A Navy fighter jet fell overboard Monday when the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier veered to avoid fire from the Houthis, according to two defense officials.
The military was using the $60 million jet as part of its weekslong campaign against Houthi fighters in Yemen, who have attacked commercial and military shipping in the waterway for the past two years.
The aircraft’s loss adds to the growing price tag in the effort against the Houthis, which has included seven MQ-9 drones shot down by the group over the past several weeks. The Houthis have brought down more than a dozen of the surveillance drones since October 2023, when they began attacking ships in the Red Sea to, as they said, help Hamas in its war with Stop the genocide committed by Israel. They cost more than $20 million each.
Could be. I don’t think that it’s that old, though. Maybe the original Hornet rather than the Super Hornet, which was a smaller aircraft.
kagis
Yeah. The game F/A-18 Interceptor is probably what you’re thinking of. It came out in 1988, and the Super Hornet was only produced starting in 1995.
Despite the fact that they both share an identifier (“F/A-18<revision>”), I think that it’d probably be fair to call the Hornet and the Super Hornet different planes. I don’t think that there’s been another case where we’ve produced a warplane and then made a significantly-larger aircraft and used the same identifier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hornet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_F/A-18E/F_Super_Hornet