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wiki posted:Only one crew member, Jim Zwayer, a Lockheed flight-test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist, was killed in a flight accident. The rest of the crew members ejected safely or evacuated their aircraft on the ground. edit: Ooh, top of the page. Time for me to post my "Airliners.net Favorites Collection 1!"                  
Boomerjinks fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Mar 24, 2010 |
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Mar 24, 2010 20:09
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Ekranoplan is sad 
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Mar 24, 2010 20:49
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slidebite posted:Anyone ever been to the Museum @ Hill AFB in Salt Lake City? Supposedly they have the SR71C there and I'm darn tempted to make the 10 hour drive just to see that. It's about 40 minute north of SLC, but yes I've been there several times. Every time I visit family in the area I take my son there. He's 9 and loves it every time. It's actually a really good aircraft museum. Head north on I-15 until you pass Hill AFB, you'll easily see the museum on the east (right) side of the interstate on one of the next exits. Sterndotstern posted:Wow, I wouldn't have wanted to be an SR-71 pilot in the late 60's. They only lost 4 of the birds after 1970, but lost 8 during the space race. Inlet unstarts are a bitch. Sign me up. I'd go TODAY.
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Mar 24, 2010 21:36
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Godholio posted:It's about 40 minute north of SLC, but yes I've been there several times. Every time I visit family in the area I take my son there. He's 9 and loves it every time. It's actually a really good aircraft museum. I think I'll take a weekend trip this year. Probably going to Seattle and the Museum of Flight this May, so it'll have to wait until June/July. Might be a nice bike ride. 
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Mar 24, 2010 21:49
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Boomerjinks posted:edit: Ooh, top of the page. Time for me to post my "Airliners.net Favorites Collection 1!" Canada bought a few of these not so long ago, and at the time I thought it was very stupid. We were also considering buying some An-124s from the Ukraine for $100 million a pop, which is literally half the C-17's asking price. And while the C-17 has good lift capibility, it can't land on rough runways, despite that this was one of the big goals of the design program. Is this plane poo poo, or am I missing something? Boomerjinks posted:Wow. What th' heck is that? azflyboy posted:Mostly, it's because the B-52's are paid for, they're reliable, and the airframes can be adapted to do basically anything. Thanks for the detailed reply. It's been mentioned a few times in the thread that newer designs are often less reliable/harder to maintain then older designs. Is this because the engineers building it are much less likely to have hands on experience? Or because design requirements have gotten way more ambitious in the past 30 years, or what?
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Mar 24, 2010 22:01
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Nebakenezzer posted:Canada bought a few of these not so long ago, and at the time I thought it was very stupid. We were also considering buying some An-124s from the Ukraine for $100 million a pop, which is literally half the C-17's asking price. And while the C-17 has good lift capibility, it can't land on rough runways, despite that this was one of the big goals of the design program. Is this plane poo poo, or am I missing something? I suspect a lot of still comes down to it being Russian/Soviet design. Being dependent on them for many parts/spares would probably have been deemed as a potential risk, especially for the military.
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Mar 24, 2010 22:12
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welp, I just ordered a copy of Sled Driver off amazon for 15€! should be here in a few days, I can't wait!
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Mar 24, 2010 23:06
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I've spent a lot of time on Airliners.net and it's NEVER time wasted. I usually like to wait a week or so between visits and then check their highest-rated lists of photos from the last week or month. It's usually filled with loving gold. This week offers us... gently caress YEAH       You can argue about how much you love the F-22 and how it can rock the poo poo out of anything else in the sky, or how much it sucks, everything from computer failures to whether the enormous cost is justifiable in an age of cheap drones where dogfights no longer happen, but there's just one thing I'd like to say about the Raptor. There is classical aircraft beauty that you can find in things like F-4U Corsairs and Constellations, and astonishing technical design evident in Russian designs like the Su-35 and the An-225, but almost nothing can even touch the sophisted and incredibly pleasing aesthetic design of the F-22. There are times where I don't think it even exists, that the USAF paid some ILM modelmakers to take our most deep-seated childhood memories of GI Joe vehicles and Popular Mechanics future weapons predictions, and make a CG model of the perfect jet fighter for recruitment ads.  The Blackbird is still my favorite Frank Dillinger posted:welp, I just ordered a copy of Sled Driver off amazon for 15€! should be here in a few days, I can't wait! WHAT? HOW? Boomerjinks fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Mar 24, 2010 |
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Mar 24, 2010 23:12
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Nebakenezzer posted:
It's an Armstrong Whitworth Argosy, which was a 1960's RAF cargo carrier that was also sold to some civilian operators.
