viper12 wrote:If my memory serves, in a documentary series from the late '90s about the Air Force's history, at least from WW2 (if not earlier) till the Gulf War, which mainly (exclusively ?) interviewed the top brass, one of the generals recalled that when flying in the F-15, he could see the flaps move on their own multiple times a second, or rather ordered by the flight control system, which goes to show that stability isn't a clear-cut definition.
Now if someone knows which documentary I'm talking about, I'd be happy to know the name, as my Googlefu couldn't retrieve it. In particular, one of the generals said something like "a treasure of experience" which was learned during the Vietnam War and applied to the Gulf War.
To answer my own question (on page 73) over 6 months later...
The quote comes from the documentary
Beyond the Wild Blue: A History of the U.S. Air Force, episode 4,
Rebuilding for Space.
Starting at around 24:50, General Larry Welch said of the F-15: "You got the impression flying the airplane that you really had good hands. Landing the airplane was a very smooth thing, most of the time you could hardly tell you touched the ground. Air refueling behind the tanker was the same sort of thing; you pulled in behind the tanker and it just sat there. And so you got the impression that "Boy, I am really good", but if you ever watched the airplane from the outside, you'd see what was happening, and all the ailerons were flopping around and the elevators were flopping around, the controls were flopping all over the place, but you weren't doing it, the flight control computer was doing it."
Posted: 08 Oct 2019, 15:28