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Slo-Tek posted:
Well, it was designed as a immediately-after-WW2-era fighter-bomber, pretty much. Otherwise the trend in Swedish aircraft design has been to constantly attempt to make the aircraft smaller, because bigger aircraft are more expensive. The Viggen just happened to become big because the only viable engine option (a militarized JT-8D) was big; twin-engine solutions were rejected for cost reasons. The engine choice is also why it looks so snub-tailed - it has to do with the center of gravity/center of lift balance. With the Gripen they were more successful; it's positively tiny compared to a lot of other modern fighters. By the way, if you have $20k, it seems like you can buy your very own Lansen: http://www.barnstormers.com/classified_818790_Great+restoration+project.html edit: by the way, speaking of stealing Nazi designs, the Tunnan has some striking similarities to the Messerschmitt Me.P1011, don't you think?  
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Oct 29, 2013 |
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Oct 29, 2013 10:50
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SybilVimes posted:Given the time gap between WW2 and the Saab 29, it could just as easily have been designed based on the Lavochkin La-150 Yak-15 and -17. The basic airframe layout was chosen in december '45 though, and there's evidence Saab engineers had access to at least some German research (regarding wing sweep in particular). But then again I agree that parallel evolution is also a likely explanation,
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Oct 29, 2013 15:39
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MrLonghair posted:There's been such an increase in Russian fighters and bombers practicing in international water edges or entering our borders that we no longer bother intercepting because we'd be ran out of fuel. Not to mention their still on-going peekaboo with submarines deep into Swedish territory that we can only sit and watch. In a bizarre twist, the Swedish navy currently has the biggest and most modern submarine fleet in the Baltic sea. On paper, at least. But yeah, the Russians are being more aggressive in the Baltic than they've ever been since fall of the USSR. We're not exactly innocent regarding submarine peekaboo in other people's territorial waters though, Swedish subs were reconing ports and doing exercises with sub-deployed mines on the wrong side of the Baltic well into the 90's (source: Vi levde i verkligheten - Marinens operationer och taktik under det kalla kriget by Herman Fältström; a highly interesting book but hard to find copies of). And then there's the NSA-financed SIGINT ship we've had basically parked outside Kaliningrad and shadowing every Russian navy exercise in the Baltic since the mid-80's. Sorry for this derail. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Nov 19, 2013 |
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Nov 19, 2013 18:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsTayoiTWTw Old documentaries are the best documentaries. (Well, okay, this one isn't that old, I think it's 1990-ish.)
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Dec 1, 2013 02:36
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Micr0chiP posted:Just saw this one, a crazy russian pilot taking off rolling with the front gear only. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QHOqmbRefg&t=229s Wait for the sick backwards wheelie and bowing to the audience.
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Dec 13, 2013 13:27
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smackfu posted:Wow, Singapore has an Air Force? It's a pretty small place. Not only that, they also have a fairly big indigenous arms industry. They're also a faithful purchaser of Swedish submarines. I think they're paranoid about Malaysia or something.
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Dec 16, 2013 21:49
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They're about as militarized now as Sweden was in the 50's. You know, the decade when we were getting planes shot down by MiGs over the Baltic Sea and we had an honest-to-god nuclear weapons program going on here. What I'm saying is, I don't really think there's a threat level that motivates that kind of thing over there right now.
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Dec 17, 2013 01:00
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polpotpotpotpotpot posted:Another fun northern approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm6dQK0ipGk I love it how it's calling minimums at a point where you can't even see the runway yet because the plane hasn't lined up. I guess if you want to go around you have to complete the turn first, because it doesn't look like trying to climb over those mountains is a good idea.
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Dec 21, 2013 20:11
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KingPave posted:Honest to god, first one to pop up when I searched Hasegawa on Amazon was this: Hasegawa J35J Draken Swedish Special Model Kit I haven't built a scale model since I was about 12 years old but now I'm tempted.
