re: American Pilots WWII vs Modern

The F-22 and F-15C pilots in the AF are still specialists that are doing 90 percent ACM. The Navy/Marine Corps are doing 50/50 ACM and mud work nowadays. When they decided to strap bombs to the F-14 the calculus changed for the Naval Aviator.

The advent of the F-35 will lead the AF in this direction as well when the “Golden Eagles” are slowly retired. Pure ACM will be a dying skill just as it was before and in the beginning of Vietnam.

My thought is that guys like Thach, Boyington, Bong, and McCampbell, would have been as good at being foot soldiers as they would have been at being fighter pilots. They just carried that mentality into the cockpit. They were tacticians and pure fighter pilots.

Pilots now are process managers. They monitor and manipulate systems. The damn planes will almost fly themselves.

Long winded way of saying that I would go with the WWII Fighter pilot.

Dicta Boelcke WW I