Flying and landing a F-15 with only one wing

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Pretty amazing...Perhaps the engine inlet and the bottom of the cowl provided some lift, but who knows. He got very lucky. The laws of lift / gravity / drag / thrust says he should have gone into an unrecoverable spin. A passenger jet would never fly with one wing.
 
Very impressive. He must have put the aileron down to reduce lift on the winged side and relied on a lot of speed and elevator angle to keep him up. As he said, just like flying a rocket!
 
The pilot said he came in fast for the landing, right? At what speed does an F-15 still fly ballistically?
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It has a pretty low stall speed. I saw one at an air show totally upstage the Blue Angels in their F-18"s(which are by no means slouches. He came in as if to land, seemed to be almost hovering, then raised his gear, stood on his tail, lit the afterburners and ascended like a rocket.
 
I don't think we can discount the amount of thrust the F-15's engines put out, as well as the somewhat "lifting body" design aspects, which I beleive are the major factors allowing them to be flown with one wing. I believe there was at least one more incident like this one, but I can't recall for certain.
 
So far the middle east dogfight scoreboard since 1948:

=Israel 1000

=combined Arab air forces 00

After seeing this video one can see why!!

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I stand corrected!

Of course I was only talking air-air which according to the IDF AF from 1948-1998 50, years the real score is:

Israel 39 lost planes

Combined arab mideast airforces 639 lost planes.

In the future I'll be more careful not to blow these types of comparisons out of proportion.
It looks as if the Arab pilots did much better than expected.
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the F-15 has more thrust then weight, one of very few planes that do. it doesn't need much from wings for lift, mostly just for flight control. it is also one of the few planes that can accelerate straight up.

Side note:

It looks like the IAF has upgraded engines to the GE F110-129 (also used in the USAF F-16 viper) which are 29,000 lbs of thrust each. the USAF's F-15s use only the older PW F100-200 which are 24,000 lbs of thrust each.
They do have variable exhaust nozzles, but not thrust vectoring.
In a former life in the USAF I worked on the GE F110-129 engines that were used to flight test the F-15 with upgraded engines. it was a joint project with GE and the USAF, the USAF apparently never upgraded our planes though, probably becuase of the F-22 coming online.
I've also checked out the ACTIVE's engines up close. very cool but very complicated thrust vectoring system. it's unique to the ACTIVE only.

anyone notice the "A4" in the video is really an F100 super sabre? I love it when they use the wrong stick footage!!
 
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