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Dec 30, 2013 14:16
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Saab is actually trying to buy their 340's back because they want to convert them to maritime surveillance aircraft and/or the AEW&C version. The production line closed in 1998. What is it with airborne radar and out-of-production airliners? 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Dec 31, 2013 |
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Dec 31, 2013 17:06
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quote:Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
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Feb 4, 2014 17:28
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It's 35,786 km. 
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Mar 16, 2014 02:17
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Davin Valkri posted:I might not much care for them (I like Gripens the best of the Eurocanard family), but what are the big issues with the Typhoon and Rafale? The main problem with them is the cost. They are only marginally more capable than the Gripen E/F (mainly they can carry more weapons per aircraft and have a bit better range) but cost incredibly much more money, both in purchase and in maintenance.
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Apr 28, 2014 14:31
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Eej posted:Speaking of (as a casual reader), is Sweden like an Aeronautical Galapagos or something? Saab's fighter designs go from a pusher prop, to a flying barrel, to a double delta wing and then canards as far as the eye can see (also sort of related, the Stridvagn 103). Supposedly they were quite good designs but I don't think any other planes really picked up on their design details? Well, during WW2 the one big lesson the Swedish leadership learned was that in order to maintain armed neutrality an indigenous arms industry is required. Saab's two first production aircraft were actually pretty conventional designs (Saab 17 and 18) but once some institutional knowledge was there, both the engineers, the company higher-ups and the air force seems to have agreed that indigenous ideas were just as good as anybody else's, and since it was probably hard to get reliable data about foreign designs they were probably sorta right, in a way. If you want to keep up with the bleeding edge developments you can't really wait for people to put them in production, you have to roll with your own ideas. A lot of the originality also came from a number of rather specific requirements from the air force's side; "Swedish conditions" were rather unlike everyone else's conditions. The pusher prop (Saab 21) in particular was pretty much a failure (designed as a fighter, was too slow and not maneuverable enough for that, repurposed as ground attack aircraft, had rather nasty cooling and reliability problems) although it did lead to Saab independently developing a very early ejection seat. The Tunnan was actually a pretty conventional design (it's very similar in principle to its superpower contemporaries, the F-86 and the MiG-15) and was at least in part dependent on German WW2 research on how swept wings worked. At this point though there wasn't really all that many ways that Saab could go; they only had one engine option (the de Havilland Ghost) and all they knew at the time indicated swept wings was a must, and so the plane was designed around that. The Lansen was basically a ground attack version of the Tunnan and is pretty boring, really. Except for the part where they developed the first (by a good ten years) long-range air-launched anti-ship missile west of the Iron Curtain for it, but that's a story for a different post. The Draken is a bit more interesting; I have a huge effort post about it that I never seem to be able to finish, but I can give a very brief summary. The chief engineer for the Draken project was a man whose only real prior experience in aircraft design was a very lightweight single piston engined single-seater hobby aircraft. He had worked at Saab for about five years at the time and was appointed head engineer "until someone more suitable could be found" (of course, that never happened). He later remarked in his memoirs that "I really wasn't qualified to design a supersonic fighter jet, but then again, at that time, who was?". The double delta design was a compromise in many ways (internal volume, wing thickness, supersonic performance vs subsonic performance, etc etc); the main alternative was an extremely thin wing, Starfighter style. The Saab engineers had to trust their own heads because they couldn't exactly look at anybody else's designs, since nobody else had built a supersonic fighter yet. The Viggen was probably the most unique of the Saab projects. Its primary role was maritime strike with long-range radar-guided missiles launched from very low altitude, which literally nobody else in the West was even considering at the time of its conception. On top of this the air force had a long list of other highly specific requirements (STOL capability, very short turnaround times, ease of maintenance with conscripted mechanics, supersonic performance at low altitude, would be nice with some fighter capabilities, doesn't have to fly any further than the other side of the Baltic sea, and oh it can't be too expensive so don't