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A fully loaded F-16 is a force to be reckoned with. An air superiority machine that countries

the world over use to patrol their skies. A low cost, lightweight, single engine fighter,

specifically designed to out maneuver its opponents while carrying state of the art

missiles that would, hopefully, mean it would never have to.

The F-16 was born out of the Vietnam war. Large, heavy, complex US fighters like the

F-4 Phantom were the norm, but the F-4 found itself in pearl frequently, at a significant

disadvantage when taking on the smaller maneuverable soviet-made MiGs of the Vietnamese Air Force,

like the Mig 21.

The Mig 21 was a small, single engined, lightweight aircraft with thin delta wings. The F-4 was

fast, flying up to Mach 2.2, traveled further, and carried more missiles, with a powerful

radar.

But, its lack of maneuverability at low speed, poor pilot visibility and easy identification

due to jet engines that billowed black smoke trails, made it vulnerable to sneak attacks

from the soviet interceptor.

MiG 21s frequently flew close to the ground, under radar, and ambushed incoming F-4s. Making

a single attacking run with their Atoll infrared guided missiles, and then, using their low

speed maneuverability to out turn and escape.

From August 1967 to February 1968, US losses in Vietnam were staggering.

Losing 18 aircraft while downing just 5. [REF] [1]

For a nation accustomed to absolute air superiority, something was off.

The MIG 21s introduction in 1966 forced the US to adapt. Its large, heavy fighter bombers,

while useful, were at a disadvantage against these smaller, cheaper planes, and something

needed to be done.

The Red Baron study, commissioned by the US Military, began to identify and address the

tactical and technical issues causing the heavy losses that both the US Navy and Air

Force were experiencing in the Vietnam war.

And their findings led to the development of one of the world’s most ubiquitous fighter

planes. A plane designed with a new physics based doctrine at its core.

Entering service in 1978 and standing the test of time, it is now confirmed that the

aircraft will be entering the battle for Ukraine’s freedom, taking on the modern day counterparts

of the MiG.

This is the Insane Engineering of the F-16.

The F-16 was built from the ground up with this classified 1966 paper as its guiding

light. A paper full of mathematical models, graphs, and equations, designed to answer

one question.

How to win a close quarters dog fight. Created with the help of military supercomputers,

it defined a new concept. Energy Maneuverability.

Created by Colonel John Boyd, an air force veteran of the Vietnam war, and one of the

members of the so called fighter mafia, with the help of a civilian mathematician Thomas

Christie. [REF][2]

These graphs were the basis for defining a plane's maneuverability through its full range

of speeds. Mach number on the x-axis. Turn rate on the y.

A theory underlined by the management of both kinetic and potential energy, speed and altitude.

In order to change direction a fighter aircraft must trade energy from these reservoirs, and

doing it as efficiently as possible is the key to out maneuvering an enemy. .

This is the energy-maneuverability diagram for the F-16. It’s a complicated graph to

read without some basic understanding. This line is defined by the maximum lift of the

aircraft.

This is important because it determines the maximum turn rate at a particular speed in

this region. We need lift to turn.

To begin a turn an aircraft will roll in the direction of the turn. This splits the lift

the plane is generating into two components: a horizontal component that causes the plane

to turn and a vertical component that keeps the plane in the sky.

A steeper bank angle will increase the horizontal component and increase our rate of turn, while

stealing lift from the vertical component.

This vertical component needs to equal the weight of the aircraft, or the plane will

lose altitude. To compensate for that the pilot will need to increase lift by increasing

the angle of attack. This is where the maximum lift issue arises. More lift means more available

force to turn.

To determine the max turn rate for an F-16 at mach 0.4 we simply draw a line straight

up and across to our turn rate. 13 degrees per second. Now, this is where things get

interesting. This is the graph for an F-4E. At the same speed the F-4 can make a maximum

turn of just 5 degrees per second.

