Saw this at a local high school.The Enka-Candler Jets.Was this a real plane or just a mock up,not sure
Looks like a RF-84F
RF-84 Thunderflash
Thanks,kind of just stumbled on it,was well kept.
They looked better in service in their beautiful NMF
Always loved the way the canopy operated on those, although it ain’t easy to model that canopy…
There’s the rear half of thee fuse of one in a pasture by where I drive to work. That pregant look to hold the turbo jet is pretty distinctive.
True that. The RF-84 showed where Repulic engineers were heading with the F-105 from the F-84F. Make it bigger, stronger, and faster… much faster…
You guys sure know your aircraft. Never ceases to amaze me.
Republic had a good run. A little known aircraft was the XF-12 Rainbow recon aircraft. Powered by 4 R-4360’s, it cruised at 400 mph with a 4,000 mile range, at 40,000 feet. That’s a lot of fours, and a lot of zeroes too.
The F-84 had a lot of variants and later in life was a very popular export item.
The XF-12 was a beauty indeed! And that is impressive performance.
The F-84 did have a long and widespread service life. Although in reality the swept wing Thunderstreak/Thunderflash family was almost a completly separate design from the straight wing Thunderjet. That they all carried the same F-84 designation was something of bureaucratic subterfuge to get the second design funded by congress, as happens with the ”Dog” variant of the F-86. Neither shared much design commonality with the original aircraft whose number they were folded into. Yes, they had a family resemblance, but…
The thing I remember about Republic is the old AF saying, “if someone built a runway completely encircling the globe, Republic would make a fighter that would take every inch of it to take off.”