Marrietta F-22 Photos

Ch466, For all your lengthy diatribe your ideas on the Falklands are completely littered with half truths and downright errors. I have already said I wont continue, and I wont but just as an example right at the beginning is your belief that the Sea King AEW was in trials when it began.

It was not, at all. When the Gannet was retired the ministry took the view (or rather tried to justify its lack of spending on a replacement for the Gannet) that the RN would never have to operate out of the reach of RAF or 'friendly' AEW aircraft and so did not need its own platform.

The Falkland showed the fallacy of this but by this stage UK forces were committed. It was AS A RESULT of this that the Sea Kings were quickly modified by having the redundant Gannet radars lashed to them.

That is basic factual error number one. I could go right through your post pointing out each and every assumption or error in in it but your mind set is clearly fixed and your manner is more than a little insulting. This will be my final post on this subject.

DW,
If they had waited six months, they would have been available. THAT is what I said.

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It was in testing and would have within the six months needed for 'High Summer in the South Atlantic'. You also would have had another carrier and a fully vetted (and onboard, the ascenscion flyout being another marvel of risked asset insanity) Harrier force ready for deck ops and quite possibly possesed of LGB and working MULE or similar ground designators.
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It was not, at all. When the Gannet was retired the ministry took the view (or rather tried to justify its lack of spending on a replacement for the Gannet) that the RN would never have to operate out of the reach of RAF or 'friendly' AEW aircraft and so did not need its own platform.

The Falkland showed the fallacy of this but by this stage UK forces were committed. It was AS A RESULT of this that the Sea Kings were quickly modified by having the redundant Gannet radars lashed to them.

That is basic factual error number one.
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I agree. Thinking you could speak definitively about the AEW Mk.2A Sea King while including the words 'Gannet Radar' (APS-20F) automatically disqualifies you as an 'expert' on the topic.

>
On 4 May, 1982, a crash programme was instituted to provide the fleet with its own AEW platform.
...
...known as Project LAST, (Low Altitude Surveillance Task), which resulted in flying hardware within only 11 weeks. At the heart of the programme lay the Thorn EMI ARI 5980/3 Searchwater radar, a pulse-compression, frequency agile search radar.
...
In fact, the first of the AEW Mk.2As made its maiden flight on 23 July 1982. The two prototypes undertook flying trials aboard HMS Illustrious as part of No. 824 Squadron and from 27 August provided AEW cover for ships operating within the Falklands 200-mile (320km) radius total exclusion zone.
>

WAPJ #25 'Westland Sea King Variants', Jon Lake

Given that I _told you_ that the way you win wars is to make sure you have more of the right toys. And that the Argies were not wolves among the shepherders threatening the Brits on the island. And that the need for these aircraft SHOULD have been foreseen as soon as the word 'Exocet' was mentioned.

IF you had waited, for the six months it took for the AEW.2a to get to the COEA and the weather to clear up sufficiently to run effectively day interceptors, IOW, -if- you had prosecuted the air war as it needed to be. You would have won, cleanly, avoiding such idiocies as the butchery of the 1st Welsh Guards.

But no. The Brits always /insist/ on 'winning by dependency'. Upon their enemies to make mistakes that no one with an ounce of wisdom would predict as likely. And upon their friends to provide lashup solutions to tactical problems that should never have been at issue. Because they were predictable needs too.

Black Buck was a joke. SAS/SBS hard kill would not have been. But /they/ were 'too busy' blowing up G2 and Pebbles. Both of which were virtually undefended. Both of which had been decisively serviced by airpower days earlier.

And to operate within a land based IADS with a second axis ASUW threat and NOT reduce one of those to principle dangers to your _fleet_ to zero.

To not put the Argies on-island within a plummeting morale situation whereby euphoric belief in having triumphed over the Big Bad Brits was replaced by the awareness that there would be no more C-130s. That ghosts in the darkness had taken their leadership, their heavy weapons and their limited, _open air_, stockpiles of equipment.

Was to put at risk the entire operation by giving the FAA and CANA a 'reason for fighting on' in threatening a conventional amphibious landing effort which even the /Real Marines/ have _never_ been able to successfully prosecute in under 24hrs. You took over 40. And suffered accordingly.

You don't fight within your limits. You don't expand those limits. You don't obey the most basic of tactical rules: Death In Detail Means One At A Time.
Decisively.

And your men paid for it in blood.

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I could go right through your post pointing out each and every assumption or error in in it but your mind set is clearly fixed and your manner is more than a little insulting. This will be my final post on this subject.
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I never invited you. You responded to me. Your own rosey eyed childish view of all things Brit oozes out around your pompous assumptions that I can be bothered by your opinions of me personally.


KPl.

About me; "Your own rosey eyed childish view of all things Brit oozes out "

I said; "The stupidity of this (somehow???) only became apparent when HMS Sheffield was lost "

Spot the difference? Yeah, real rosy.

This is a waste of effort, I'm done.

Will this F/A-22 be painted in other paint schemes or is the current one designed especially for all environments?. Well i quite like the desert one on those photos.