To determine a sustained turn we look to this line labeled with a 0. Meaning no loss of

altitude is required to make the turn. We can see the F-16s best sustained turn is 14.2

degrees per second at 0.85 Mach at 7 g. The F-4s best sustained turn is 10 degrees per

second at 0.85 Mach at 5 g.

This is what that looks like in practice. It takes the F-16 25 seconds to complete a

full 360 degree turn. While it takes the F-4 36 seconds. 11 seconds in the difference.

The F-16 was a radical new way of thinking about fighter aircraft and that

design philosophy can be seen with how the engine inlet has been designed to deal with

supersonic flow. To learn more about the F-16, we spoke with F-16 test pilot David Wren.

so the F 16 inlet is one of those things that tells you about the design philosophy of the

aircraft because up until that point, the thought process was we wanted to go faster,

we wanted to go higher, and nobody stopped to ask why, because it turns out that not

a lot of fights, not a lot of air combat was happening in that mach two plus range. In

fact, very little of it was happening and it didn't have a huge amount of tactical application.

And so as John Boyd and the rest of the team was looking at this lightweight fighter design,

which became the F 16, they said, well, where do we think that the dog fights of the future

are really going to happen? And they said, well, it's probably going to be somewhere

in that 0.8 mach to 1.2 mock regime.

That's really where we need to be in terms of optimizing the performance of the jet.

And we see that here in terms of the specific excess power chart where it's got this advantage

right here in that range of 0.8 M to 1.2 mach. That's where the fat part of the chart sits.

That's where your fat on energy, that's where you have that advantage. And so the F 16 propulsion

system is not optimized to go over mach two, although it can, and I've flown the F 16 at

Mach two, you run out of gas pretty quick, but you can go that fast. But in that what

we call transonic regime of 0.8 to 1.2 mach, you've got a different design problem than

some of the previous jets. And you can see that in terms of the inlets. The inlets on

the F four have this extension that goes sort of along the cheeks of the aircraft forward,

and then the actual inlet is inlets are set back, and what that's designed to do is attach

a shockwave to the front of that inlet lip and then it goes backwards and expands along

the body.

And that shockwave is basically going to cover up the inlet that has some thermodynamic effects

in terms of pressure recovery for the fan face because you don't want supersonic air

getting all the way in to your turbine. If you have supersonic airflow hitting the front

face of that jet engine, the jet engine's going to disintegrate. It's designed to ingest

subsonic airflow. And so you have to attach that shock wave at the front of the inlet.

That's part of what slows down the airflow to eventually a normal shock inside the inlet.

It expands a little bit and then it gets to the front face of the compressor or the fan

face of the compressor. Well, the F 16, and you can see it right here, has what we call

a peto inlet. It's basically a flat face air scoop. It is not that sort of overhang with

a lip and then an inlet that's further back like you see on the F four or the F 15 or

the F 14, the big 29, the s U 27, all of those have more of that inlet that's set up to put

an oblique shockwave across the front of the inlet.

Those are designed to go faster. The F 16 has a little bit of that. If you look at it

on a side view, you can see how it's got a little bit of an overhang on the lip and the

nose helps to attach a shockwave, but it's not as efficient to go above Mach 1.2. And

that's okay. Actually it can go that fast, it can go faster, but the engine is working

a little bit harder as it gets into this 1.4, 1.5 mock range compared to something like

an F four or an F 15. That's where they start to really stretch their legs and run.

These design optimizations for optimizing maneuverability at these speeds can be seen

elsewhere too.

It’s air intake placement underneath the aircraft, a stark difference to the side mounted

twin intakes of the F-4. And the thin elongated wing that blends smoothly into the fuselage

with these wing extensions forward of the main wing. These are called leading edge strakes

.

This air intake ensured the F-16s engine was not starved of air during high angle of attack

maneuvers. With the forebody of the aircraft helping to funnel and divert air directly

into the air intake.

However, this does come with some problems that needed to be engineered around.

