• cobysev@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    S’all good. I spent 20 years in the US Air Force. I don’t know a damn thing about airplanes. There are plenty of civilians who have way more knowledge than I do on the subject.

    I worked an IT job in the military. 90% of my job was spent sitting in dark, cold server rooms, about as far removed from the planes as one could get.

    From my time overhearing people talk about planes at work, I think I’ve figured out most of the letter designators? F = fighter, B = bomber, C = cargo, A = attack (how that’s different from fighter, I dunno).

    I rode in a C-130 on my way to a deployed base in Africa once. That’s the only military plane I ever got to fly in; the Air Force put me on commercial flights for everywhere else they sent me. Even on my deployment to Iraq; they wanted us to blend in with civilian planes so we were less likely to be shot down. We took a commercial plane directly to our base in the country.

    I loved being in the Air Force (definitely best branch of the military, I dodged some serious bullets (sometimes literally) with that random selection of a branch), but I never had an interest in the planes and they were unimportant to my job. As long as our computer systems were online, the pilots could communicate. That’s about as involved as I ever got.

    • call_me_xale@lemmy.zip
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      26 days ago

      (how that’s different from fighter, I dunno)

      The line is pretty blurry, but it’s my understanding that fighters are generally air-to-air combatants, whereas attack/assault aircraft are used for precision strike against ground targets and/or close air support.

      • decipher_jeanne@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        24 days ago

        I get it’s blurry for modern multirole fighter like the F-35.

        But what about the F-105, F-111 and F-117. Those are all aircraft that should have been designated as attack aircrafts.

        • call_me_xale@lemmy.zip
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          24 days ago

          Yep, I’m in full agreement there. There’s obviously some other factors I’m not aware of.