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There's two planes on my short list that I want to buy: The Icon A-5 Amphibious sport aircraft. Price: $135,000  The second is the world's smallest jet, the BD-5.. which I want in a two seater. I can't find a solid price on the kit though.  Click here for the full 640x480 image. Is anyone else here interested in sport flying?
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Mar 8, 2010 10:48
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DerDestroyer posted:What can they do with flattened lumps of scrap from the F-117 anyway? Isn't the F-117 retired now? The F-117 was an absolute miracle, it's considered the best secret ever kept by Washington. The US Department of Defense spent 20 years developing the stealth material without a single leak. Being able to examine the surface alone in a lab is a HUGE advantage in solving the technology. The next step is figuring out how to manufacture it in mass production, but rest assured that the Russians didn't need 20 years to duplicate the invention once they had this sample. Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Mar 12, 2010 |
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Mar 12, 2010 15:06
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azflyboy posted:I remember reading that the Nighthawk was retired simply because the aircraft were getting old (and therefore more costly to keep flying) and the USAF wanted more F-22's, so they canned the F-117. The F-117 was retired because the B-2 was a more capable bomber, and it's poor maneuverability limited it to nighttime missions. The F-22 was the scheduled replacement, which is a way more capable fighter, but its costs has canned it as well. The F-35 will eventually be the fighter of choice for all forces once it is sent into mass production, so the DOD can save money. Also, Here's a video of the Russian T-50 stealth fighter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22fN4fVoFdY
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Mar 12, 2010 15:16
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Cannons are a perfectly capable weapon. If I was intercepting an enemy target and fired my missiles at range and missed, be it from their stealth signature, maneuver, or counter measures.. as I approached I would want to be able to fire cannons. Alternately, in a drag out dogfight it's a great backup weapon if you are out of missiles, you can shoot down a hell of a lot more planes with a fully loaded cannon than with fully loaded missile payload. Cannons are also more effective against ground targets like trucks, ships, etc. You can't strafe with missiles.
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Mar 12, 2010 17:51
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decahedron posted:If things are really that undetectable people will just fly around blundering in to each other like retards though and the quickness of closing the range will make it very difficult to bounce people or get a good pass off. You're talking fighting WWII dogfights at 3x speed. Pilots don't rely on radar during dogfights, it's visual identification. That's why they have such nice big canopies on fighters. Radar is great when a target is out of visual range, but once in visual range, it's a lot better to look at them than watch your radar screen.
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Mar 12, 2010 17:55
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decahedron posted:Well yes, my point was that with low-observable stealth aircraft people are going to be getting to within visual range before they can plan to engage, and it will probably be a little bit difficult to find people to kill when everyone is super stealthy (which is a future that is decades off, because nobody the US is fighting is going to have stealthy equipment for a while). Yeah, basically the idea behind stealth aircraft is an intercept vector into their blind spot, and their first radar warning being your radar system locking them for missile radar guidance, at which point they need to panic and try to figure out where you are in the sky. Once your missile fires, they have a decent idea of the attack vector, can fire off a counter measure, and attempt to maneuver into a counter attack. So the longer you wait to fire missile, the better chance you have to hit.. and the more likely you will need to follow up with a cannon. If you wanted to be all Top Gun, you could try to stealth into cannon range with no radar, but the military would never condone that. EDIT: Watch my previous video about the Russian Sukov T-50. Russia and India already have orders for 200 each, and delivery date is approximately 2015-2017. I'm sure India isn't the only country ready to place an order. Russia is notorious for selling weapons systems to anyone who will buy them. Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Mar 12, 2010 |
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Mar 12, 2010 18:05
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I get what you're saying, and having both defender and aggressor as stealth air craft will present new challenges. It will really boil down to visual identifications, and you would be surprised at how a pilot can see. Legend has it Chuck Yeager used to spot enemy aircraft during WWII from 50 miles away.
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Mar 12, 2010 18:22
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The shuttle is about to take off, and you can watch it live here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/
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Apr 5, 2010 11:21
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azflyboy posted:Most fuel dump sites are located over either uninhabited areas or over water. Frank Dillinger posted:isn't something like this kind of an environmental hazard? I mean, dumping that much hydrocarbon fuel can't be good, can it? As an Army environmental compliance officer, I will interject that gasoline contaminates water at a ratio of 1:1,000,000 so it's insane to think someone would dump fuel over water as a matter of precaution. It would also have to be reported to the EPA. I can vaguely sympathize with field dumping, though the site would need to avoid run-off and be subjected to close monitoring.
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Apr 5, 2010 12:03
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Banked through some clouds on an IFR flight today, flying a Beechcraft Duchess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ivdMsg76Kw
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Nov 21, 2010 01:22
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I suppose I can share a few pics from my albums as well....       