On take off and landing this air intake is just 100 centimeters of the ground, this combined

with the extremely thin wings make placement of the landing gear difficult.

The forward landing gear could not be mounted ahead of the air intake, as they would kick

up debris into it, and they couldn’t fit into the wings, as the thin aerodynamically

optimized wing didn’t have enough space.

The F-16s landing gears are stored just behind the air intake, and in order to provide enough

stability and bracing on landing, they need a unique folding mechanism to swing them outward

to create as large a wheelbase as possible.

The front landing gear, which is steerable during taxi, also rotates 90 degrees to lie

flat just under the engine inlet.

Above the inlet is a boundary layer diverter channel. This ensures the engine gets consistent

laminar flow.

As air travels along the length of the aircraft it forms a layer of slow moving turbulent

air called a boundary layer. If this air is allowed to enter the engine it not only lowers

performance, it can also damage the engine. As the turbine rotates it will pass through

the slow boundary air on one side and then fast free stream air on the other. This means

the force on the turbine blade changes for each and every rotation, causing cyclical

bending. A recipe for fatigue failure.

This boundary layer diverter separates this layer and diverts it underneath the wings.

All of this ensures the engine can operate at as high a thrust as possible, even when

the F-16 is performing extreme maneuvers, which is exactly when it is needed most as

the plane bleeds energy to produce lift.

It’s essential that a plane like this can continue to generate effective lift during

these maneuvers,

but typical wings lose lift as angle of attack increases beyond a certain angle, as flow

separates from the wing. This is called a stall.

These leading edge strakes help to mitigate that.

They act similarly to the canards of the SU-34, one of the planes the F-16 will likely be

going up against in Ukraine, with 19 of them reportedly being taken down thus far in the

war.

Canards and leading edge strakes help produce lift during high angle of attack maneuvers.

Canards placed close to the wing, like the Saab 37 Viggen, create a vortex that passes

over the wing, ensuring the wing continues to get high energy airflow during high angle

of attack maneuvers which allows it to continue generating lift

During the development of the F-16, General Dynamics did consider a canard configuration,

testing different configurations and geometries including versions with no strakes or canards

with subscale models in wind tunnel, testing through its optimum maneuvering speeds between

0.4 and 0.8 mach.

The goal was to maximize lift and minimize drag at high angles of attack, producing graphs

like this, and these were used to compare designs.

As they were narrowing down on the design they consulted NASA, and they found one area

to improve on.

The sharpness of the leading edge.

General Dynamics had rounded the leading edge of the wing to weaken these high angle of

attack vortices[REF][3] , but NASA advised them to sharpen the leading edge in order

to strengthen them.

The F-16 underwent a great deal of iterative design in the wind tunnel phase before eventually

landing on the design we are familiar with today. With the long blended leading edge

strake that makes the F-16 immediately recognisable, and this comes with an added benefit.

It provides enough space for the barrel of F-16s powerful 20 mm rotary cannon. [REF][4]

You can see the barrel of M61 Vulcan hiding here, a minor clue to the weapon hidden within

the fuselage of the tiny plane.

One of the early conclusions of the Red Baron report was that lackluster armament of the

F-4 made it difficult for it to compete in close quarter battles. It lacked an internal

cannon, which left the F-4 without offensive options in close quarter battles, where missiles

could not be safely used. The F-4 was eventually retrofitted with the M61 slung underneath

the plane.

But, the F-16, looking to fix the problems of the past, came with General Dynamics M61

Vulcan rotary gatling cannon as standard, and was packaged neatly inside the plane,

creating minimal aerodynamic drag.

The M61 is the smaller cousin of the A-10s GAU 8/A, and while its rounds are tiny in

comparison. The noise it emits still packs a punch. A massive cannon for a tiny aircraft.