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Mar 24, 2010 23:36
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Holy gently caress...it's....how can so good pics be taken?  If you browse flickr.com's highest rated it's usually cats, artfully lit models or randomers in the street taken with fashionable equipment. But the pics of the rocket shot, the Mirages, the....fuh. Expensive equipment for sure, but goddamn they work hard for their fives.
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Mar 24, 2010 23:44
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I find out that the airplane on the Intrepid is, in fact, not an SR-71 and feel a bit cheated. I then find out that the Intrepid has a Concorde. http://tinyurl.com/OMGCONCORDE I can no longer feel cheated.
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Mar 25, 2010 02:32
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Caught a look at a couple 747-8's on the flight line at work today, jesus christ they are massive in person.
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Mar 25, 2010 02:58
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Cactrot posted:Caught a look at a couple 747-8's on the flight line at work today, jesus christ they are massive in person. I was actually thinking of making a post about the 747 already, so here we go, I guess. Putting aside our negative feelings about commercial air travel these days, you cannot help but think that the Boeing 747 is not an absolute marvel of engineering, and just how much this aircraft changed how we travel today. In 1965, after losing the contract to build a heavy-lift freighter for the USAF, Boeing turned its attention to building a commercial aircraft of roughly the same size. After consultation with the biggest and most powerful airlines of the time (PanAm and TWA, amongst others), it was decided that the new model, the 747, would be built an order of magnitude larger than the largest airliners then in service. To do so, this aircraft would need to incorporate vast amounts of leading edge technology and design philosophy such as high-bypass ratio turbofan engines, inertial navigation and multiple-redundant systems in numbers greater than any other aircraft built to that time. Apart from the Saturn V and maybe Concorde, there was no other machine on Earth more complicated than the Boeing 747 would end up being. In April of 1966, after promising the aircraft be delivered to Pan Am no later than the end of 1969, Boeing began work on the aircraft in earnest. With only 28 months from the time the ink dried on the launch contract to delivery day, Boeing not only had to design an aircraft larger and more complex than any before it, but they also had to build a factory big enough to make this leviathan. The challenge was so immense, many felt that Boeing had essentially wagered the entire company on it's ability to deliver the 747 on time, on weight and on price. Amazingly, they succeeded at this endeavor, with the first flight occurring on February 9th, 1969, and the first delivery to Pan Am just days before the end of 1969. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zq9yJYtXQEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaNT88pPoQ What is even more incredible about the 747 is that it was thought to be obsolete the day Ship #1 rolled off the production line. The idea was the 747 was to be a stop-gap until the SSTs under development at the time took over passenger flights, with the fleet being relegated to a life of hauling cargo. As we all know, however, that proved not to be the case, and the 747 lives on to this very day, having undergone two major revisions in which the 747:
Of course, we could go on and on about how many billions of passengers have been flown over countless billions of miles in the 747, but what I find most amazing about this aircraft is the longevity of its basic design - the 747 has been in service now for just over 40 years, with a brand new variant just entering production now. If the 747-8 lasts as long in production as the -200 and -400 did, we will all be very old men and women by the time the last 747 retires, after what could end up being well more than a century of revenue service.  
MrChips fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 05:13
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JnnyThndrs posted:I lived on the Sunnyvale/Mt. View border for ten years, not far from Moffet Field and you could hear those P3 Orions about a hundred miles away in the middle of the night, they'd just kinda drone away FOREVER before they actually landed there. I got used to it, the noise was sorta comforting. Let it also be known that NASA Ames (at Moffett) has the world's largest wind tunnel - well, it's actually the world's two largest wind tunnels in one package.  Click here for the full 1896x1397 image.  (Look for the people standing in front of the fan section).   SMART rotor (basically an MD-902) in the 40x80 foot closed-loop acoustically treated section.   F/A-18 in the 80x120 foot open loop section. One of the few wind tunnels in the world large enough to test full scale aircraft. When it was built around WWII, it was just right for testing the aircraft of the day. These days, the tunnel is really best suited to testing rotorcraft, but the (actual) F/A-18 above shows that it's useful in fixed wing high AoA tests, too. Tetraptous fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 05:18
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MrChips posted:What is even more incredible about the 747 is that it was thought to be obsolete the day Ship #1 rolled off the production line. The idea was the 747 was to be a stop-gap until the SSTs under development at the time took over passenger flights, with the being relegated to a life of hauling cargo. This is a interesting point all by itself. Everybody in aerospace back in the start of the sixties assumed that the next big thing was going to be SSTs, and most nations with a big aerospace industry were actively planning building one. You can kinda understand why they thought this: if you look at the development of flight from the start of WW2 to the sixties, the amount of change was immense. The smart people just extrapolated the current amount of change into the future. It's a good reminder that even all the smartest people in the room can be vastly wrong about something, especially if that something is a future prediction.