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Mar 2, 2011 23:37
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Not to bend the conversation back to the cell phone thing again, but it might be enlightening to read this article from the IEEE, as I noticed that no one was addressing the specific points made by their investigation. The nuts and bolts of this argument is that the FCC allows most devices to bleed outside of their target frequencies and cause a radius of interference with other devices that often does not meet the margin of safety for interference with aviation equipment. A prime example of this was the Samsung SPH-N300 cellphones causing GPS receivers to lose satellite lock. It's not just limited to cell phones though, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error reoccurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again. Sorry for bringing that back up, here's some pics from Sun N Fun
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Apr 4, 2011 21:59
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ack! posted:The funny thing is weather is pretty poor here (2SM -RA BR BKN025 OVC030) and one of our brand new 737 didn't depart because of it, but this WWII A/B-26 just did. That weather is actually nice for a 737, so maybe it was the airport they wanted to land at? Most people who fly vintage aircraft don't give a poo poo, but legally that B-25 would need some kind of modern nav aid to fly with 2SM visibility.
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Apr 5, 2011 15:17
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slidebite posted:I understand where you're coming from, but even with mass transit it's pretty easy to get to DC from NY, isn't it? D.C. and NYC are like a million miles away. There's no difference between taking Accela and flying, both in travel time and ticket price. The Amtrak is around 5 hours, pretty close to driving. So besides being a significant distance to travel, both cities have dedicated Air & Space museums that get way more tourism than any other place in the US, even more than Kennedy Space Center. I think it makes sense to give them each one.
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Apr 14, 2011 13:07
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oxbrain posted:What kind of climb and descent rates do airliners normally use? Each airframe has it's own Vx and Vy, and the angle depends on gross weight, lift, and winds.. but both climb and roll maneuvers should be done as a single smooth movement, not a series of rapid small corrections. Doing an 8 point roll feels like fun in the cockpit, as each point jerks you to the next... but trying to break a bank into a series of "points" would just be obscene to the passengers of an airliner that simply don't want to spill their coffee.
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Apr 25, 2011 18:46
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BonzoESC posted:A pretty good article on the aerodynamics of turning an airplane: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.htm That's a great article.
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Apr 26, 2011 01:41
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Advent Horizon posted:Off the top of my head I have 5 different backpacks that I currently use and I'm planning on buying another later today or tomorrow. Only one of those was under $100, and even that went over when you consider that I took it to a tailer and had custom work done to it. Who the hell takes a backpack to the tailor?
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Apr 28, 2011 03:21
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This is probably a repost seeing as it's 4 years old, but does anyone have anymore videos like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xISpZYajveA
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May 25, 2011 14:41
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xaarman posted:When all else fails, there is known pitch and power settings. From what I understand about the crash, this is the only thing that could have saved them, which just leaves you to ask, "Why weren't these pilots trained any better?"
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Jun 1, 2011 22:33
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Gorilla Salad posted:Over in the History thread in GBS, Phanatic posted this utterly glorious story of a SR-71 pilot Brian Shul from his book Sled Driver. This is awesome. Was there ever a second edition printing of this book?
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Jun 3, 2011 17:09
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That fly-by is just crazy. Speaking of crazy.. saw a squadron of F-18s come in to land in front of me.. couldn't get out my camera until I got on the ground though.  
Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jun 8, 2011 |
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Jun 8, 2011 05:37
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Yeah. it was the real Air Force One, there was a TFR out for it when I was checking last night. I was wondering what the hell he would be doing in Miami.. thanks for the pics and info.
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Jun 14, 2011 03:23
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Previa_fun posted:Edit: Oh and Blue Angel pilots land fighter jets on boats and don't wear g-suits. My wife has a really nice certificate and tie pin for pulling 9Gs in her F-16. Sooo.. I don't know what's so great about being limited to around 4G maneuvers.
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Jun 20, 2011 18:44
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VikingSkull posted:Well, the first C-17 landed at Stewart yesterday to start replacing the C-5s. I got to watch it come in which is historic or something, but don't take my C-5s away How do you replace a C-5 with a C-17? The C-5 is literally twice the capacity. When we did the Afghanistan troop surge, we were running heavy rotations on the C-5s just to move enough gear out to them and trying to move things like container housing units with C-17s was a pain in the rear end in comparison. I think we did like 3 missions using C-17s before we dumped them entirely for C-5s. Granted stuff like that is typically moved by sea, but isn't like a strategic mission of our armed forces to improve our mobilization capabilities? I know the C-5 loves to break, but I think it's the best transport plane we've got in our fleet, especially when comparing pax configurations. The bottom line is you don't want a heavy lift scenario to materialize in war and be forced to shrug your shoulders and say "we don't have that kind of capacity anymore."