[REF] [5]

The 6 barrelled cannon fires from the top position. Spinning 16 times a second, the

gatling cannon spews 100 20 mm rounds per second. [REF] [6] With an ammunition drum

capable of holding just 511 rounds, the full ammunition drum can be unloaded in just over

5 seconds.

The drum fits neatly behind the pilot here,

and the vibration of gun firing on the pilot's left side is jarring for many new pilots.

It is such a small fighter, and I think I've said this before, when you get into an F 16,

you sit down and you strap into that. It's not like you're sitting in the jet. It's like

you're wearing the jet and the gun is right here. As I sit there in the cockpit, the gun

barrels, the muzzles are right back here. It's just out of reach. It's so close though.

And so when you shoot the gun and you're shooting a hundred rounds a second of 20 millimeter,

it is unbelievably violent in the jet, but you're thinking about the target that you

have to go and shoot.

And so one of my experiences flying the F 16 was I was teaching as an instructor pilot

at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona. And so I had the privilege of taking in Air

Force pilots, they're wearing wings, they've graduated Air Force pilot training, but they're

not fighter pilots yet. And putting them into an F 16 and then we would make sure that everybody

shot the gun in training. In fact, they had to qualify with the gun as a weapon. And so

the first time experience for anybody shooting the gun in an F 16 is a little bit of an emotional

experience. People would say funny things, they would cuss. It was all on the tapes,

the HUD tapes, the heads up display recordings, and we come back in the debrief and we kind

of laugh at the students because they knew that they were going to go shoot the gun and

it was always shooting at a target on the ground is when they would do this for the

first time, raf.

And so it's a little bit intense. You're diving at the ground, you're doing 4 50, 500 knots

pointed at the ground. Obviously there's a survival instinct that kicks in there. You're

trying to put the pepper on the target, you pull the trigger for the first time and the

whole jet shakes violently. It's like somebody started up a chainsaw just in your left ear

and the whole jet is shaking and your hand's on the throttle there. And I can always remember

every time I would shoot the gun, there's this hard foam insulation that's just behind

the closeout panel, but the vibrations would cause some of those little bits of foam to

fleck off, to flake off. And they would come around the closeout panel and every time I

would go shoot the gun for practice a straight I'd come back, and as I'm getting out of the

airplane, I'd see these little yellow flex of foam all over my green flight suit on my

left arm.

The vibrations were so intense, you get used to it after the first time you shoot it, it's

a little bit of an emotional event. And then after that you're focused on, I need to put

those rounds on target. So the F 16 is incredibly well integrated as far as a weapon system

with that gun. And I'll tell you that both for air to ground and also for air-to-air,

the gun sites on the F 16 are incredibly precise. And even with dynamics on the aircraft, even

under maneuvers in terms of air-to-air shoots where we're shooting at a banner, there's

not been a lot of actual air-to-air dog fighting with the gun in recent memory. But the F 16

is accurate when it shoots at air-to-air practice targets to the point of it's almost not even

fair. It used to be kind of a scoring kind of a skill thing.

And now you can just park the Pippa on the target open up and it just t shreds anything

you pointed at in terms of an air-to-air target. And then in terms of airto ground, you can

be extremely precise with it. It's not quite a laser beam, but you can be extremely precise.

And there's even ways that you can couple up other sensors on the aircraft and share

information, even in a at night blacked out type of close air support roll, you can hit

what you want to hit on the ground.

All from a gun hidden away in this tiny fighter plane.

If we follow this leading edge strake down the wing we come to another device designed

to increase lift at high angles of attack. The leading edge flap. It deflects downwards

during high angle of attack maneuvers to delay stall, allowing air to remain attached to

the wing surface.

When performing a sustained turn at 0.9 Mach at cruising altitude, it increases lift by

18% and decreases drag by 22%. You can see them actuate here during the 5 g take off

I performed with the Thunderbirds back in 2019.

The seam between the leading edge flap and the main wing is barely noticeable and fitting

a control system into this wing, which is only around 4 centimeters thick where the

actuator system needed to fit, proved a challenge.