use two engines please) and the engine options were basically limited to either the Bristol Olympus (originally conceived as the engine for the cancelled TSR2 project, later repurposed for the Concorde) or militarizing an engine used on the 727 and the DC-9. All of this led to the funky stubby-tailed canard design. The Gripen is, as far as aerodynamics goes, built on the same general idea as the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Rafale, it's just a lot smaller and single engined for cost reasons. The canards are also bigger because they double as airbrakes, which let the designers do away with the thrust reverser that gave the Viggen the L part of its STOL capability. As far as the S-tank/stridsvagn 103 goes, the "defensive tank" stuff is probably a History Channel invention. This isn't the appropriate thread so I'll keep it short, but I've read most of the original design documents and related correspondence kept at the national military archives and it's simply not true. The army wanted a tank, they ordered a tank and they got a tank - not a tank destroyer. A tank is an offensive weapon, and the bulk of the Swedish tank force was stationed in the far southern parts of the country, where the terrain has a lot in common with the north German plains. The mission was to throw back amphibious landings from Poland and East Germany (Sweden was actually located east of the Iron Curtain) back into the sea before they could establish a beachhead. The entire thing with the gun fixed in the chassis was a compromise; a turret would have been better but the designers figured that they had invented the Next Big Thing as far as tank armor protection went. Protecting the tank from weapons equivalent to its own, as well as from those nasty HEAT shells would have made it unreasonably heavy, but by fixing the gun in the chassis you could have both a really good sloped armor all over the front of the tank (protected you from the tank guns of the day), a low profile (made it harder to hit you at all) and a slat armor that covered the entire front of the tank (protected you against anti-tank missiles and other HEAT weapons) while still keeping the weight down. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 20:05
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Spanish Eurofighter crashed earlier today, pilot did not survive: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27768001
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Jun 9, 2014 18:14
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A Handed Missus posted:
What's the 747 with the goofy fins on the elevator and weird pins all over for? edit: oh right, that's the space shuttle carrier TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Aug 20, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 18:12
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Haha, right after posting that I googled "dryden flight research center" and figured it out from the wiki entry, but during the five minutes it took to do that I get no less than four awesome picture replies. I love this thread 
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Aug 20, 2014 18:17
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Babby's first turboprop flight.  ATR 72-600
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Aug 29, 2014 07:04
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david_a posted:Whoa. I always assumed planes with two engines had them spin in different directions. Although I guess that would make them different engines, huh? quote:The Hornet used "slimline" Rolls-Royce Merlin engines with engine ancillaries repositioned to minimise frontal area and drag. It was unusual for a British design in having propellers that rotated in opposite directions; the two engine crankshafts rotated the same direction, but the Merlin 131 added an idler gear to reverse its propellor's rotation (to clockwise, viewed from the front). This cancelled the torque effect of two propellers turning in the same direction that had affected earlier designs (such as the Mosquito). It also reduced adverse yaw caused by aileron trim corrections and generally provided more stable and predictable behaviour in flight. De Havilland tried props that rotated outward at the tops of their arcs (as in the P-38 Lightning), but this configuration blanketed the fin and reduced rudder effectiveness at low speeds, compromising ground handling; on production Hornets the conventionally rotating Merlin 130 was on the port wing with the Merlin 131 on the starboard.
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Oct 21, 2014 23:44
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http://vimeo.com/99490998
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Nov 10, 2014 14:01
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Nov 29, 2014 15:34
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 click for huge
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Dec 9, 2014 08:25
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Ardeem posted:I wonder what the one pilot did to get a tiger striped drop tank. The Czechs regularly fly around with tiger themed Gripens for the NATO Tiger Meets. That particular tiger striped drop tank seems to be more or less permanently painted like that, it's shown up on several different aircraft individuals and it's been around for a while.    
