Message posted by Al on January 21, 2007 at 18:35:38 PST:
It turns out this has already happened. On Sept.21, 1956, a F-11F Tiger(BuNo. 138620) doing an armament test fired it's guns while in excess of Mach 1 and in a slight push over at 13,000 ft, ran into four of the shells(20mm) 11 seconds later. That later lead to engine failure and the aircraft crashing short of the runway. Turns out what happened was the shells slowed down due to high supersonic drag while the aircraft maintained it's speed with afterburner and the shallow dive. I had read about this many years ago in an issue of Aero Album (for any of you that old). What I didn't know was that after the previous test flight(same parameters) they had found scratches on the sides of the vertical fin which they thought had been caused by the empty shell cases and links. Turns out the pilot had pushed the aircraft over just a fraction more and shells had hit the fin. The pilot involved (Tom Alridge, he survived!) says a F-100 did the same thing at Edwards soon after, which I can't verify. Source:Naval Fighters #42 F11F Tiger by Corky Meyer and Steve Ginter
In Reply to: Re: Back to the F-22's cannon question. posted by Argo on January 20, 2007 at 12:30:12 PST:
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