Why are swing-wing fighter jets obsolete?
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TLDR: we’re better at designing wings now, we have better materials, but mostly stealth.
Stealth is the real answer to the question. Having a moving wing is very bad for an aircraft’s radar cross section so modern fighters like the F-22 and F-35 have been forced to abandon the concept outright.
But other newer non-stealth aircraft have also preferred a fixed wing lately, so why is that?
Swing wings were a solution to allow aircraft to fly at lower speeds to maneuver and take-off and land, then swing to a low drag mode for flying at super sonic speeds.
Modern simulation software and material science (composites) has improved so much that we can make wings that have better flight characteristics without needing to swing.
The way fighters operate has also changed. For example speed used to be much more important than it is now. During Vietnam they realized that pilots rarely exceeded mach 1 because it just burned too much fuel. So modern jets are slower than before but way more efficient, able to cruise at supersonic speeds without the afterburner.
Missile technology has also improved a lot. Dogfighting is not obsolete, but it’s nowhere near as important as it was in Vietnam.
There’s an argument to be made that swing wings were also heavier and difficult to maintain, but to paraphrase a Youtube aviation engineer “Who cares, the benefits outweigh the downside. Maintenance on stealth aircraft is much much worse anyway and that didn’t stop them now did it?”
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