As a follow-up to my earlier look at the issues with an article critiquing modern carrier operating range, I decided to do some experimental work with the planes they actually fly today. Obviously, "experimental" isn't quite the right term, as I don't actually have a Super Hornet of my very own. Instead, I used Command: Modern Operations, which is a simulation package used by a number of professional organizations as well as by amateurs.
An A-6E lands on USS America
I started with a fairly simple test. I took pairs of F/A-18C+s, F/A-18Es, and A-6E Intruders, and loaded each of them with Mk 83 iron bombs. All three were the latest type in the database, and each of the Hornets carried a quartet of the bombs, while each Intruder carried 10. All aircraft were launched from a field in Hawaii, and set to fly to an island far to the south. Weather conditions were entirely calm. One of each pair was assigned an altitude of 1,000', the other an altitude of 36,000'. For the low-flyers, the Hornet ran out at 223.1 nm, the Super Hornet at 285.4 nm, and the Intruder at 290.8 nm. The high-flying Hornet hit bingo at 327.2 nm, the Super Hornet at 420.2 nm, and the Intruder at 418.5 nm.
So in this case, it looks like the Super Hornet and the Intruder had essentially the same range, to within the margin of error. But there are some caveats to this. The Intruder carries 2.5 times the bombload, and does so with a single drop tank instead of the three that each Hornet is loaded with. As such, there's a long-range loadout with 6 Mk 83s and three drop tanks, which has substantially more range than the Hornets do. So the obvious advantage is to the Intruder, in terms of bombload delivered at a given range.
Super Hornets and legacy Hornets fly together
But the real-life picture is more complicated than that for several reasons. First, the Super Hornet is a multirole aircraft. This has several implications. Every Intruder on a carrier deck is a plane that can only be used for dropping bombs, and is completely useless if the need arises for air combat.1 A Super Hornet wing theoretically can be either all fighters or all attack aircraft, while a wing that's split half-and-half will be weaker in either mission. More importantly, the Hornet family is capable of flexing missions in the air, giving it self-escort capability. On the first night of the Desert Storm air campaign, a pair of Hornets, each carrying 4 2,000 lb bombs, encountered two MiG-21s. They shot down the Iraqi jets, then continued to their targets. A mission previously flown by a pair of Intruders escorted by a pair of Tomcats might now be a quartet of Super Hornets, each with both bombs and AAMs, with a score of 16 bombs to 20. With the increasing smartness of modern bombs, this force will be considerably more powerful than any of equivalent size when the Intruder was still in service.
Another issue is speed. The Intruder, at least in Command, cruises at 415 kts, while the Hornet and Super Hornet cruise at 480 kts. This is an obvious problem in mixed groups, and I ran a test to see how the Intruders would fare if they were asked to keep up with the fighters. The results weren't encouraging. The low-altitude A-6 hit bingo only 257.4 nm out, the high-altitude one at 364.1 nm. At high altitude in particular, keeping up with faster fighters would have imposed substantial costs in range, dragging it below the Super Hornet.
I'm not going to claim that the Intruder wasn't able to carry a heavier payload than the Super Hornet, or carry the same payload to a longer range. It plainly was, although the advantages are often overstated. But it came at a cost in survivability and versatility. As the USN brings a dedicated refueling platform back to the carriers with the MQ-25, the range gap seems to be closing, and the other superior traits of the Super Hornet will become apparent.
1 There were plans to use Intruders as missile platforms to counter the Soviet bombers in the late Cold War, but they were never implemented, and they would have had to be backed up by actual fighters anyway. ⇑
Comments
As I recall, the one seat Legacy and Super Hornets both have substantially better internal fuel capacity (+10% or more, I've seen different figures) due to space not getting taken up by the extra man. that's not going to eliminate the gap, but it's not insignificant either.
How would an intruder with buddy pods compare to the MQ-25 as a tanker?
@cassander - The C and E as examined above are the single-seat Legacy and Super Hornets. The two-seaters are the D and F; they'll have less range than the above, widening the range/payload gap.
Bean, a 1001 apologies if this sounds like a quibble as it definitely is not meant to be. At the beginning you say that the Hornet "ran out" at 223 NM and the Intruder at 290 NM while the high altitude flights "hit bingo" at their distances.
Are you saying that the low flying Hornet flamed out at 223 NM while the high fliers had to bingo back to the boat? Just curious as bingo normally means a decision fuel state and not a flameout state and from the numbers you gave for the high fliers it would seem to be this is what you were saying. Just a little confused over the "ran out" term.
Do the charts give an equivalent Mach for the Hornet and Intruder at their 480 and 415 KTAS?
Also, can the Hornet climb all the way up to 360 with all those external stores?
Since I don't think I mentioned it at the time – your critique was really good work.
