Douglas A4D-6 vs A-7

[KJ_Lesnick]

I was wondering about how the A4D-6 and how it would have compared to the A-7.  It looks like it would have been a hell of a lot more agile.

[Logan Hartke]

Don't know about air-to-air capabilities, but one of the docents at the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola said the Navy considered the Skyhawk to be a bit of a failure as an attack aircraft.  While it was fast, agile, small, and efficient, there's no such thing as a free lunch.  Cramming so much capability into such a small airframe meant that it really couldn't absorb much punishment and that it didn't take a lot to bring the aircraft down.  If you took a hit, chances were it got something vital to keeping the airplane flying.  The Israeli experience was largely the same in 1973.  The aircraft was great...until it got hit.  Then you generally needed to get out very, very fast.

The A-7 was bigger and beefier, and generally considered more survivable.  I can't say much about the proposed A4D-6, but I imagine it would have been similar to the earlier variants of the A4D regarding survivability.

Cheers,

Logan

[Weaver]

  The Israeli experience was largely the same in 1973.  The aircraft was great...until it got hit.  Then you generally needed to get out very, very fast.

The perfect example being the Israeli F-15 that collided with an A-4 during DACT. The F-15 got back down on the ground with most of one wing missing, but the A-4 span out of contrl and the pilot was killed.

The A-7 was bigger and beefier, and generally considered more survivable.  I can't say much about the proposed A4D-6, but I imagine it would have been similar to the earlier variants of the A4D regarding survivability.

The A-4D6 looked like a Skyhawk, but was scaled up in pretty much every dimension to about A-7 size in order to use a TF-30 engine with lots of fuel. I imagine it's survivability would have been about the same. Survivability can be as much about detail as size and strength: the F-105 was big, tough aircraft, but it's survivability was lower than expected due to a few detail design decisions that meant survivable damage in one system often "fratricided" over into another one.

[KJ_Lesnick]

Logan Hartke

Still, the fact was I'm not sure how much the A4D-6 had in common with earlier A4D's... the SLUF had little in common with the F8U


Weaver

I thought that the pilot of the A-4 was tossed out of the plane as it came apart?