Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The F-86 Sabre


This beautiful aircraft you're looking at is the F-86 Sabre. This beauty served in the Korean war. It was designed to achieve air superiority or air dominance, which was the same mission as the P-51 and is still the mission of the F-15 Eagle and teh F-22. It had six .50 caliber machine guns (same as on the P-51). During the Korean war America had jets but they all had straight wings, where they just stick out like a rusty canon on a sunken ship, but the F-86 was a new design, that we had learned from the Germans. Germany had learned that jets worked better with a swept wing, Russia and America took the idea and used it well. When the Korean war started North Korea had lots of man power and tanks but they had a very primitive air force, we took control of the skies after just a few weeks of air combat and we pounded the North Koreans from above, but soon a new Russian built fighter stated attacking, this was the Mig 15, it was a swept wing fighter that had two 23 milimeter cannons and a 37 milimeter cannon, which is roughly the size of a coke can. The Mig 15 was designed to shoot down B-29 SuperFortress bombers, thats why it had such big guns. The Mig was light weight and could climb and turn better than the F-86 but we had one advantage that pretty much won the war, we had better pilots. The North Koreans had young untrained pilots, while we put our pilots through rigorous training.  Russia was using North Korea as a training ground for new pilots, this was against the "laws" of war but soon they started putting instructors instead of students and that's when our pilots actually started having problems with the Migs