The amount of torque needed to actuate a control surface like this at 0.9 Mach is not trivial.

To solve this problem power is transferred from two hydraulic motors, which convert the

pressure in the hydraulic system into rotational motion. The hydraulic drive motor itself is

tucked away behind the M61 Rotary cannon, next to the hydraulic motor that drives the

cannon's rotation and ammo drive system. [REF] [7] This power has to be transferred to the

wing, and this is done through a series of torque shafts, angular gearbox, and down another

series of torque shafts with rotary actuators in between.

[REF] [8]

This leading edge flap is not controlled by the pilot however, it’s controlled automatically

by the flight computer, and the F-16 was ground breaking in this regard. The F-16 was the

first fighter aircraft to have a fly by wire system controlling every control surface.

The leading edge flaps, the flaperons, the rudder, and the horizontal tail of F-16 are

not controlled directly by the pilot.

A fly by wire system using a network of sensors, wires and computers as well as the pilots

own input to control the plane. The F-16 was employing this new technological wizardry

to allow it to efficiently spend the energy its single jet engine provided.

Traditional flight control systems, up to this point, used a mechanical system

connected directly to the pilot's controls to manipulate the flight surfaces. This is

footage of the F-4s control system. A heavy and complicated network of cables, rods, linkages

and hydraulics. It even has a 2 kilogram bob weights attached to the pilot's stick. A mechanism

designed to make it harder to pull the stick as gs increase, an analog feedback system.

To provide the pilot with an analog feedback on speed the F-4 also featured a diaphragm

that deflected with ram air taken from this probe on the vertical fin. This introduced

a force that acted to push the stick backwards, and indicated to the pilot to adjust a trim

setting. [FOOTAGE]

This system not only added a huge amount of weight to the F-4, reducing it’s maneuverability,

it added workload to the pilot and was more vulnerable to damage in dogfights with little

redundancy.

With a fly by wire system, none of this was needed. The first batch of F-16s actually

had a stick that was immovable. It was just force sensing. Later a small amount of movement

was added after pilots complained.

So the non movable stick kind of little known fact, you know the original F 16, it wasn't

a Lockheed Martin product, it was general dynamics and they had made the F one 11 previously,

tand the weapon system operator on the F one 11 had a small joystick that they could use

to steer the attack radar and that was a force based movement. It wasn't really a joystick

that would move, it was just the apply force. And so they took that same concept and then

they put it into the F 16 stick. So it was sort of a general dynamics thing of we've

got a force transducer, a control in scepter is what you'd call that.

So what it turns out though is that the human body, does really well with knowing where

your limbs hands are moving, knowing the position of your body is something that you naturally

do pretty well, and that is something called proprioceptive feedback. Well, when I have

a force based inceptor, I don't get that proprioceptive feedback anymore and it's really hard to judge.

It's something that I think if you challenge yourself to go pick up a small weight at the

gym and ask yourself, how much does that weigh without looking at it, it's actually kind

of hard to guess when you're down in those few pounds range.

And the maximum force you can put on the F 16 sidestick is 25 pounds. So it's kind of

hard to tell the difference between 15 pounds and 15.2 pounds. We don't do very well with

that. We do a lot better with knowing how far we've pulled something. And so the original

F 16 controls didn't move, and what pilots found was that they were having a difficult

time. The test pilots at Edwards were having a difficult time judging exactly how hard

they would move the controls, and so they would think they were going to get a certain

response from the jet and then they weren't, and then they'd pull harder too hard and then

they'd get a different response. there is a phenomenon called pilot induced oscillations

or pilot in the loop oscillations. Sometimes it's just shortened to p i o and the F 16,

even to this day, particularly if you have a lot of wing stores, can have a little bit

of a wing rock on landing. And if you look at some videos of F sixteens landing, sometimes

you can find if they have wing tanks or they're bringing back some bombs that they didn't

expend, you'll find an F 16 that'll sort of do this little back and forth wing rock. And

that is still, to this day, it's an artifact of having a sidestick that doesn't move very

much because it's one of those things that in terms of the mind to the hand, eye hand

coordination, you start to make a movement.

