F-15 FAST Conformal Fuel Tanks

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Sundog said:
Didn't fairchild come up with the idea of the CFT's and pass the idea to MDD after they didn't win the contract? Or is that just an urban myth?
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That's certainly not what IAI said. They used to claim it was theirs. With much hoopla about how their CAD/CAM was so advanced that in some cases the drag with their CFTs was less than without.
(And I personally have no idea one way or the other).
 
McDonnell-Douglas came up the their FAST packs in the 70s. B-58s used a conformal fuel and nuke pod. Does that count as prior art?
 
The FAST packs are precisely what IAI claimed as theirs.

EDIT: And counting the B-58 pods as "conformal" vs hung is maybe stretching it...
 
I get errors 404 on both links.

And to clarify: IAI claimed to have developed the FAST packs _for MDD_, not as a separate venture.
 
Fixed links.

Where exactly did they claim that? They built F-15 CFTs for Boeing in the 90s, I know.
 

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PaulMM (Overscan) said:
Where exactly did they claim that? They built F-15 CFTs for Boeing in the 90s, I know.
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Well, I can't find a quote. It may not be surprising as it was in the 70s. And maybe I'm wrong. Either way, I wouldn't want this to turn into an argument.

Here are things as I remember them, right or wrong:
- in the 1970s, the top minds of the USAF had come up with the smart slogan "not a pound for air-to-ground". So the initial F-15s delivered by MDD to the USAF were weak in that respect. Not that the machine couldn't, but because the DoD's Politikorrect Bigotry (tm) of the time vetoed it.
- Israel bought F-15s, and a) couldn't afford a fighter to be single-role, b) negotiated for IAI an "offset package" of industrial compensation contracts.
- IDF/AF's priority was to add air-to-ground capability to those planes.
--> a way for everybody (MDD, USAF, IDF/AF, IAI) to get around the DoD's bigotry was to include that air-to-ground capabilty into the jobs farmed out by MDD to IAI.

This is how I remember it from then, but indeed I do not find positive evidence one way or the other to prove it, so yes, maybe I'm wrong. And again, I don't want this to become an argument.
 
Israel visited the US end of August 1974 to evaluate the F-14, F-15 and F-16.

McDonnell-Douglas announced the FAST pack in October, development started in 11 March 1974 with a target of 150 days and first flight was 27 July.

In October, Israel was expected to request either F-14 or F-15 soon. November 1974 saw the US agree to sell the F-15.

Several books suggest McDonnell-Douglas privately funded development of the prototype CFT/FAST tanks in anticipation of export sales (including, in one book, explicit mention of Israeli interest). I have a hard time thinking that an Israeli company did the design months before they even settled on the F-15 however.

Happy to be proved wrong though!
 

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