The woosh sound effects are very annoying. It makes a good show almost unwatchable.

HEAR HEAR! I don't know who decided that every video edit had to have a flashy video effect and those god awful hissing and whooshing sounds, but he needs a reality check. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP IT! The sound effects are unnecessary, distracting, and after ten minutes REALLY ANNOYING! Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? Find the guy responsible and give him a job sweeping floors. He can enjoy those scraping and hissing noises all day long while someone else who knows how to edit a TV show does his job for him.

It gets worse. I remember watching "Wings" on the Discovery channel in the late 80s. The show they did on the F/A-18 is for the most part the same show they did back in 88 (or whenever) I was only half paying attention to it but if you watch it you notice they really don't talk about the F/A-18 until about the half-way mark of the show. In the late 80s the Hornet still did not have much of a battle record so aside from the unique way it was built (for fighter and attack) They did not even update the information that much. No Desert Storm, Bosnia, Iraqi Freedom or anything about the E/F version.
The only thing they did was put the host on as opposed to the original that only had the narrator and the stock footage. I guess it does not matter that much if you never saw the first one but for an old timer like me, :-) it is the same show I saw 20 years ago. Maybe that is why they did these. As sort of a 20 year anniversary

P.S. even the name is the same. The show was called both "Wings" and "Great Planes"

I'm with you guys, not only are the sound effects at the edit points extremely annoying, but the visual edit effects are extrememly distracting from the subject matter as well. The narration does often not match the subject, or even era, being shown, and the same scenes show up repeatedly, often reversed to make them seem different. Too bad, the show has lots of potential.

I just saw the Great Planes show on the F-15. Of the several shows that I've seen on the F-15, that had to be thew worst. Where do I start? The A & B models were designed as defensive weapons. They were good but they lacked the range. The big difference with the C & D models was the increase in fueland the new avionics. Fuel was crammed in to every open cavity in the aircraft and they were fitted with CFTs, conformal fuel tank, on both sides of the fuselage. That made them offensive weapons. The reason that they were sold the the Saudis was because the Israelis bought them and the Saudis wanted something equally as good. The E model was mentioned but nothing more. All we heard was what a great fighter the aircraft was. Then we see an F-15 dropping bombs, but no explanation. The E model is an attack version.

They said the the F-15 is flown by 3 other countries, but in fact it is flown by 5. Korea and Singapore also fly the F-15.

As for the sound of the gun firing, well that sounded like a .30 cal machine gun. That is nothing like the Vulcan cannon in the Aircraft.

Too much time was spent showing and reshowing the same film clips and not enough time talking about the Aircraft and it's varients.

The points you have made are the same as the point I made b4. If you have never seen "Wings/Great Planes" b4 you might not have realized that the 4 or 5 episodes they are now showing were made back in 1988 (or there abouts). The only thing they changed was the addition of the fighter pilot (Max Mocha??) and those little clips of information they flashed on the screen. Even the narration is almost word for word from the 1980s. In fact if I remember right the very first time they showed Wings on the Discovery channel the guy doing the talking was British. And the show did have lots of potential, which I think was fully realized in the 8+ years the show ran in one form or another. They must have done 30 or 40 episodes of "Wings/Great Planes". If you can think of a military aircraft between WW2 and 1996 it was covered on this show in one way or another. In fact I think they did 2 different show on the F-4 Phantom b/c it had such a long history and severed so widely.They did shows on the F-14, the F-15,-16,-18 the F-111 the B-52. They had shows about helicopters. They had a couple of different shows about "strange planes", "X-planes" and planes that never made it into service. I think they even did a couple of shows about civilian aircraft.(767 maybe) And in doing these shows they would go through the history of the plane so even though they never did a show about the B-36(first U.S. jet bomber??)they would cover it as they talk about the development of the B-52. I don't think they did a show about the B-1B, but I bet they covered it when they did a show about bombers. I think that one was called "Bombers" :-) When they got done with all that, they did "Wings of the Red Star" and "Wings of the Luftwaffe". They did another one called "Sea Wings" That one had the A-6 in it just when the plane was going out of service.They had so many of these they would show marathons of it on New Year's Day. Nothing but "Wings/Great Planes" from 7am till whenever. And they did it for 2 or 3 years running.The point is that they did a great show back in the day. I think they would have done better to bring that show back and tell everyone why they are showing it. "To celebrate the 20th anniversary of "Wings" Might sound like a bit much but remember when the military channel was the "Wings" channel?? You don't name a entire network after a show that needed to be redone

P.S. Depending on which one you were watching the show had some decent music in the closing credits too

I have to laugh my arse off at the whole hilarity of the two Great Planes shows today - F/A-18 and F-16 - so many horrible errors on the shows.

First, I'll direct to the F/A-18 show. They mention the F-14 during the show, and part of that they show the stats - the Engines are wrong, for a front model 14, they list the F-110, which was ONLY put on with the A+ (B) and D models. Before that was the TF-30, which was horrible for its compressor stalls.

Then we go to the birth of the YF-17 Cobra, which was Solely for the Lightweight Fighter competition, and was NOT originally planned for the export market. Competition against the F-16 for Export deals was the F-20 Tigershark, and was not won on performance, a situation which would be repeated by Northrop again with the YF-23 against the Raptor.


Now, to the F-16 Show, and one error - General Dynamics was NOT the only proposal in the LWF competition to suggest a Single Engine, infact Northrop was the only one to suggest a TWIN engine - Boeing, Vought and Lockheed all suggested single engines - Boeing's a very similar aircraft to the F-16 but with a longer nose and sleeker fuselage, Vought based off the F-8/A-7, and Lockheed building a bigger, better Starfighter.

General Dynamics went up against Northrop again after the LWF battle with the F-20 for the Export market.