The Skyknight got more than that, 7 kills and one probable vs. one loss. Most of the kills were MiGs I think. There were special circumstance though.Originally Posted by Ken White
even though I also added my comment on the big, slow, lumbering and very straight wing F3D shooting down one Mig (true)...
The Soviets were a mix of old and new pilots. One of the books I have says that the success of MiG units varied on how many experienced pilots were in the units as they rotated through.
The B-29s were driven from the daylight skies within range of the MiGs. There weren't enough F-86s to protect them and the straight wing jets may as well not have been there.
Navy and Marine aviation were critical of course but they had nothing that could deal MiG-15 either. They were mostly light bombers.
Mass can trump quality if the quality differential isn't too great. Straight wing jets vs. swept wing jets the quality differential was too great. There was no way to overcome that unless we were wiling to sustain a loss rate that would have whitened our hair. The F-84 got 10 MiGs and the MiGs got 18 F-84s.
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