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 14:04
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I haven't flown any powered aircraft but I did almost get a gliding license about ten years ago and let me tell you, they took aerodynamics really loving seriously. There was a lot of time during the training dedicated to things like making sure we understood sideslips, spin/stall recovery, CG/CL balance etc etc (if you weighed less than a threshold you had to bring a sandbag to sit on when you flew front seat for CG reasons - a very hands-on lesson that was always accompanied by the warning that forgetting to do it could change the normally very benign aircraft into a spin-hungry monster). The instructors were constantly hounding you to fly aerodynamically "clean". I remember one of the first lessons in aerodynamics where they were giving an introduction to the control surfaces and what each of them do individually answered that question vessbot was asking about ailerons - if you bank left without any rudder input, the aircraft will turn its nose right. It's because when the right wing increases lift, the drag on that wing also increases, while the opposite is true on the left wing. I suppose this explanation probably isn't the whole truth (and I don't remember all the details anyway) but for something done by volunteers in their spare time for a symbolic fee it was pretty exhaustive. Gliding was pretty awesome and I really oughta get into that again. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 08:50
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Lightbulb Out posted:Here's a cool video of a CH-53A doing loops and rolls. That's pretty awesome! Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmoc3YgvXWE
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Feb 4, 2015 22:11
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iyaayas01 posted:And even with "the West," the only people who can make engines worth a drat are P&W (lol), GE, R-R, and Snecma. There's a reason that other countries that build fighters (Sweden) or airliners (Brazil) license, buy, or otherwise utilize engines from one of those manufacturers (or a consortium where one or more of those companies has the lead). Yeah. Back in the 40's and 50's there were some efforts to develop an indigenous Swedish jet engine business, though. The company working on it, STAL (Svenska Turbinfabriks AB Ljungström; these days the remnants of the business is a company called Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery) had a pretty long history in the power generation business and - among other things - built turbines for a number of power plants, both in Sweden and elsewhere. They had a working engine that they test flew on a surplus Lancaster in the early 50's, but it was too small for the Draken and the air force decided they couldn't wait for an indigenous engine and went to Rolls-Royce instead. I remember reading in some book about the Draken that the planned engine would've been better than the Rolls-Royce Avon if it had been built, but who knows, paper projects are very unreliable creatures and considering they had no real previous experience... Either way, since the air force had been the main financier of the jet engine experiments STAL got out of that business and that was that. Even if they had succeeded, though, they would probably have been swallowed up by one of the big players pretty quickly. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 04:08
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0I75OZmA-0 Found this while cruising around in the related videos. e: also, fighter pilots don't have a monopoly on stupidly low passes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo4LlpFs-5M&t=34s TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 18:12
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galliumscan posted:To add a bit of quantitation to the discussion: Thanks for these, very informative. What I'm getting from these is that even with a 500 mW green laser you'd have to use some very interesting terrain features to get close enough to a commercial airliner to have any real chance of dazzling the crew, let alone do any actual eye damage. I mean, all distractions to air crew are obviously bad and potentially dangerous, but I think the whole permanent eye damage risk discussion is a bit exaggerated.
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Feb 12, 2015 08:27
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priznat posted:Dunno about the regular -46 but the ch-113 Labrador had a watertight hull specifically for water landings. I know the Swedish ones had that capability as well.
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Feb 17, 2015 17:12
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Slo-Tek posted:TIL, Sweden operated ex-RAF Skyraiders as target tugs. Then there was a separate "target tug squadron" which was the closest to an aggressor squadron the Swedish air force ever had. They flew Lansens with ECM pods as aggressors way into the 90's, something like 20 years after the aircraft had been retired in the rest of the air force. Some more pics from the early 60's: http://lae.blogg.se/2012/february/visby-en-gang-pa-60-talet.html TheFluff fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 01:45
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InAndOutBrennan posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM1thbvBbKk When I look at these footage of the crashsite, it looks like something is not right. If the plane was packed with 150 passengers then the crash site would have been bodies all over the place. I can clearly see the rescue workers so then a body would be clearly also. But there are no visual bodies. Also how can a plane just drop from the sky as they said, that is not even possible, as a plane has wings that glides. Another thing, i see no burning marks or a place of impact. If i plane hits the rocks it leaves a big black burning mark. I see no such thing on the footage. Also there is nothing left of the plane, not even the wings or the cockpit or seats or anything, the plane has just crumbled to pieces. Wings, engines and cockpits just don't crumble to pieces, no matter how hard the impact. But they did manage to find the black boxes within no time. This is ridicules, it is right in your face that something is wrong in this picture. But of course we are all just blindly going to believe what the authorities are going to make us believe. I have no idea what has happened to that plane, i have no conspiracy, but all i see that what they are showing us on this footage is not a plane crash site. It looks staged to me, i think we are being lied too. And not just now, they are lying and deceiving us all the time. This proves it to me. Whatever this is, it doesn't look like a plane crash.
