Interview with Stuart Reid on the T-38 Talon 

120 hours in the White Rocket in UPT at Laughlin AFB Class 69-05 (Grad. Feb.'69) - Great seeing it's still flying 50 years later ----

dan kuettel Cheers Dan. It certainly is a good looking jet.

Cheers :)

Cheers Brian!

Glad you’re enjoying them Scott.

Shaun Evertson he is very passionate about the BBMF. More to come this week.

His passion really comes through. And yay for more to come! :)

Matt Thornton cheers Matt.

Cheers Colin.

In the process​ of that at the moment, Loki.

It’s a strong possibility.

He is a very knowledgeable bloke. Glad you enjoyed it :)

Matthew Sloan glad you enjoyed it, Matthew.

Glad to have discovered Aircrew Interview, keep up the good work. I look forward to watching future videos (getting ready to watch the Jas Hawker video).

Matthew Sloan great stuff. I hope you enjoy :)

The new mic for me so you can hear my questions is coming soon, Charles.

Cheers Simon.

I have only seen one display on YT by them (t-38 Thunderbirds) but they were certainly great aircraft for their display.

The T-38s are all very old now and need to be replaced. The last brand-new T-38 was built in the early 1970s! They were very good trainers for the 1960s and early 1970s but should have been replaced starting from the mid-1980s. Anything they build now will be at least a $35million plane if NOT a $50million plane. What you see in airshows and what's needed for combat are oftentimes too very different things. The equipment demo'd at airshows is NOT flown to the limit. If they did that more often, we'd be having a lot more accidents than we do! The F-16, btw, is NOT at its best in airshows. It was designed to fly/handle its best in the middle of its flight envelope which is far faster and at higher altitudes than you will ever see at an airshow. The F-18, ironically, is MUCH better in the low-end of the flight envelope (the LERX makes the F-18 handle beautifully at low speeds BUT if you're flying at those speeds you've left yourself very vulnerable and with fewer options for maneuvering and getting out of trouble) but nobody who's operated both planes will say an F-18 is going to out-muscle an F-16 in SANE combat! It simply won't happen when the F-16 can choose to engage or leave whenever it wants to. It's a much more powerful machine with greater acceleration and far higher climb rate. The T-38s really haven't been up to the standards of the latest planes since at least the mid-1970s. They're 6-G aircraft and they can barely handle that without losing altitude. They were fine trainers and superior to frontline planes in handling when the frontlines planes were Century series fighters, F-4s, F-111s, and planes like the EEL and Mirage III. Since the F-16 debuted, the T-38s haven't come off so well. Considering the F-16 is a 9-G plane and every other fighter since the mid-1970s can at least sustain 7, 7.5G and pull 9G's instantaneously the T-38 is just not adequate. It simply doesn't have the thrust and aerodynamics to keep up. They can be outrun, out-accelerated, and out-turned. The avionics are ancient and simply nothing like the prospective pilot could expect to work with in a frontline fighter. They've needed replacement since the mid-1980s -- the T-38 fleet has already been re-winged once! -- but it's always been one of those things the USAF puts off because they want to buy the latest toys (ie, fighters) and neglect training when there's a budget crunch or rundown. The same scenario has played itself out again and again since the end of World War II and you think they would have learned the importance of training considering how many men and machines were lost because of inadequate training during that conflict! (Let's not kid ourselves -- the main reason WHY the kill ratios were so ridiculously favorable for the Allies in the second half of WWII was because the best Axis pilots were KILLED because their countries kept those pilots on the frontlines constantly without rotating them back home to train the NEXT round of pilots. Their combat skills were not preserved, lost for good, and the guys that replaced them simply weren't prepared when they went into combat.) The problem is USAF no longer has a trainer that's up to training pilots that adequately emulates the frontline equipment. Having an economical trainer is even more important than ever since it costs at least $22,000 or better per hour to train in a frontline fighter! (I've heard closer to $35,000/hour for the F-22 and the F-35 isn't expected to be much more economical, either...) Short of re-engining the T-38s and rebuilding them as "F-20B's" the planes are just not up to the job anymore. Heh -- ironically, if they HAD built the F-20A they might have had the basis for an "adequate" trainer in place now. (The F-20 was the F-5 design pushed to its limit... The design simply had no room for further growth without a major, major redesign and even the F-20 really wasn't as good a multi-role design as the F-16 even if it was arguably close in interception/close combat capability. The F-16 is without a doubt a better bomber than any F-5/F-5 derivative.) Boeing or Lockheed will likely get the next-gen trainer contract but it'll be a plane that will cost at least three times what an F-20B would have! (And they'll pretty much use F404 or F414 engines, too.) The Korean design being offered as the next-gen trainer is pretty much a hybrid between the F-16 and F-18 in aerodynamics and equipment.

My neighbor flys for A/A and frequently flies to LAX from Charlotte. He says when leaving LAX he will regularly fly north so he can hit the jetstream on the trip home, easily knocks an hour off the flight :-) On the other hand, he sometimes has to go down to the Gulf of Mexico to stay away from it... The rules of the universe, can't have good without bad ;-)

I think the conversion is one knot equals 1.15 statute miles.

Enjoy :)

Unfortunately not. I am going to keep them as a live event only, but that could change in the future.

OK, thanks for the reply. Cheers!

Agreed. We are now going to incorporate this into future interviews.

He means that the aircraft was very reliable, it rarely had any mechanical or electrical failures that would cause it to be grounded [unserviceable] until they were repaired. He only had to step out of one aircraft that was unfit to fly as a result of mechanical or electrical problems.

Is that Bulgarian markings? 🤔 🇧🇬