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jrv, an f16 can almost flight vertically. They have the power to virtually eliminate a stall speed. I've no doubt they made some speed matched passes next to this airplane.


Even when going vertical an F-16 needs a lot of airflow over the control surfaces or the stick becomes useless. And in vertical flight it's the engine counteracting gravity, not the wings - different problem.

In level horizontal flight the F-16 needs enough lift to balance gravity. The slower it goes the less lift. You can angle the nose up (AOA) to get more lift at a given airspeed, but at a high enough AOA airflow over the top of the wing is disrupted and the plane adopts brick-aerodynamics. An f-16's AOA limit is 25 degrees in this case.

The best the pilots can do is extend landing gear and flaps (to increase drag) which lets then run the engines at a little more power, with maximum AOA (nose a bit up, engines pointed a little down, meaning a little extra lift, meaning airspeed can be a little slower).

As best I can tell the F-16's can't do it. In normal flight their minimum airspeed is about 100 mph faster than the Cessna's maximum airspeed. With landing gear out etc and max AOA I think they're still 20+ mph faster. And this assumes the Cessna is at full throttle - if the Cessna slows down it's hopeless.

It's like some of the problems the Soviets had when Mathias Rust flew his Cessna to Red Square during the Cold War - their interceptor jets simply couldn't slow enough to get a good look at him.

I'm betting the F-16's were flying ascending/descending circles around the Cessna just to stay with it, but were not able to match speeds well enough to see what the Cessna dude was looking at.

PS. If a Cessna is in a maximum speed dive then an f-16 _might_ be able to hold position next to it, until the Cessna runs out of altitude.
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