America: Big Swinging Dick Of The World, Part 11 – Icons of the Sky

RageTheory8 years ago

America is the greatest country on the planet for many reasons. When American war planes retire, the jerseys hang forever next to our back to back world war championship trophies. That is the simple philosophy that fuels the badassery of the most effective home team the world has ever seen.

SR-71 Blackbird

The SR-71 Blackbird is an icon of American engineering. Heralded as the fastest spy plane on Earth, the Blackbird took supersonic dick pics of communist fucks during the Cold War. She was retired in 1990 with the advent of satellite telemetry, which made the need for spy planes obsolete.

The SR-71 came from the alien nerds at Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s notorious UFO producing black project R&D division. The CIA first began working with Skunk Works in 1957 to build an “undetectable spy plane” to replace the slow as balls U-2.

Fielded in 1960, it was the first operational aircraft to employ the classic stealth shape and composition, which significantly reduced radar cross signature. It cruised at Mach 3.2, which is simply the “most efficient speed.”

The SR-71 is so supremely badass that its official top speed is still classified by Professor Xavier. Most sources simply cite the max speed at Mach 3+, which is beyond ludicrous, enough to go into plaid.

The SR-71 didn’t carry physical countermeasures of any kind. No flares, no chaff, no condoms. Just electronic radar jammers, a boss ass camera, and the Astro-Inertial Navigation System, which tracked stars during day or night and relayed altitude and position to the onboard navigational systems.

This bitch was so beast, pilots had to wear pressurized suits like goddamn astronauts.

The Blackbird was faster than the missiles designed to shoot it down. It could operate at such high speeds and altitudes, it was essentially invulnerable to enemy planes and SAMs. By the time most missiles could get a radar lock, the Blackbird was already out of range. If a SAM could lock on in time to fire, the pilot simply hammered down the throttle and left that shit in the dust of another time zone. During its service career, not a single SR-71 was ever shot down.

Pentagon politics officially killed the Blackbird in 1998 because of budget allocation bullshit, but it set the standard for American aeronautical domination for decades to come.

P-51 Mustang

World War II was the greatest display of global firepower our planet has ever seen. The Germans controlled the skies with the Luftwaffe for most of the early stages. The P-51 was created for one purpose: to haze the shit out of Nazi scum.

The RAF (Royal Air Fuckers) thought their bombers were perfectly capable of defending themselves against enemy fighters, which is why the Brits were getting completely murked in the skies. The British preferred bombing runs under the cover of darkness, without fighter escorts. American ideology differed because we came up with the radical idea of using fighters to protect our bombers. Crazy, I know. I guess we drive on different sides of the road.

The problem with P-38s and P-47s was range. We didn’t have planes that could escort bombers all the way to the target and back home again. The Mustang had a higher ceiling, longer range, and faster top speed than any other fighter at the time. It quickly became the gold standard for beating bitch ass Nazis into the ground with lead.

With six .50 caliber Browning machine guns, the Mustang had no problem tearing Aryans a new asshole. It could be equipped with a 1,000 pounds of bombs for enforcement of freedom or external fuel tanks to extend its range. Although its turning radius was not as good as the Spitfire or Me-109, its range and speed set it apart from the pack.

440 mph might not sound fast by today’s standards, but back then it was motherfucking light speed. The Mustang was so fast it could pursue and intercept V1 rockets that were fired at London. Shooting down Nazi bottle rockets was a cake walk for the P-51, which is why the Luftwaffe had to change their entire strategy when dealing with them.

Mustang squadrons claimed almost 5,000 aerial kills — more than half of all aerial kills in the entire European theatre. Between blasting tanks, trains, ships, and installations, they racked up another 4,100 combined ground kills. Only 2,500 mustangs were lost.

Towards the end of the war, the P-51 switched roles from defending bomber squadrons to actively hunting down the Luftwaffe and pounding them into oblivion. Slowly but surely, the Germans lost air superiority, thanks in part to the P-51 and badasses like Chuck Yeager and George Preddy, who singlehandedly added 23 swastikas to the side of his Mustang before he was shot down by friendly fire. Sucks to be the turd who accidentally shot down the war’s most notorious fighter ace. That guy definitely took a lap.

The P-51D had the K-14 gunsight, which calculated the correct angle of deflection necessary to hit an enemy warplane. It made shooting shit down about as difficult as lining up a tie fighter in the targeting computer of an X-wing.

“When I saw Mustangs over Berlin, I knew the jig was up.”
– Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe

F-14 Tomcat

The F-14 is the frattest fucking thing ever made and that’s all that needs to be said about it. For further information, crank up Kenny Loggins and consult this historical footage:

If you have any suggestions for military weapons or vehicles, leave them in the comments, along with the usual trolling. I can’t promise Part 12 will come soon, but I can promise that I will.

If you missed out on the critically acclaimed “America: Big Swinging Dick Of The World” series, you can find them here:

Part 10 Fuck Hippies (CS Gas, PHASR, TASER XREP, TASER Shockwave, Active Denial System)
Part 9 Drone-A-Palooza (Ripsaw, Shadow Hawk, MQ-9 Reaper, Switchblade UAV, Micro Air Vehicles)
Part 8 (M134 Minigun, V-22 Osprey, DDG-1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer)
Part 7 (CBU-97, Mk-19 Grenade Machine Gun, YAL-1 Airborne Laser)
Part 6 Throwback Vietnam (Iowa Class Battleships, M50 Ontos, PACV)
Part 5 (XM25, MAARS Robot, Active Denial System)
Part 4 (Phalanx CIWS, AA-12 Automatic Shotgun, B-52 Stratofortress)
Part 3 (MOAB, F-22 Raptor, Ohio Class Submarines)
Part 2 (AH-64 Apache, M1 Abrams, B-2 Spirit)
Part 1 (Aircraft Carriers, AC130 Spectre Gunship, A-10 Warthog, MQ-1 Predator)