I don't doubt your assessment for a second...however...do you
really think that if an a/c can climb to 'out of sight' at 60 deg
that it can only climb a few thousand feet at 90?....doesn't
compute to me.

I'll only speak from personal experience here. Believe it or not, at one point
the B-52H held the Time to Climb record for its class (or at least, that's what
my FTU IP told me, although 8 years later I've not checked it out) and will
climb pretty good at an *initial* climb angle of 50-60 degrees. Now, if you
increase that angle of climb by just a few degrees, you get a very small VVI
increase, but a greater airspeed loss (ops checked by myself as a young
co-pilot with too agressive of a pull). I've never taken a BUFF to 90-degrees
in the real world, but if the sim is any indication, you could not sustain a
90-degree climb for more than 7-10 seconds before you ran out of flying
airspeed. In 7-10 seconds, by my guess, you would only climb about 3,000 feet
(if that). Now, perhaps a light weight Bone has greater excess thrust (easy to
check on fas.org), but I don't think a Bone could go verticle for too much
longer than a BUFF.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"