[solvegas]

I have to say that ascetically the F-104 is a beautiful aircraft.

I will admit that it has the turning capacity of a brick, so it was not good as an actual fighter.

 It just looks damn good.

One of the names it was given by pilots of the era was Widow maker. It had a relatively bad safety record. One man that survived an accident on it was test pilot Chuck Yeager, the first human being to go faster than the speed of sound on October 14, 1947, on the Bell X-1 test aircraft, and years later he was trying to break the altitude record and while using a modified F-104, he surpassed the height but then the aircraft went bad and he was able to survive through sheer good luck. When Tom Cruise did Top Gun Maverick, he based the scene where the test plane literally disintegrated on what happened to Chuck Yeager on the F-104.

[solvegas]

First flown on November 10, 2023. the B-21 Raider will be in active duty by 2027 and start replacing the 1983 B-1 Lancer bomber and later on the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber by 2040 and the US Air Force intends to buy at least 100 of the aircraft at a unit cost of $700 million Dollars apiece, which would make it cheaper than the B-2 Spirit which was first deployed in 1993. As for replacing the B-52 Stratofortress. that might happen by 2050 if they buy more units. 

[solvegas]

The Republic F-105 Thunderchief, aka the "Thud" by its crews, was part of the 100 series fighter aircraft built during the 1950's by different manufacturers and the F-105 was a Mach 2, 23-ton single seat fighter which served in the US Air Force from 1958 through 1984, so it was retired 40 years ago. It was originally designed as a Fighter/Bomber, which was a new concept at the time, and it could carry tactical nuclear weapons to supplement the strategic bombers if necessary. It was extensively used during the Vietnam War to suppress enemy air defense systems but when it was retired, it was the F-4G Phantom which took over its job.

[solvegas]

First flown in December of 1956, becoming operational in June 1959 and retired from the US Air Force in 1988, the last of the 100 series fighters/interceptors built for the Air Force, the Convair F-106 Delta Dart, was built to intercept Soviet strategic bombers. It did not have an internal gun and it carried in its internal bay AIM-4 Falcon missiles only. It was mostly flown by State Air National Guard squadrons and one of its most notorious pilots was George W. (Dubya) Bush who flew for the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war. Later on, he became the 43rd President of the United States of America.

[TheZookie007]

This video features quite a few planes I'd like to get my hands on, especially the Embraer Praetor 600, one of the successors to their hugely-successful Phenom 300 line:

TheJetBusiness, 13 March 2024: "How to buy and sell private jets!"