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Jul 21, 2011 04:53
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Boomerjinks posted:
I'm pretty sure this is a shot of the Magellanic Clouds, which are visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Aug 17, 2011 |
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Aug 17, 2011 16:52
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slidebite posted:Looks like the galactic core to me. I think it's had a bit of manipulation though, for the stars to be so bright, the exposure would have been pretty long and should have been washed out judging by the light on the wingtip. The red nav light on an aircraft is on the left wing, and it's positioned in such a way that it wouldn't be visible on the top of the wing. So either it's a filter or it's the sensitivity of the CMOS. It wasn't really a long exposure shot, but at a high enough altitude you don't really need as long of an exposure as long as your lens is large enough due to the limited amount of atmospheric diffraction.
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Aug 18, 2011 03:29
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Advent Horizon posted:I think it's actually more fuel efficient to fly. It's certainly more labor efficient. The Queen Elizabeth II uses 57.5 gallons per passenger mile while a Boeing 777-300ER gets 60.06 passenger miles per gallon when configured for maximum capacity (365x 3rd class seats) So if fuel costs skyrocketed and we consider fuel costs as being equal, I would actually think the cruise tickets would be less expensive. The reason, the bulk of their operation can be subsidized through alcohol sales.
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Oct 30, 2011 00:43
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The Locator posted:WORDS Using tank capacity/range is a fairly crude way to do it when you have a more precise calculation available: What is the range when all fuel tanks are full? At service speed, QE2 carries enough fuel for 12 days continuous sailing, but at the slower, more economical speed of 20 knots, she could sail for 30 days or two-thirds of a circumnavigation of the world. I assumed that the QE2 was cruising at 20 knots for maximum efficiency, not at service speed. It's a huge difference in fuel consumption for those 7 knots difference in speed. Here's a detailed explanation e: added links Why argue over which when you can have both? 
Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Oct 30, 2011 |
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Oct 30, 2011 13:38
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smooth jazz posted:I'm told the guy's hat flew off his head, he instinctively reached out to grab it and got sucked in. I thought hats were banned on every flight line around the world because of ingestion issues?
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Dec 5, 2011 15:10
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Cygni posted:Color me skeptical, but given Iran's history and the RQ-170s abilities, it's more likely that it just had a part failure somewhere. According to the latest statement, "U.S. officials tell NBC that CIA operators were flying the unmanned drone when it veered out of control and headed deep into Iran. The drone eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in Iran's remote mountains." That actually lends some credibility to the Iranian's cyber-warfare story. If they hijacked the controls they would want to bring it back to an Iranian base. If the CIA was flying it they wouldn't just let it run out of fuel over enemy territory. However, you really need to question how they were able to reverse engineer the protocol, discover encryption keys, etc. It's starting to sound like perhaps the recent attacks on RSA and Lockheed Martin might have been more interested in drones than the F-22 program as originally speculated. I would be surprised if Iran had the capability to do this on their own, I would be more inclined to think that the Chinese were involved in a joint operation. The fact that Iran had forces out in the mountains picking up the stealth drone before we were able to send in a UAV with a hellfire to destroy it could mean either our bureaucracy was tied down, their QRF was anticipating the recovery, or they just got super lucky, and I definitely wouldn't chalk it down to luck. e: Apparently, breaking their encryption isn't all that hard. Iran has done it before. "The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said." Well, I suppose their worldview just changed. Maybe one day the Pentagon won't run national defense like Adobe and leave in a known exploit for 20 years. Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Dec 6, 2011 |
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Dec 6, 2011 15:27
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Godholio posted:Except you're wrong. I'm pretty sure the bondo job on the wing was done by Iran in order to present it to the public as "whole and intact!" e: The CIA has pretty much admitted they have one, I don't see why you're in a higher state of denial than the CIA, I didn't even think that was possible 
Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Dec 9, 2011 |
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Dec 9, 2011 16:24
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Tsuru posted:FWIW, Airbus has been working on a system that uses inertial reference data to reconstruct an approximate airspeed figure when air data sources become unavailable since well before the accident. The problem is, you can think up the most amazing avionic doodads, but you still have to get your regulatory authorities to accept it and your customers to buy it. Every Airbus has a GPS, and every GPS can calculate speed. Why isn't this a suitable emergency backup for verifying airspeed?
