U.S.-China Race For Air Dominance (From The Joe Piscopo Show)

Air dominance for New York City’s morning drive time radio on AM 970 The Answer with Jersey Joe Piscopo includes the Navy’s secret F/A-XX carrier plane, the Stingray refueling drone, collaborative drone wingmen and a shout out to Jimmy Doolittle, leader of the 1942 Tokyo raid and a commander of Fifteenth air force bombers flying out of Italy in World War II.  Hint: there’s a Piscopo family connection.  Full interview here and highlights below.

Piscopo: Hey, I’m looking at the competition between China and the U.S. and this race for air dominance. Don’t we own it at this point, Dr. Grant?

Grant:  Well, China is putting up a pretty good race.   Air dominance means we can carry out whatever missions we need to.  When we were fighting in Iraq 20 years ago, we pretty much owned the skies.   It’s tougher with China, because they do have advanced jets, advanced surface-to-air missiles, and they have satellites that look at everything we’re doing.   But between the Air Force and the U.S Navy, we do have the superior aircraft.  But most of all, our pilots, our controllers, we have some combat experience, so we can go in and get air superiority where we need to in the specific airspace. It’s not easy, but we’re still able to do it….The F-22 Raptor, which we saw used in Iran’s airspace a few months ago, is very much superior, and the Air Force has a new F-47 fighter plane, also super stealthy, in development.  I want you to ask me about the Navy secret carrier plane, too.

Piscopo: Tell us about that one.

Grant: The Navy has this plane – well, they would, if the Pentagon bureaucracy would get to it.  Both Boeing and Northrop Grumman have flown demonstrators for a plane the Navy’s been working on for 10 years. It’s called F/A-XX.  Not too exciting a name, but it is a stealthy, longer-range plane that goes off the Navy carrier decks, and carries more and bigger weapons so that they can launch from carriers in the Pacific and hit targets around China or Taiwan if need be.   But the Pentagon won’t make a decision on going forward on it.  We were told it would happen in April, now we’re still waiting, and the Navy really needs this plane.  You know we have a carrier down in the Caribbean, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and it’s great, but all the planes on that deck are decades-old designs.  So, the Navy needs this new plane, and a new drone called the Stingray that’ll really help out with naval aviation longer-range missions.

Piscopo: Will they lean more on the drones?

Grant: Oh, definitely.  The Navy drone, the Stingray, is a refueling and sort of an intel drone, and it’s big.  I mean, it’s like the size of a camper, or something larger than that, and it flies off the carrier deck.  It will be out in the fleet next year. The Air Force is working on what they call “drone wingmen,” and these are collaborative combat aircraft, and that means they can carry sensors, they can carry weapons, and our pilots in the F-35s or F-22s or F-47s in the future can use these drones to go off in a different direction, or penetrate more deeply, take out a target over here, while the fighter is taking out targets someplace else. That’s going to be a big asset in going against the sheer number of planes and missiles and drones that China can put up in the airspace. 

Piscopo: Let me go back.  My father put the bombs on those B-24s and those flights that came out of Bari, Italy, and it was just devastating because a lot of the planes just plain didn’t come back.

(Note:  In World War II, B-24s from the “Forgotten Fifteenth” Air Force based in Italy attacked heavily defended targets such as the Nazi Messerschmitt factories at Regensburg.  The Fifteenth’s first commander was none other than Jimmy Doolittle.)

Piscopo: The Doolittle raid, if I may.  Going in, didn’t they take off with B-25s off of an aircraft carrier?

Grant: Yes, they did.   The USS Hornet launched Jimmy Doolittle and the B-25s in 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor, and the Hornet launched those from about 800 miles away.  They bombed targets in Tokyo and a few other targets in Japan, and then continued flying and landed in China, which was our ally.

Piscopo: Unbelievable.  Jimmy Doolittle, what an American hero, Medal of Honor winner.  But boy oh boy, I can’t imagine how you lift the B-25 off of it, because the aircraft carriers were not the aircraft carriers of today.  They were tiny little things, right?

Grant: Right, they were small, they had wooden decks, and displaced about 20,000 tons.  So they did it by revving up the engines and getting a huge amount of thrust and, of course, turning the carrier into the wind.  You know, Joe, our new B-21 bomber, the new stealth bomber being built in California, is named the Raider because of the Doolittle raid.

Piscopo: Fantastic.  But we gotta stay on these weapons, because China’s there, because Russia is there.  I say build these suckers because it’s dangerous out there, and China ain’t backing down.  Look at me, I sound like my father now.  But we’ve got to keep our edge in the airspace.

Grant: You are right.  Our American engine technology is so superior to China’s.  We can build engines that are smaller, with more thrust, that can run hotter. But we have to build the planes to keep the engine development going.   We need drones, but we still very much need these manned planes for the top missions. 

Piscopo: I went last spring to where my Pop served in Bari, Italy.  He said the skies would go dark with B-24s.  But not all of them came back….I know from my dad, it could slip away really easily.

Grant: Those bomber crews did heroic work. Sometimes we lost dozens of bombers, each with 10 people aboard.

Piscopo: Thank you!  People forget about that.  I don’t forget about that, so listen, it’s a great chat.  Dr. Grant, please come back when you can, and keep us posted on any secret projects that you know about, OK? We love hearing from you.

Grant: You’ll be the first to know!  We love American air dominance.