26 Nov 2007
An F-16C Fighting Falcon from the Texas Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Squadron flies with a special paint job in honor of the squadron’s 90th anniversary. All the colors and markings have specific meanings, reflecting the unit’s nine-decade history. (Photo courtesy of John Dibbs)
Story at AF.mil which explains the meanings.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Mind you - I love heritage paint schemes, good heritage paint schemes. This one is just too busy and comes off, well, poorly. Almost looks like someone was playing with powerpoint. For starter’s I’d clean up the vert stab, move the red&white stripes from the wing to their proper spot on the rudder, and make the roundels a little closer in proportion to their original example. But hey, YMMV 8) - SJS
November 26th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I must agree. I know the guy who designed this one and I feel bad for slamming it but it is truly ugly though I do appreciate the time he had spent designing it. I do really like how he tied in the several aircraft and eras that the squadron had flown in. I do not however understand how the blue represents the Korean War aircraft? I will ask him. I might like it a tad more if the blue was a tad more subtle or even more of a grey/sliver?
November 27th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
There’s no amount of paint in any color that will fix what’s wrong with the Viper.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
I actually quite like this pain scheme. It’s garish but I dunno, just on the right side of the border between attractive and ugly for me. Of course I like the F-16 to start with. Dare I ask Dfens what’s wrong with it? I probably shouldn’t open the floodgates. I happen to think that for the price, the F-16 is pretty good, although it’s a pity the later versions got so heavy.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Er, hehe, was that a Freudian slip? Paint scheme… Nah I really do like it.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:58 am
There is a short answer to your question, Nicholas. The Viper is a small, supersonic airplane that is totally inadequate to perform in the attack role. The supersonic wing has little room for gas and is not efficient at loiter speeds. It can get off the ground with a bunch of bombs, and it can support the precision drop electronics junk, but fundamentally it is the wrong airplane for the job it is being asked to do.
November 28th, 2007 at 10:21 am
What was better at the time to do the job?
November 28th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Yeah, the A-4, A-6, A-10… Oh, you mean being currently produced? Sadly, no. Of course, I’m an anachronism. I remember a day when if we needed an airplane to do a job, we designed and built one, and it didn’t take an F’ing 25 years to do it. Hell, it probably took longer to modify the F-16 to it’s inauspicious ‘Viper’ configuration than it did to design the whole airplane from scratch.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Out of the three listed I agree with two of them. What I find funny though, you attacked me for having virtually the same view of the situation you have…sometime the older, less technical aircraft are better suited for the mission and can do a better job–
December 7th, 2007 at 11:26 am
the guy who painted it said this: The blue fuselage does not represent the Korean War. It represents the observations aircraft flown in the 1930s such as the O-2, O-38 and O-43. I don’t know how this was misquoted, but it is mentioned on numerous websites.