History Channel Dogfights Youtube
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History channel really f##$ked up when they canceled Dogfights. There is a rumor that all the work for a episode about the Falklands, ended up in a Spanish speaking market only released special. I heard also they had plans to do more German and Russian interviews. Instead we end up with Ice Road Truckers.
Wings of Russia is a fantastic series. Lots of aircraft/information and pigeon English that you'll never see from History/Military channel doccos. It's nothing personal Yank buddies, but, I could trip over 5 documentaries about the F-15 or the Vietnam War with the same rehashed interviews and footage when getting out of my chair, but I've only ever seen one documentary about Soviet Ekranoplans or with detailed information about the Su-24, Su-25s, Su-34s etc. Also, I understand many of these American documentaries are for the US market, but they're often very generalised and from the US perspective only. A great example of this would be to compare the Military Channel's Mi-24 show with the Wings of Russia episodes. I think the Wings docco on the A-4 Skyhawk doesn't even mention Australian, New Zealand, Singaporean or even Indonesia using the aircraft. The last one I saw on the F-111 didn't even mention Australia and we operated the sucker longer than the US! The most contemporary doccos I've seen come from Military/History Channels have been pretty bad. The series made in the 80s and 90s are superior to the 'edutainment' they show today.
With painfully few exceptions outside of the "Bible" and "Vikings", the History channel is producing nothing other than what passes for the norm today, that is, anything other than "staged" reality shows.
Neither was I (not about the aces anyways), but I'd have just liked to see something on the technology from the East from time to time. Also, that docco about the A-4 I mentioned, mentions Israel in the vaguest way. It's something like "The Skyhawk was a success with air forces overseas, including that of Israel..." And that's it. Nothing more than that. Israel's use of Skyhawks was, you know, pretty significant. I think it deserved more that a single throwaway line.These doccos just gloss over all sorts of pertinent information like that unless it pertains directly to the US. Maybe I'm just picky, but I'm not gonna waste an hour with a series if I know I can get better, non recycled footage or info online...
The thing about Dogfights was that it a documentary so much as a real-time dissection of some of the more famous dogfights in history that (mostly) knew what it was talking about. They actually got most of the tactics right, most of the time. Where else have you ever seen a literate explanation of High/Low speed Yo-Yos' that was even close to the actual manuver? And with video, to boot, video, I might add, that made it seem you were watching a well made, narrated video of StrikeFighters2. The last thing I ever watched regularly on TV.
They had a new female program director come in that wanted to compete against the reality TV shows on other networks. Is obsessed too strong of a word here? So she pushed Dogfights and other like minded actual history programs to later in the night/early morning to "prove" that they werent being watched in order to cancel them. It worked...
On the episode, they showed all of the F-15Cs were from Lakenheath, despite the unit not even formed until after the war. Some of the unit names got mixed up with what they did. A lot of small errors, but nothing like how the series started out. It was pretty spot on then.
Dogfights was an American documentary series that aired on the History Channel from 2006-2008 that usually covered Ace Pilots from World War I to the present and future. On occasion, however, they would cover other, related topics, namely during several episodes that focused on World War II. The show recreated historic battles in CGI, accompanied by interviews with military and history scholars and (with the exception of World War I dogfights) surviving participants of said battles. This show provides examples of: