Wingspan: 9"
Model length: 12"
Code: AM07012

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Super Hornet entered service with the United States Navy in 1999 and will serve a complimentary to the original Hornet. It has been ordered by the Royal Australian Air Force in 2007 to replace its aging F-111 fleet.

The Super Hornet is a larger and more advanced variant on the F/A-18C/D Hornet. An early version was marketed by McDonnell Douglas as Hornet 2000 in the 1980s. The Hornet 2000 concept was an advanced version of the F/A-18 with a larger wing, longer fuselage to carry more fuel and more powerful engines.

The early 1990s brought a number of problems for US naval aviation. The A-12 Avenger II program, intended to replace the obsolete A-6 Intruders and A-7 Corsair IIs, had run into serious problems and was canceled. The Gulf War revealed that the US Navy's strike capability lagged behind that of the U.S. Air Force in certain respects.

With no clean-sheet program likely to produce results before about 2020, updating an existing design became an attractive approach. As an alternative to the A-12, McDonnell Douglas proposed the "Super Hornet" (or, initially, "Hornet II"), originally put forward in the 1980s to improve early F/A-18 models, and serve as an alternate replacement for the A-6 Intruder which had a greater range / payload than the A-7 Corsair that the original Hornet was designed to replace. At the same time, the Navy needed a fleet defense fighter to replace the canceled NATF, which was a proposed navalized variant of the F-22 Raptor.

The Super Hornet was first ordered by the U.S. Navy in 1992. The Navy would also direct that this fighter replace the aging F-14D Tomcat, essentially basing all naval combat jets on Hornet variants until the introduction of the F-35C Lightning II. The Navy retained the F/A-18 designation to sell the program to Congress as a low-risk "derivative", though the Super Hornet is largely a new aircraft with little more than an aerodynamic resemblance to previous Hornets. The Super Hornet did retain most of the avionic systems from the F/A-18C/D's then current configuration.