Military Aircraft Videos

Dogfight story :Vietnam May 10, 1972 Randy 'Duke' Cunningham

Vietnam May 10, 1972 Randy 'Duke' Cunningham was the pilot and his RIO was Lt. (jg.) Willie 'Irish' Driscoll flying a F-4J. After WOII and Korea the designers of airplanes assumed that the day of the gun, on a fighterplane, was over. F-4's in Vietnam, on this sortie, had only missiles and NO GUNS also training was poor. Before Vietnam it was forbidden to train a dogfight situation, it was considered out dated,technology was the answer rockets, missiles, nuke-strike.....why did you need a fighter for? After the great losses in airbattles over Vietnam, new trainings programs where introduced. The NAVY came with "TOP GUN"(almost at the end of the Vietnam war) and the USAF came with "Red Flag". The new generation fighters,even the F-22 "raptor", have all guns now, a hard lesson was learnt, in the first gulf-war the low-tech plane such as the A-10 thunderbolt, was the nr1 tank-killer, this was not appreciated by the the designers. link: http://www.acepilots.com/vietnam/cunningham.html