Back in 83 an Israeli F-15 landed without its right wing, but that's only relevant to the pre-edit. Having looked it up I'm going to post it .

Some stuff about it that aired on History Channel. Sounds like he wasn't fully aware of the extent of the damage until afterwards.

To be honest, the first thing I thought when reading this was that WWII planes also had this "feature." That certainly was more about pilot skill, though.

One small step closer to Skynet Hunter Killers.... It can't be long now.

Yeah, a few bullet holes isn't a big deal. The F-15 in question lost its wing. Its ENTIRE wing. Nothing left but a spray of smoke and leaking fuel.

A significant amount of lift on the F-15 comes from the shape of the fuselage, so losing most of the wing didn't result in a complete loss of lift on that side. The aircraft was traveling light, I think, and the pilot had a lot of power on hand to keep the plane fast enough where it could stay in air.

Honestly, though, I don't think F-15s have enough power to keep the plane fast enough to outrun the sh*t that would be continuously geysering from my freaked out sphincter.

Sure, there are numerous pictures and stories of bombers coming home with ridiculous battle-damage, including partially missing wings, vertical stabilisers, chunks of the fuselage, and even the nose of the aircraft. I think part of the issue that that the media portrays aircraft as flying deathtraps just waiting to spin out of control the moment it hits a gnat, but in fact this is far from the truth.

Airliners, for example, can glide if they lose all engine power. Sure, you'll be trading altitude for airspeed, but as long as you don't run out of both at the same time (as the pilot saying goes), it's possible to land it. The A-10 is designed to be able to take heavy damage to its wings, fuselage, and engines without airworthiness failure. Modern fighters derive a lot of their lift from their fuselage (note the near symmetry of their wing camber), hence their ability to fly upside down and on their side without losing altitude.

Er, no. Interestingly, the Wright brothers originally had a warping-wing control scheme, but ailerons carried the day. Now, warping wing technology with advanced materials is being tested for bleeding-edge fighters. Flapping wings were tried for a long time as people tried to imitate birds to fly. It wasn't until asymmetric wings were designed that we were able to gain flight, and I don't see flapping wings as being useful in any sense beyond perhaps tiny drones, as I doubt it scales well.

Physically altering the lift surface to affect flight characteristics could be a huge advance in the speed of the plane, as you go faster and faster you need less lift relative to forward thrust, and the need to reduce drag becomes more important, and inversely on takeoff you could maximize lift to get off the ground on a much shorter runway than a conventional plane of similiar size/weight.

Eh, this isn't really anything new. The F-117 was fly by wire, and planes since then have been largely so as well. Because of that, even with no damage, the plane does more flying than the pilot does. Still cool tech nonetheless though

This is not to say the pilot has nothing to do with it, but increasingly less incidents, including the Israeli F-15, and a US F-16, are brought back due to pilot skill as opposed to computer control. For the pilot skill deals, look for an A-10 missing an engine from Gulf War I. Those are nearly universally pilot skill.