26 Serbian Mockery of Downed F-117
After shooting down an American F-117 stealth aircraft in 1999, Serbian propaganda posters mockingly read, “Sorry, we didn’t know it was invisible.”
27. To demonstrate the A-10 Warthog’s effectiveness, its designers created a mock Cold War battle in the Nevada desert using over 300 Russian tanks acquired from around the world.
28. The F-4 Phantom II earned the nickname “World’s Leading Distributor of MiG Parts” due to its history of downing numerous Soviet-built MiG aircrafts.
29. Because of its alleged instability at low speeds, the F-117 earned the nickname “Wobblin’ Goblin.”
30. In March 2019, a 64-year-old French defense executive accidentally ejected himself from a Dassault Rafale B fighter jet during a surprise flight gift from colleagues. Grasping the ejection handle to steady himself at over 500 km/h, he ejected himself at 1,300 feet, landing safely in a field with only minor injuries.
31 A-10 Tank Training Coloring Book
A-10 pilots received training on how to target enemy tanks using a coloring book, which humorously instructed them to “color the bottom of the tank green and yourself brown-you dumb shit. An A-10 will not fit underneath a T-62 tank and remain airborne.”
32. In the 1950s, Canada abruptly canceled its Avro Arrow fighter jet program in favor of developing Bomarc nuclear missiles, leading many engineers to join NASA.
33. An F-105D fighter jet, nicknamed Pussy Galore, boosted the morale of refueling tanker crews by featuring a naked woman whose genitals marked the refuel docking port.
34. The United States Air Force’s F-22A Raptor has a radar cross-section smaller than a bumblebee, making it nearly undetectable, and its radar changes frequencies over 1,000 times per second to avoid enemy detection.
35. In 2009, Air Force One and an accompanying F-16 jet flew low around the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan for a photo op, causing panic and evacuations due to the Defense Department not informing New York City’s mayor or the public.
36 Retro Design of F-117 Explained
The Lockheed F-117 and HB1001’s distinctive retro-low-poly appearance stems from 1974 calculations using Soviet algorithms on computers that lacked the power to handle curved surfaces reliably.
37. Nazi Germany created a design for a coal-powered fighter jet in 1944 as part of their efforts to develop alternative fuel sources.
38. Rather than scrapping the retired F-111 fighter jets, the Australian government found it more cost-effective to bury them.
39. The recoil force of the A-10 Warthog’s GAU-8/A Avenger cannon exceeds the thrust of one of its jet engines.
40. Willy Messerschmitt, the renowned German aircraft designer known for creating the Bf 109 during WWII, designed his last aircraft, the Helwan HA-300, which was a supersonic fighter jet for Egypt to use against Israel in the 1960s. Despite Egypt’s efforts to develop prototypes, the HA-300 never saw operational use due to technical challenges and project cancellations in favor of more advanced foreign aircraft.
41 Operation Bolo’s Vietnam War Ruse
In Operation Bolo during the Vietnam War, Colonel Robin Olds led his powerful F-4 fighters disguised as slower F-105 bombers, luring North Vietnamese MiG-21s into an ambush that resulted in the destruction of seven MiG-21s with no U.S. losses.
42. The F-22 Raptor’s development took so long that by its first production flight in 1997, its onboard CPUs had become obsolete by three generations, necessitating the redesign of its flight computer using PowerPC processors. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman commented that the F-22 is “safe from cyber attack” because “no one in China knows how to program the ’83 vintage IBM software that runs them.”
43. In 1986, an F-117 Nighthawk crashed in Sequoia National Forest, two years before the aircraft’s public announcement. The U.S. Air Force secretly replaced the wreckage with the wreckage of a F-101A that had been stored in Area 51 for this very purpose and established a perimeter to conceal the incident.
44. In 2011, after a Taliban fighter shot down an American CH-47D Chinook, he boasted about it over the radio. Within two days, US signals intelligence located him, and combined firepower from an F-16, a C-130, and two Apache gunships eliminated him and five others.
45. During the Gulf War, a B-52 bomber and an F-4 fighter mistakenly targeted each other, with the F-4 firing a Texas HARM missile that caused damage to the B-52, which was subsequently nicknamed “In Harm’s Way.”
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 One Euro MiG Sale to Poland
In 2002, Germany sold 23 MiG-29 Fulcrums to Poland for the symbolic price of one euro as a goodwill gesture to help upgrade the Polish Army to NATO standards. The Soviets took these jets after the reunification of East Germany.
47. Due to navigational issues, a Libyan passenger jet strayed into Israeli airspace in 1973, and Israeli F-4s intercepted them. The Israeli F-4s instructed the crew to land, but they refused due to the tense relations between Libya and Israel at the time. The Israeli F-4s then shot down the passenger plane, killing all 108 people on board.
48. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian F-14s shot down over 160 Iraqi MiGs with only three losses. To counter the F-14 threat, Saddam Hussein deceived Iran into believing its U.S.-trained F-14 pilots were plotting against them, leading Iran to ground its entire F-14 fleet.
49. In 2004, an F-16 accidentally strafed a New Jersey school with cannon fire during a training mission, causing alarm but no casualties.
50. During the Cold War, the entire A-10 Warthog fleet was expected to suffer 100% casualties within two weeks if a war against the Soviet Union occurred.
