This week’s Movie Monday takes an early 90s look at the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark. After watching the final public displays of the Royal Australian Air Force F-111s in Singapore in February, I was interested to delve into the history of this aircraft.
While not a perfect parallel, The F-111 Aardvark was derived from a similar philosophy that gave life to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Create a single fighter platform that can leverage common capabilities across different military services. In this case, the F-111A was developed for the US Air Force and the F-111B was developed for the Navy. However, increased weight and design changes eventually caused the cancellation of the Naval variant.
The five-part hour-long episode of Wings will give a solid history into the novel design features and operations of the Aardvark in Vietnam, Libya and the Gulf. Parts two through five are after the jump. Enjoy!
In addition, this post was optimized with the new Apture 2.0 which you may have already noticed. The new features included the branded search bar at the top of this page. Try highlighting F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or any other text and click ‘search’ to see some of the new 2.0 features.
This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.
This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.