The Tornado



I spent a lot of time today watching video of the Tornado, the variable-swept wing attack and interdiction aircraft fielded by Britain, Germany and Italy in late Cold War period.

The plane has a brief cameo in the installment of Dreamland Whiplash I'm working on. I had to refresh my memory - or at least that was my excuse for watching airplane porn all day - since the last time I'd thought about the plane was several years ago in connection with the First Gulf War.

That war, unfortunately, proved that the concept of high-speed, low-altitude attack had been somewhat flawed.  The early Tornado missions suffered high casualty rates, despite the brave and expert crews who manned the planes, and the aircraft's performance, which as far as I know was never faulted. The problem is, a lot of dumb defenses around an important target can defeat anything flying low enough, even if it passes in the blink of an eye.

Fortunately, technology in other areas made the low level attack concept - at least for the high-value targets the Tornado was designed to deal with - obsolete.

I've always thought of the Tornado in roughly the same category as the F-111, which was a bit ahead of it development wise. They had similar missions (at least originally), and of course there were those moving wings. But the Tomcat was probably the real classmate, so to speak, even though the aircraft diverged in significant ways.