By the time you see the effect, it's more than you wanted. So you take it out, you put

in a correction. By the time the correction takes effect, it's more than you wanted. You

see it, you come back. It's a feedback loop in our minds. And now p i o is kind of a dirty

word in aircraft design and nobody wants any PIOs. I'll tell you PIOs pilot induced oscillations

are like snakes and some snakes are very dangerous and some snakes are not. And so the P I O

that's remaining in the F 16 in terms of its wing rock on final at landing is not super

dangerous.

These pilot induced oscillations can also be naturally stabilized through passive stability.

Where the plane naturally self corrects itself without pilot input. However the F-16 was

the first aircraft in history to do away with passive stability and make the plane intentionally

unstable in flight. This was done because it lowers the energy needed to fly and maneuver.

We can understand why this is with a simple analogy. Here we have two situations, a ball

placed on top of a hill and a ball placed in a valley. If we push the ball on top of

the hill, even a tiny bit, it will begin to accelerate down the hill and will not stop

until we put energy in to slow it down. This is an unstable system.

The opposite is true for the ball in the valley. Apply a force and the ball will roll uphill

and gravity will now provide a restoring force to bring it back. It may oscillate back and

forth a few times before coming to a stop, but it will eventually return to its original

position. This is a stable system.

We want to tailor our stability to find a balance between these two scenarios. Where

we can cause a rapid change in direction with a small energy input, while also managing

the amount of energy required to get back to our original position. This is called relaxed

static stability.

The F-16 pitch stability is one of the areas where this idea was applied. One of the key

factors that affects pitch stability is the location of the center of gravity and center

of lift.

The center of gravity for the F-4 is located about here. This is the point at which all

lift will act around, it’s like the fulcrum on a see-saw. As a result of the wing design

the center of lift is slightly behind the center of gravity. This would force the plane

to pitch downwards, but the horizontal stabilizer provides counteracting downwards force.

This isn’t ideal, we are wasting energy on downwards lift.

We need upward lift to fly. It also increases the amount of energy the F-4 needs to input

to change its pitch.

When it pitches upwards the force on the horizontal stabilizer decreases because of reduced air

flow, and as a result the weight of the plane, acting through the center of gravity, forward

of the center of lift, wants to move the nose down again.

But the pilot is trying to pitch the plane up, and this natural stability is fighting

them. So more kinetic energy is wasted by converting it to lift and drag with an increased

elevator deflection.

The F-16 is different. Its center of lift is ahead of the center of gravity, in part

thanks to those leading edge strakes pushing the center of lift forward. This means to

balance the plane the horizontal stabilizer needs to create upwards lift. This is useful

lift and reduces the energy needed to keep the plane airborne, and increases our maximum

lift pushing this line on our energy maneuverability diagram up, increasing our turn rate.

However, it is an unstable system. When the plane pitches up it increases the angle of

attack of the wing and increases the lift. Because the center of lift is ahead of the

center of gravity this forces the noses up even more.

In an air to air battle, energy isn’t just a fuel burning problem. Energy is needed to

maneuver, and as we spend it our ability to maneuver diminishes until we replenish it

by gaining speed or altitude again. any fighter pilot will tell you speed is life.

And as a fighter pilot, energy management is one of the most important things that you

can do. It's part of your situational awareness in that combat arena. You don't want to get

slow and you don't want to put yourself in a place where you are vulnerable and now I

can't turn, I can't move, I can't get my sensors or my weapons engaged where I need to. And

that's not just an air-to-air thing that's in every aspect of being a fighter pilot.