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Mar 25, 2010 08:18
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Cirrus_Alreia posted:I find out that the airplane on the Intrepid is, in fact, not an SR-71 and feel a bit cheated. I could've sworn I saw one of those parasite jet fighters on the deck of the Intrepid in a state of disrepair years and years ago. I even took a picture. And then my friend lost the camera. This is probably the mid-90s. I think it was a XF-85 Goblin.
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Mar 25, 2010 09:57
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Them Russians be crazy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnUT8O7w6b8&feature=player_embedded
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Mar 25, 2010 12:21
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quote:With one engine destroyed and two on fire Lieutenant Palm struggled to keep his bomber on course, determined to make his bombs count. "Tramping on the pedals was like fighting a bucking horse," he recalled. "I was not getting much pressure on the right pedal. I reached down. My right leg below the knee was hanging from a shred of flesh." http://www.homeofheroes.com/wings/part2/09_ploesti.html quote:Enemy fire was as heavy as it had been earlier and most of the bombers took multiple strikes. Posey's lead ship V for Victory, piloted by Captain John Diehl, took a direct hit from a 37-mm ground gun that tore away part of the bomber's tail and killed gunner Truett Williams. Similar damage was wreaked upon other bombers in the four waves, but in a manner that may well have validated Colonel Smart's original concept for the low-level mission, Target Blue suffered 100% damage beneath the bombs of twenty-one airships, without the loss of a single aircraft over target. Diehl climbed to 250 feet to clear the smokestacks, then dropped back down to low-level flight with the other pilots following. "We left at a very low level," he recalled. "People ask me what I mean by low level. I point out that on the antennas on the bottom of my airplane I brought back sunflowers and something that looked suspiciously like grass." quote:Killer Kane had mounted nose guns in Hail Columbia that could be charged by the navigator and fired from the pilot's seat. Running hard and low into a barrage of enemy fire, Kane pulled the trigger. "Col. Kane controlled them (the guns)," recalled his navigator Norm Whalen. "He used them up. The deafening roar of three of them going off at once in the confined space of the nose of a B-24 is hard to describe. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. Col. Kane hollered down to us, 'What happened?' He thought we would reload the guns, but he'd used up all the ammo. There was none left." In a minute and a half Kane had unloaded nearly 2,500 rounds on the enemy positions.
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Mar 25, 2010 14:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:It's been mentioned a few times in the thread that newer designs are often less reliable/harder to maintain then older designs. Is this because the engineers building it are much less likely to have hands on experience? Or because design requirements have gotten way more ambitious in the past 30 years, or what? Probably the same reason that cars are now more difficult to maintain - increased technological sophistication.
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Mar 25, 2010 14:33
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Basically: more stuff == more stuff to break
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Mar 25, 2010 15:38
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Tetraptous posted:Let it also be known that NASA Ames (at Moffett) has the world's largest wind tunnel - well, it's actually the world's two largest wind tunnels in one package. When I was living on Moffett you always knew when this tunnel started up because the whole house would shake. We were directly across 4 blocks of open space from the outlet of that beast, and it was pointed straight at the front of our house. It wasn't as bad as some of the smaller (super-sonic?) wind tunnels near it though, those would SCREAM all drat day. It was neat living on that base too and being able to walk around the whole Ames research center and see all the cool wind tunnels. There was a back lot where they stored all the 'thrown out' prototype things they'd test in that tunnel. I wish I'd had a camera to share with you all. I remember seeing a couple of those wierd rotor-craft that you posted in that lot, along with this:  More info here BloodBag fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 15:47
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InterceptorV8 posted:http://www.homeofheroes.com/wings/part2/09_ploesti.html Amazing link, thanks much. Lighter note, here's a page from Trade-a-plane, 1964.  edit: according to Wolfram Alpha, $10K in 1964 equals just under $70K of todays. So cheap yes, but not given away with corn flakes exactly. Ola fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 15:49
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Ola posted:Lighter note, here's a page from Trade-a-plane, 1964. My God, that is amazing. How many Mustangs are in civilian hands now? And why aren't there more full sized replicas around?
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Mar 25, 2010 15:58
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Here's one in great shape: http://www.trade-a-plane.com/specs/78153 1.8 million.
