Least Fortunate Timed Tweet Of The Day (And Why The Dangerous F-15 Eagle Is Long Overdue Being Scrapped)

Three and a half hours later:

This is what the North Sea looked like today over the area the plane went down.

Low stratus cloud combined with frets (sea fog) makes it hard to differentiate between land and sea, and if a pilot is relying on vision instead of instruments – or is relying completely on either one or the other, the consequences can be fatal.

All over Britain since lockdown started, the population has had to put up with gung-ho skeets from the military flying any way they like because they have a near total monopoly of the skies. This has included military jets screaming low at speed over where I live which has never happened before.

An accident like this was bound to happen, and it should come as little surprise that it was an F-15 Eagle, which may give your average All-American dipshit hard ons because this jet blew up lots of upstart third worlder in Africa and the Middle East for Uncle Sam, but it is a museum piece which requires engine overhauls every twenty hours – something which last happened with British military jets when the Gloster Meteor was still in service. The RAF are only doing this with Typhoon II’s, brought into service in 2004.

Which raises the question why the Americans are flying this pre-computer age jet at supersonic speed over the British Isles.

The F-15 Eagle has been around since 1976, and there has long been complaints that it has been kept in service so long when there have been decades of complaints about the aircraft’s longerons (the load bearing part of an aircraft’s framework, designed to take the strains from manouevring in flight away from critical parts of the aircraft’s body, eg. the joints between the wings and fuselage) not being up to the task.

On 2nd November 2007, the crash of an F-15 led to the entire USAF fleet being grounded temporarily. A report on 28th November 2007 blamed catastrophic failure of the longerons caused the aircraft to disintegrate in flight. A second report on 10th January 2008 confirmed another nine aircraft had been found with the same structural problems.

The aircraft which disintegrated in flight was an F-15 C – the same variant which crashed into the sea without giving any distress call today.