It seems pretty clear that [assuming we had kept A-6s and F-14 airframes and upgraded their weapons systems] two Tomcats and two Intruders would be better than four Super-Hornets (the Intruders would have more bombs; the Tomcats would have more missiles) but on the other hand, that's not considering the expense of maintaining the two separate airframes.
With that being said, I think a somewhat overlooked disadvantage of multirole aircraft is that their pilots are splitting their time between routine carrier-related training [the most important thing to be proficient in], ground-attack training, and air-combat training, and as a result they are less proficient at each. I suppose it's still possible to split squadrons into fighter and attack squadrons, but I haven't heard of it.
On the gripping hand, nobody wants to not have a way to shoot back. But then again, A-6s and A-7s already had that with the Sidewinder before the Hornet and Super Hornet.
@Alexander
Based on some quick googling, the MQ-25 seems to have approximately the same fuel offload as the KA-6, although I can't find official numbers on this.
@Neal
All of the numbers given are bingo numbers, although my stylistic rendering may have obscured it. I don't remember knot equivalents for the speeds, sorry.
@Suvorov
I'm not sure that training is nearly as much of a problem for multirole aircraft as you might think. Modern GUI-type systems are a lot easier to train on and use than the previous generation of computerized combat systems, to say nothing of the sort of stuff those airplanes replaced. The desire for this has driven platform upgrades in at least one case I'm aware of, and when the system is relatively intuitive to use it's a lot easier to train people on it, which reduces the penalty for multirole training.
I certainly believe that modern GUIs have made multirole aircraft easier to use – and, as I understand it, they have allowed us to do away with the need for the RIO and bombardier seats, as cassander mentioned, which seems like a huge improvement. But F-4 pilots were competent at using their aircraft as multirole weapons platforms. My concern is less that pilots would not be capable of operating the weapons systems and more that they would not be as tactically proficient as possible. There's more to soldiering than being able to competently operate your weapons!
I don't think it's any cause for grave concern – U.S. pilots are probably better trained than our adversaries – but just as single-mission aircraft are more likely to be better at their mission than multirole aircraft, so too are their pilots likely to be more experienced in practicing their mission, even if modern GUI and weapons systems can do a lot to bridge that gap.
The main concern regarding readiness I've heard from naval aviators in the US has been around finding any time to train at all between flying ground attack missions in the Middle East and maintenance. This is a problem that the Air Force is running into as well. Put simply, we don't have as many planes and pilots as we used to at the end of the Cold War, and simultaneously, we're asking them to fly to more places carry out more missions.
While I still think that US pilots are better trained that pilots from any other military in the world, I also think that question is somewhat irrelevant. What really hurt US Air Force and naval aviation in Vietnam wasn't that our pilots couldn't outfly North Vietnamese pilots. What hurt was the fact that our pilots couldn't outfly North Vietnamese pilots and North Vietnamese SAMs at the same time.
I think we could say something similar about the situation today. In a prospective great-power conflict, our pilots are going to be going up against surface-to-air systems that have taken just as much advantage of the advances in electronics as our aircraft. While stealth does help with this, stealth is not (and was never claimed to be) a panacea.
My real concern is that our pilots have flown so many missions in relatively permissive airspace, that they've atrophied their skills in penetrating hostile airspace, especially airspace rendered hostile by new surface-to-air systems like the S-400. This is something that we were superb at during Desert Storm, using a combination of stealth and SEAD to substantially degrade Saddam Hussein's air defenses prior to the ground invasion. I wonder if we could pull off such a feat today, now that our adversaries have had twenty-seven years to think about how they'd deal with stealth.
@Suvorov
I think the issue of maintenance is an underrated one. The F-14, to me, is like the Italian sports car of naval aircraft. Excellent performance... when it's not in the garage. The Tomcat was notorious for being a "garage queen" because of the complexity of its swing-wing mechanism. As a result, it's plausible to me that one actually gets better readiness out of a fleet of all F-18s, because it's a simpler airframe and the standardization simplifies the spare parts situation.
As I heard Secretary Spencer say in a speech once, sometimes it's worth a certain amount of capability to have a large increase in readiness. A flying F-18 contributes far more air-to-air capability than a F-14 in the hangar.
I'm probably too attracted to multirole aircraft (and indeed ships) so my first thought was that if an Intruder can also fill the tanker role, then the fact that is an efficient bomb truck (at least against less heavily defended targets) makes it a better use of hanger space than the Stingray. Being able to loiter for longer or carry a greater payload would be very valuable for a lot of the attack missions US aircraft have performed over the past couple of decades. In a less one sided conflict they would give the air wing the same extra range that MQ-25s offer. I don't know if it would have been easier to develop an optionally manned Intruder than the Stingray, but I would imagine something like that is possible.
