F-15. Makes it harder to disable a forward air base, since even a modest portion of the runway is all that would be needed to survive and/or be repaired to have flight operations. The side effect though is that it offers the low-speed agility of thrust vectoring, which would erase the F-15's one weak area (turn rate at very low altitude). Largely the eagle has the power to simply avoid being pulled into a rate fight on the deck, but a STOL could turn with as much force as any pilot can take at almost any speed. It _also_ means that the nose can point up or down independently of the forward direction of travel (to a degree). Maintaining lift deeper into negative AoA, or increasing positive AoA limit due to the canards shoving air back over the wings to mitigate stall. By the time it was proposed, sidewinder & amraam missiles with wide angle seekers would allow for pretty big off-axis shots. But it would empower gun aiming, to shoot inside a turn dramatically better. Basically it would allow an F-15 to follow an F-16 into the F-16's ideal fight, and beat it there. I included FAST packs (the conformal fuel tanks "fuel and sensor tactical") on the fuselage. Some think it adds weight & drag, but it's substantially less drag than a drop tank. And weapons mounted conformally to it have less drag than they do if out on a pylon. Plus sensor bearing fast packs can eliminate pods which add drag & weight. So personally I think the air force under-utilizes them (not frequently seen outside of E models). Manufacturer's suggested spec is to use them for "most" types of sortie, and definitely not just to sell more kit. The aesthetics of the gun port is pure speculation. I modeled it on the F-4's chin gun protrusion. But that is where it would have been relocated to. In the models prior to E, there is empty fuselage space behind the cockpit area in the center of gravity. Deliberately left empty for future upgrades without balance issues. It would fit the vulcan 20mm. On the E's, that space was used for extra fuel though. So they'd have to either sacrifice a bit of fuel, or go without a gun (if one wanted an F-15E-STOL model). Anyway, this was what was being pitched to the USAF as a production aircraft option, with the test plane being a bit more halfhazardly pieced together just to proof the concept in actual flight. All before it got sent to NASA and became the "MTD".