[nuclear_eclipse]

I've actually noticed that behavior myself when screwing around in X-Plane with the F-4E; I take off at low-speed, high AOA to gain a few thousand feet, and then drop the nose at full afterburner to use both the engines and gravity to go transsonic, at which point the F-4 can accelerate faster, and maintain a higher angle of climb without losing velocity, due to the "lower" drag at supersonic speeds.

I had figured it was perhaps a weird characteristic of the simulation's breakdown of airframe components, but if that's how things worked in the real F-4's, that just gives me that much more respect for the physics simulation in X-Plane. No wonder it's FAA certified :)

[Rod]

The seminal paper in which these findings were published:

BRYSON, A.E. and DENHAM, W.F., "A steepest-ascent method for solving optimum programming problems," Trans. ASME. J. Appl. Mechanics, June 1962, pp. 247-257.

I can't find a PDF copy anywhere. It sucks. If you want to read a non-technical paper on it, try this one: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00506395