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Mar 25, 2010 16:00
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decahedron posted:Probably the same reason that cars are now more difficult to maintain - increased technological sophistication. There was also a lot of "trial and error" fixes to older aircraft (due to more of them being built) during their production runs that modern designs usually don't go through. In the case of the B-52, the current USAF fleet is comprised entirely of "H" models, which were the last of 744 total B-52's manufactured. Each successive B-52 variant was built to improve the capabilities of the aircraft as well as solve any design problems from earlier models, and most B-52 variants underwent at least one modification in service to correct things like fuel leaks or unreliable engines. When the B-52H was built, it incorporated the lessons learned from all the earlier B-52 models, which means that the USAF has mostly needed to replace outdated electronics to keep the aircraft viable as technology changes. Because of that evolution, the B-52 fleet started with a proven airframe, and every time it gets upgraded, the technology added has already been proven, which removes the teething problems any new electronic system is going to run into.
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Mar 25, 2010 18:59
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Boomerjinks posted:WHAT? HOW?! I just searched for it on amazon, and I guess someone didn't know what they had or are about to scam me out of 15 bucks. I can't wait for the mail to get here, I want to read about amazing SR-71 stories  fake edit: if anyone ruins it for me, so help me god I will KILL YOU.
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Mar 25, 2010 19:23
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One of my favourite 747 pics: Also, you BASTARD for finding that SR-71 book so cheap!
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Mar 25, 2010 19:33
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monkeytennis posted:One of my favourite 747 pics:
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Mar 25, 2010 20:51
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Fucknag posted:Man, what are the odds of timing that shot so perfectly? Pretty good if the pilot didn't care about what happens to the plane after 
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Mar 25, 2010 20:55
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monkeytennis posted:One of my favourite 747 pics: New Desktop!
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Mar 25, 2010 21:32
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Cirrus_Alreia posted:I find out that the airplane on the Intrepid is, in fact, not an SR-71 and feel a bit cheated. I knew they had the Concorde but I also thought there was an SR-71 on the Intrepid. I had to look too. As a New Yorker, my greatest source of shame is that I've never been there 
Seizure Meat fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 21:39
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D C fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 22:36
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Saw this posted on CNN today. The British had to intercept a Blackjack over Scotland. drat Russians are getting ballsy. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/03/25/russia.uk.intercepts/index.html?hpt=C1
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Mar 26, 2010 00:23
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This sort of thing has been happening for a few years now.
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Mar 26, 2010 00:35
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monkeytennis posted:One of my favourite 747 pics: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. I have turned on the seatbelt light because your copilot bet me we couldn't go vertical." fake edit: He got an amazing price on that book, hopefully I can find it cheaply soon, too. In the meantime, I'm rereading Ben Rich's book about the Skunk Works.
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Mar 26, 2010 01:19
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Anybody want to play junior spy photo analyst here? http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sou...6,0.018024&z=17 Beijing Aviation Museum. All kinds of stuff you don't expect to see laying around. Plus a bunch of good stuff under the mountain. Like this TU-4 AWACS  During WWII, several American B-29's were emergency landed in Kamchatka after raids on Japan. Russia was officially neutral in the pacific conflict, so they said "Yoink!" and took possession of the aircraft, sending the crews home the long way via Iran. At the time, the B-29 was the most advanced, most expensive aircraft the world had ever known. The Superfortress program rivaled the cost of the Manhattan Project. With three examples on hand, Soviet engineers copied them part for part, and bootstrapped their own strategic bomber industry. Built hundreds of them, including a few that found their way into the Chinese Airforce. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Mar 26, 2010 |
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Mar 26, 2010 01:31
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I think there's a P-40 down in the south surrounded by Migs 
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Mar 26, 2010 01:39
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Slo-Tek posted:
Funny how they lucked out on development. Their heatseeking missile program got a bonus leap when an undetonated Sidewinder was pulled from a North Korean MiG-19 and shipped to the Soviet Union.
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Mar 26, 2010 01:49
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Slo-Tek posted:The best part of the Tu-4 story was the part where Russian scientists visited the engine factory in the US wearing specially-designed soft sole shoes, which they used to collect metal shavings around the different lathes. SNEAKY FUCKERS!
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Mar 26, 2010 02:02
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D C posted:Much love for the AStar. Don't see too many other 3-bladed helicopters these days, but it's quite economical for an articulated rotor helicopter with very good performance for the price. My only complaint is the blades go the wrong way round, like most other French and Russian helicopters.
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Mar 26, 2010 02:04
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