@Alexander
The problem is that some missions play together better than others, and anything to do with weapons makes life a lot more difficult. An optionally-manned bomber/tanker/surveillance plane is going to cost a whole lot more than an unmanned tanker/surveillance platform. You need to make sure it's man-rated for when the pilot is in the plane, and you need all the stuff to support weapons, which raises everyone's paranoia. So if we primarily need a tanker, we can easily bolt on some sensors, but bolting on bombs and a pilot is not nearly so easy.
(All this ignores the fact that optional manning is basically just a red herring to distract the "everything should be a UAV" brigade. You're paying all the costs of manning in terms of weight, cost, and certification, and raising all sorts of questions in terms of things like crew proficiency.)
And if we're trying to penetrate airspace defended by S-400s, we're probably also going to be dealing with airspace defended by Flankers (or even 5th gen fighters), which are much more of a comparative threat than Iraq's fighters were at the time. As you pointed out, that was what was part of what was so troublesome in Vietnam.
We also had three different dedicated SEAD jets in Desert Storm. I wonder if hanging HARMs off of F-16s (which is awesome, don't get me wrong, being able to put anti-radiation missiles on as many aircraft types as possible is unambiguously good!) will be able to compensate for the apparently loss in dedicated airborne jamming assets.
In the Tomcat's defense, it's not especially fair to compare a 30 year old airframe with a 5 year old one (as people were doing with Super Hornets and Tomcats around the turn of the century) – but yes, I agree that maintenance is a very underrated aspect of aircraft performance, and of course the Tomcat's swing wing is going to be a maintenance nightmare, comparatively. I brought up the F-14 more because it was the logical alternative to escort A-6s and less to argue that we should restart the production line.
Interestingly, stealth aircraft are also supposed to be "garage queens," – I wonder if the F-35's stealth coatings will end up being less maintenance heavy than earlier stealth aircraft or if they will replace the Tomcats in the hangar.
"Suvorov said... My real concern is that our pilots have flown so many missions in relatively permissive airspace, that they’ve atrophied their skills in penetrating hostile airspace, especially airspace rendered hostile by new surface-to-air systems like the S-400."
...There's something to be said for that viewpoint, and almost certainly we're going to take losses because of it in The Next Unpleasantness. Keep in mind though that the point of RED FLAG and TOPGUN is to give our guys that experience, and those units do an amazing job especially when it comes to the electronics side of things. That aspect of the exercises tends to be overlooked in the furballs and explosions, but it's a vital and constantly upgraded one. We can always use more and better experience; absolutely, but I'm reasonably confident that we have been working on ways to tamp down the threat. As far as the F-16 SEAD goes, I worked with them with 20FW at Shaw AFB, SC - the East Coast Weasels. HARM may be getting a little long in the tooth, but it's still surprisingly up to date and should be more than capable of dealing with anything they can reasonably come up against. The problem is if we end up against a peer adversary, we should be able to knock down the SAM threat - but at the price of the Weasel force. We don't have a dedicated jammer - the idea (as I understand it) is that the EF-18 Growler force will support USAF and USN ops, and that's fine...until they can't, or the carrier's gone. We need to perhaps get the Growler's electronics onto an F-16 and get back into the tactical jamming business.
Just my .02, YMMV.
Mike
Mike, there are a couple of land-based Growler squadrons dedicated to supporting USAF operations. I agree that the USAF getting out of the jammer business was stupid, but it's not like they don't have any support on it.
@bean
Just want to let you know that you're not alone in being frustrated about the inability of finding reliable MQ-25 stats. It's not quite as frustrating as lockheed martin's persistent refusal to say outright how they're designating V upgraded F-16s, but it's up there.
@Mike Kozlowski
There is a positive note here, for some amount of time the Navy has been buying a substantial number of its F/A-18Fs in the F+ configuration, which is an F with the few hundred pounds of extra wiring that go into the EA-18Gs. It's not clear exactly how many aircraft aircraft have been bought like that, but the ones that have should, at least in theory, be readily convertible to EA-18s should the need arise.
Also, while the air force doesn't have the 111s anymore, they do still have the EC-130Hs/EC-37Bs. They can't do wild weasel stuff (though the Soviets did try that with AN-12s), but they can still provide a lot of support.
@cassander
The RAAF purchased 12 of its 24 F/A-18Fs in the F+ configuration you've described. It then decided it wanted some EA-18Gs - and, rather than converting the F+s, it purchased 12 brand-new airframes. Maybe the conversion process is more expensive than expected?
@DampOctopus
Or they just decided that they would rather have 12 EA-18Gs and 24 F/A-18Fs instead of 12 of each, and got their politicians to pay for it. The wiki article indicates that the conversion for 12 airframes would have cost $A300 million in 2012.
@DampOctopus
Bean's answer would be mine. If the Aussies end up neither replacing that EA-18 that caught fire nor converting one of their F+s, that might be a good indicator that the conversion is pricier than originally envisioned.