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Mar 24, 2015 20:25
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jeez guys there's even a link to the comment in the post, I haven't actually gone completely bananas (yet)
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Mar 24, 2015 20:32
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Regnevelc posted:True. But wasn't it in the afternoon? 10:41 AM local time.
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Mar 26, 2015 02:18
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I got to fly from Heathrow to LA in the upper deck of a 747 a decade ago. It was pretty cool. Virgin's 747's on the LHR-JFK route used to have (don't know if they still do) some regular economy class seating on the upper deck. If you were quick on the self-assigned seating you could just grab one - and of course I did, both ways. Very quiet and generally chill up there, really good for economy class.
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Apr 8, 2015 18:57
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Mortabis posted:Isn't that normally a really bad idea? Well, AFAIK the danger is risking a deep stall, but if you know what you're doing it's a relatively "safe" maneuver. I'm not sure if I understand it completely but I think it's similar to this maneuver in the Draken (which was done during the basic flight training on the aircraft as a "you need to be aware that this is a thing" type exercise), except in a flat turn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqiDEcfSnXs&t=110s I have probably gotten all of this completely wrong but it's an excuse to post that video clip so I don't feel ashamed at all.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:14
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The JA 37 Viggen's radar had basically the same transmitter/receiver hardware from when it entered service in 1979 to when it was retired in 2004. The signal processing computers were upgraded in several stages though, and the software for them was continually modified and improved through the entire service life of the aircraft. By 2000, when the last modifications were done, the radar had basically double the detection range compared to its first incarnation. There had been some hardware mods with amplifiers of some kind installed, but most of it was in pure software. So yes, that stuff is really loving important. I've been working on a radar effortpost to go with the last part of the translation of the JA 37 seminar, but I'm lazy and have been researching other things as well, but I'll see about finishing it one of these days.
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May 14, 2015 00:55
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This discussion is fascinating and all, but y'all need to post more insanity. Example: giving new meanings to the concept of "bush flying":  You're looking at a Viggen below treetop level, somewhere up north. Possibly at the Vidsel Test Range, but who knows, the regulations weren't all that strict up there. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 09:32 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 09:26
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Örlogskapten  Örlogskapten is only used in the navy; the equivalent in the air force is simply a major (same spelling in Swedish). "Örlog" is an old Norse/old Germanic term for "oathbreaker" or something like that, but it's come to mean "naval warfare" in modern Swedish.Also, aircraft and pilot loss rates were absolutely appalling in the Swedish air force in the 50's/60's. Out of 661 Saab J 29 Tunnans built, 242 were written off after accidents of various kinds, in which 99 pilots died. Safety thinking and regulations steadily improved during the Cold War but extreme low flying with the Viggen remained a part of the doctrine well into the 90's, even though regulations during the 80's and 90's formally restricted altitude minimums to 30 meters AGL over land (20 meters over water), up from an earlier 20/10 meters. This was as eyeballed by the pilot though, so there some (or, well, a lot) of wriggle room, especially up north where there weren't a lot of people to complain about it. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 10:30 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 10:20
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Yes. Yes, this is insane.
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May 18, 2015 15:17
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MrYenko posted:Fairey Firefly Painted in Swedish target tug colors and featuring the text "SVENSK FLYGTJÄNST AB, STOCKHOLM" in faded letters. Svensk Flygtjänst was a civilian contractor towing targets for army and navy AAA training. They bought 19 milsurp Fireflies from the Royal Navy in 1949, which they used until 1964 (about half of them crashed during those years of service). The one Duxford has (formerly registered as SE-BRG) was then in a museum at Arlanda for many years, then sold to a private individual for restoration and then sold to Duxford in 2004, with the intention that Duxford would restore it to flying condition. Here's the same aircraft back in the early 60's: 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jun 1, 2015 |
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Jun 1, 2015 20:41
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