The original Eagle was an air-to-air fighter, but the Strike Eagle is an air-to-ground platform first and foremost. Just like the original Mirage 2000C was air-to-air only, but the Mirage 2000D was air-to-ground only. So the basic airframe design doesn't do everything here.
Advantage of speed and altitude? Not so much. While the original Eagle boasted a max speed of Mach 2.5, this has never been true in practice, because carried stores not only increase drag, they also come with their own speed limits beyond which they become unsafe. So in practice, an air-to-air Eagle would be lucky to get Mach 1.8 max speed, and air-to-ground loadout would be much less.
For altitude, the limit of the pilot is reached before that of the aircraft. If your fighter pilot flies in a pressure suit, they can fly above those that do not have this equipment.
The Rafale remains much smaller and more maneuverable than the F-15, plus it has a much-longer ranged missile for BVR fights. However I'll concede that the F-15 is an excellent missile truck, able to carry some Ace Combat-style configuration with no less than twelve air-to-air missiles.
F-14A with 4 Sparrows and 4 Aim-9's was able to reach a top speed of Mach 2+
F-15EX with CFT was able to reach Mach 2 and the pilot said if they were clean they would have been able to reach mach 2.5.
We got up to 40,000 feet and pushed out to Mach 2. That [speed] is a CFT [Conformal Fuel Tank] limitation. If it was a clean jet we’d go out to Mach 2.5. We did engine checks at 40,000 feet, at 30,000 feet, and then we came down to 20,000 feet and we intentionally shut down the perfectly good engines and then re-started those motors in both primary and secondary mode to prove the reliability of the
General Electric GE-129 motors.
The F-15EX went to 40,000 feet and flew at twice the speed of sound on its first flight.
www.thedrive.com
On 9/11/01 two F-15c's were scrambled to intercept the hijacked planes and during an interview with an F-15c pilot he said the load out back then for those alert fighters were two fox2's and four fox3's with two tanks and they were doing mach 1.2-1.4.
-Duff taxied out as No.1 While we were taxiing out, I followed him and we got the words to climb to a certain altitude and a certain heading in the direction of New York City.
DUFF: We're going down there. We’re accelerating to (Mach) 1.3, 1.4, so we’re doing a mile every three, four seconds. We’re kind of hauling the mail getting down there. And actually Nasty even called me up at one point and said, "Duff, you going supersonic?" And I said, "Yeah, OK." We’re not supposed to do that, but this time I figured we were high enough, we weren’t going to blow out any windows or do any damage so, we kept the Mach up trying to get there as quick as we could.
When word of a hijacking came, two fighter pilots flew at supersonic speed from Otis Air Base on Cape Cod to New York City. They say they couldn't have stopped the attacks, even if they responded faster.
www.wbur.org
This is a heavy draggy load.
The Rafales top speed of mach 1.8 was recorded in clean configuration and it was the A model so Rafale F3 in a clean configuration is not going to be able to reach mach 1.8. Rafale hasn't gotten a thrust upgrade since it entered service.
US F-16 block 50s in South Korea after an engine swap was only able to reach mach 1.9 for a few seconds in a dive position.
Anything close to the maximum structural speed for a jet is usually just for the glossy brochure—99.9% of the time we don’t come close to reaching it.
www.sandboxx.us