And that's even engaging in an air-to-ground arena because oftentimes when you're engaging

air to ground, an interdiction mission, a strike mission or close air support mission,

well you're supporting friendly troops on the ground, but there's also people that really

don't like you in the vicinity and they have weapons also. And so you have to maintain

that energy to be able to evade, to be able to move out of the way if you're getting shot

at.

And so with the energy management on the F 16, it's interesting that this jet doesn't

really talk to you in terms of feedback to the pilot. It doesn't really shake and rattle

and vibrate like a lot of other aircraft will do. I've flown the F 16, I've also flown the

F 15, the F 18, the A 10, and those aircraft will talk to you. Those other aircraft will

talk to you a lot more than the F 16. The F 16 just feels smooth all the time, whether

you're 200 knots and really slow or you're 600 knots and really fast, it just sort of

does what you ask it to do. You think you move the controls just a tiny bit and the

aircraft responds. So managing your energy becomes a situational awareness challenge

for the fighter pilot. And so a lot of that's helped now with the joint helmet mounted queuing

system or JE hemic is what it's called, where right there in your right eye, you've got

your airspeed, you've got your altitude, you've got your G, and so you can engage visually

in that fight. I can keep my eyes on the threat, the target, keep situational awareness, and

I don't have to look back in at my heads up display or down at the console to see how

fast I'm going and how high I'm going. You get the feel for it. You get a feel for how

the aircraft is responding. But that's where experience comes in and it's imperative experience

training comes in. It's imperative to maintain that energy awareness in any kind of fight.

The unstable design of the F-16 helped fighter pilots like David to manage energy more efficiently,

but to maintain control of an unstable fighter a pilot would have to make constant tiny corrections.

A task deemed impossible before fly by wire systems were invented.

The system consists of a network of accelerometers, gyros and air speed sensors, all fed into

a central computer that manages the work.

This instability makes the plane extremely nimble, ready to change direction with very

little energy input. We could see this in practice on the first flight of the F-16 prototype,

the YF-16. A flight that was never supposed to happen.

This was intended to be a short test along the runway, but the early control logic of

the plane would not allow the engine nozzle to open to cut thrust if the wheels had left

the ground. Meaning, even at idle, the plane was generating too much thrust.

Then the plane rolled left, which caused the pilot to counteract it with a roll right command,

but again the control logic of the early prototype was not dialed in, with control input resulting

in higher roll than expected at such a low speed. Resulting in an over correction, leading

to an oscillation.

With this being the first full fly by wire plane, there many lessons to be learned along

the way

But the benefits it now provides are game changing. It helps the pilot get the most

of out of the plane.

So for example, with an F 16, the airframe is limited to nine Gs. And so I can go and

pull back on the controls on an F 16, and if I am less than about 300 knots or so, actually

more like 400 knots, I'm not going to get nine Gs. It's just that's how much lift the

aircraft can make. But once I get above about 400 to four 50 knots, now the wing on the

F 16 is capable of creating at least nine Gs. In fact, it's capable of creating a lot

more than nine Gs. But what that fly by wire system does is when I start pulling back all

the way to the stop, it goes to nine Gs and it sits there. Even if the wing aerodynamic

effect of the whole airframe is that it could generate 15 GSS or 20 gs, the fly by wire

system says, Hey, I know you're asking for your best possible turn.

I'm just going to give you nine Gs because we're not going to break the airplane. Or

again, in a slow speed fight where I'm having to, it's less than 300 knots. I'm having to

crank the nose around to either bring my nose onto the adversary or maybe I'm trying to

jin out of the way of an adversary's weapon system, pull suddenly on the controls of an

aircraft and your angle of attack is going to increase rapidly. Alright, well with a

lot of more conventional aircraft, you're worried about things like stall. Well, the

F 16 doesn't really stall in the same kinds of ways, but that flyby wire system says,

Hey, I know that if you get past about 26 degrees angle of attack, bad things are going

to start to happen. In terms of the controllability, the F 16 stops behaving as predictably above

26 degrees angle of attack.

