Warbirds Thread

For the same reason you don't fly the SR-71 over non third world countries anymore. It may be fast, but now there are missiles with a good chance to catch it anyway.
Meanwhile the tradeoffs for being so fast are terrible in terms of payload, agility, maintenance, nevermind total, absolute lack of stealth.
I have been bringing up agility this whole time
 
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MiG-21bis of Zambia. The USSR sent sixteen of these to Zambia starting in 1980 but they are all out of service now, retired to a boneyard in 2005 and replaced by Chinese Shenyang J-6's, which themselves were a variant of the MiG-19.

 
AutoGyros of the Burkina Faso armed Forces.



These two seat gyroplanes are built by Celiar Aviation, based out of Malta. Burkina Faso reportedly has four of them in service.
 
South African Cheetahs. Significantly upgraded from the French Mirage III by the South African Defense Company Denel. Less than forty were built and now the biggest operators are the Ecuadorian Air Force and the US Defense Contractor Draken International which bought a dozen of them to operate as adversarial aircraft for pilot training.

 
Here's a rare treat for y'all:



This is one of between two and five Mitsubishi J2M Raidens which were brought to the United States for testing and evaluation by the Army Air Corps. Around 1952, it was acquired by the City of Los Angeles and placed on outdoor display as part of the "Travel Town" collection in Griffith Park before being donated to the Planes of Fame museum in the early 90s when Travel Town was revamped to be a train museum rather than mixed vehicles.

The plane had been misidentified as a Zero and the Griffith Park collection was incredibly obscure as it was basically just a handful of old vehicles on the back lot of the Los Angeles Zoo; needless to say, aircraft historians flipped out when L.A.'s beat-up old Zero turned out to be the only known Raiden left in the entire world.

Edit: BTW, that's a real Long Lance torpedo in the same picture, too.
 
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Here's a rare treat for y'all:



This is one of between two and five Mitsubishi J2M Raidens which were brought to the United States for testing and evaluation by the Army Air Corps. Around 1952, it was acquired by the City of Los Angeles and placed on outdoor display as part of the "Travel Town" collection in Griffith Park before being donated to the Planes of Fame museum in the early 90s when Travel Town was revamped to be a train museum rather than mixed vehicles.

The plane had been misidentified as a Zero and the Griffith Park collection was incredibly obscure as it was basically just a handful of old vehicles on the back lot of the Los Angeles Zoo; needless to say, aircraft historians flipped out when L.A.'s beat-up old Zero turned out to be the only known Raiden left in the entire world.

Edit: BTW, that's a real Long Lance torpedo in the same picture, too.

There's also a MXY-7 Ohka and a MXY-8 Akigusa(training glider for the J8M1 Shisui, the Japanese iteration of the Me-163 Komet) in the picture.
 
There's also a MXY-7 Ohka and a MXY-8 Akigusa(training glider for the J8M1 Shisui, the Japanese iteration of the Me-163 Komet) in the picture.

Indeed.And Dunno how somebody could mistake Raiden with Zero.
 
Except for the Kawasaki Ki-61.

Kawasaki_Ki-61-14.jpg


The Allies thought those were a licence-built version of something Italian. They weren't.

Well,one attacked B.25 during Doolittle raid,which survived and reported attack by Me 109.
And japaneese used italian Mc202 plans,but only partially.
 
There's also a MXY-7 Ohka and a MXY-8 Akigusa(training glider for the J8M1 Shisui, the Japanese iteration of the Me-163 Komet) in the picture.

Close but not quite — that is an actual J8M1 Shisui, one of only two surviving examples out of the seven prototypes built. Depending on how you weigh "rarity of surviving examples" versus "rarity of aircraft overall", it's either the rarest plane in the collection or the second-rarest after the Raiden.

Here's a better look at the Shisui, and Planes of Fame's replica Komet for comparison; you can see that while the J8M1 is directly based on the Komet, it's an evolved derivative rather than a simple copy:



 
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Because it was out there in 1952 when there was no Internet you could use to easily look up incredibly obscure niche information.
Obscure? everybody had photos from WW2,including those of Zero.
At least owners of museum must knew that.
 
Close but not quite — that is an actual J8M1 Shisui, one of only two surviving examples out of the seven prototypes built.

Wasn't aware any Shisui had survived.

Here's a better look at the Shisui, and Planes of Fame's replica Komet for comparison; you can see that while the J8M1 is directly based on the Komet, it's an evolved derivative rather than a simple copy:

That's why I said 'Japanese iteration', instead of 'Japanese copy'. I am aware some design modification was done.
 

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