And so they fly by a wire system simply says, that's where I'm going to stop you right there,

and I'm going to give you up to 26 degrees or nine Gs and do with that whatever you need

to.

A plane capable of 9 g maneuvers is not much use if the pilot cannot remain conscious during

them. The F-16 has some interesting adaptations in the cockpit for this.

Traditionally the control stick was mounted centrally, between the pilots legs. This made

it mechanically simpler, with the network of mechanical linkages being central and symmetric

throughout the plane. It also allowed the pilots to use both hands to wrestle the control

surfaces into position during high g maneuvers as the air flowing by them tried to push them

back down.

For the F-16 this wasn’t a problem, and the control stick was mounted conveniently

on the pilots right hand console. A comfortable resting position that makes it far easier

for the pilot to control the plane while trying to stay conscious at 9 gs.

The seat is also reclined by 30 degrees, this makes the F-16 feel like an executive office

in the sky with unobstructed 360 degrees thanks to the bubble canopy, but it also comes with

major advantages to increasing the pilots g tolerance.

The most common g force a pilot experiences is directly down. When flying in a straight

line even cells in your body have inertia in that direction, and when suddenly pitching

the plane upwards, those cells want to continue traveling in that direction.

This isn’t too much of a problem for cells to stay fixed, but your blood cells are free

to travel through your body. And in a scenario like this they race in the direction of that

travel, pooling in your lower extremities.

This starves the pilots brain of oxygen and they can pass out as a result. This effect

could be minimized by placing the pilot flat on their back, with the entire body aligned,

blood wouldn’t have to fight gravity to get to the brain, but this position isn’t

practical. The F-16 found a compromise with a 30 degree

recline, reducing the pressure on the heart by the equivalent of about 1 g. The recline

also makes it easier to fit the pilot into the diminutive forward fuselage of the f-16,

Another measure to increase the pilot's g-tolerance is the g-suit. A pilots g-suit contains multiple

air bladders that are connected directly to F-16. When the plane is instructed to perform

a high g-maneuver it immediately begins to pump compressed air into these bladders. This

squeezes the pilots legs and to limit the volume available for blood to pool into.

The F-16 is a 45 year old aircraft, and many advances have occurred in aviation since its

maiden flight, stealth technology and interconnected intelligence networks have been the main focus

for 5th generation aircraft like the F-35 that have been slowly replacing the F-16,

but one thing hasn’t changed since 1975. Physics.

The F-16 pushes the boundaries of maneuverability for a fighter aircraft and the pilots inside.

It’s a highly capable fighter aircraft that the strongest air force in the world deemed

capable of continuing service until 2048. The plane will be a major asset in the next

phase of the fight for Ukraines freedom, providing essential air support to the troops on the

ground as they attempt to push forward through entrenched Russian defenses.

Ukraine has been targeting long range anti aircraft batteries with success, and captured

oil platforms off the coast of Crimea that were housing Russian sensors. All to clear

the way for Ukrainian Su-24s to get close enough to launch cruise missiles, targeting

high value Russian assets in Crimea, including a kilo class submarine.

The F-16 can also carry these cruise missiles. Every asset in the Ukrainian air force is

going to play a vital role in Ukraines fight for freedom.

Having an actual fighter pilot add context to this story was incredibly valuable, helping

us truly understand the power of those energy maneuverability diagrams. We ended up talking

to David for nearly two hours and ended up cutting an incredibly interesting story from

this video, about how he helped develop an automatic obstacle avoidance system for the

F-16 that has saved lives. A fascinating system that works in a way I didn’t expect, I had

assumed it simple uses radar to measure distance, but that is not how it works. You can watch

that extra video on Nebula right now, along with an uncut explanation of energy maneuverability

diagrams.

Access usually costs 5 dollars a month, but you can get access right now with the huge

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When I am taking flights to shoot interviews I often download videos from Nebula, which

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