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Dec 12, 2011 19:19
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iyaayas01 posted:This has been discussed at length in the thread over in GiP...the general consensus is that it is typical Iranian propaganda bullshit. Jamming GPS signal != hacking the Gibson and spoofing the drone into thinking it is somewhere it is not...these things have INS for a reason. The general consensus there sucks. If I owned 3 radio towers I could make a military drone fly off course, and I'm not an electronic warfare agency of a government. All you need is the known coordinates of 3 satellites, their broadcast frequency, and the ability to delay and rebroadcast their signal from multiple ground sources. A simple delay can trick the GPS into thinking it's 500 miles West of its actual location, and cause it to suddenly veer to the East. It would think it is correcting its position or returning to base, when in fact it is flying deeper into Iran. GiP think because the signal is encrypted it is impossible to crack, but they don't need to crack it, just slow it down. They think Iran is too stupid to hack it, but it's not complicated and it's not even innovative. All it took was a few minutes on google to find a research white-paper on the vulnerabilities of military GPS receivers. Now imagine if you are a government with an electronic warfare agency, access to a hundred radio towers, a serious interest in recovering a remote controlled spy plane, and daily opportunities to do so. So you have to acknowledge the vulnerability exists and there is continual access to exploit that vulnerability. Every day the probability that they will exploit it approaches 1. So now you've caused a drone to veer off course and it's going to attempt to fly 500 miles in the wrong direction until it runs out of fuel. All the remains is the glide characteristics of an aircraft that's designed to maximize efficiency and maintain straight and level flight so it can hover over a target for hours on end. People in there seriously think this thing is going to brick, but it's not.. it's going to glide. Sure it's going to hit hard and fast, but plenty of people survive crashes like with only some structural damage to the aircraft. Like the taped back on wing we see in the Iranian press photo.
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Dec 19, 2011 14:26
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movax posted:It's definitely possible to do, and I've seen it done...on civilian GPS receivers. Remember that military receivers can decrypt P(Y) (accuracy improvement) starting with PPS-SM in the mid 1990s, and currently on SAASM (the uDAGR I've linked below implements SAASM). It doesn't improve jam-resistance any though (same signal coming from space), though the new code they are rolling out on Block IIR/IIF promises to improve that aspect as well. What the P-code does prevent is an enemy transmitter mimicking a real GPS satellite and the P(Y) code. The GPS ASICs that Uncle Sam uses are rolled in-house; I think you're in for a world of hurt if you're caught with a Rockwell GPS ASIC in your pocket. I think there's been some confusion, in that the theory is that it was a two-fold attack. UAVs are primarily piloted by a human. The theory goes that there was a jamming signal that disconnected the "unhackable" encrypted command and control signal from the UAV forcing it to fall back into a GPS guided "return home" failover. The second part of the attack was then manipulating the timing of the GPS streams to manipulate the UAV to consider itself off course and attempt to correct itself. I know the military is working on a new generation of GPS signal that will be far more robust and secure than what is currently implemented, but I'm not aware of the minuta of detail. It's pretty cool you're home-brewing a GPS receiver, I'm definitely not opposed to hearing all sides of the issue but as I've been piecing it together it seems there's definitely a plausibility to using signal attacks on the UAVs to prevent them from returning back to base. It could just be that the Iranians sort of stumbled into a plausible scenario through coincidence, but I think in terms of national security, we should mitigate risk and not off-handedly dismiss potential threats as GiP demonstrates.
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Dec 20, 2011 02:43
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grover posted:This wouldn't work; the rebroadcast encrypted signal would be rejected for being out-of-tolerance. Spoofing of this sort only works when the signal starts out completely synchronized with the GPS unit's position- something that can only happen if the repeater is initially positioned within a few feet of the target. It's something that's easily done in a laboratory, but just not possible in practice. this one I just stumbled across than the GiP discussion on the matter. E: What's the potential to using GBAS augmentation to assist in the spoofing? Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Dec 20, 2011 |
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Dec 20, 2011 02:58
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Those are all fine points, and again they reinforce the difficulty of a scenario but don't render it impossible.movax posted:Unless defense contractor security is incredibly abysmal, or there was a huge unreported security breach, I don't think the scenario of breaking in and literally "stealing" the drone by taking over its command/control is feasible. Jamming it though to create the scenario you describ would be feasible though. Just to touch on this point, defense contractor security isn't perfect, and there were huge reported security breaches this year connected to China (which is Iran's close military ally). "To this day, RSA still won't confirm what exactly was stolen from its systems, but speculation has run high that the token seeds were compromised in some way." This attack was immediately followed by a remote infiltration of Lockheed Martin using RSA, who just so happens to make the RQ 170. The big story at the time was, were the hackers going after F-22 project material.. but in hindsight, the question could have just as easily been, were they after RQ 170 information? e: formatting Mr.Peabody fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Dec 20, 2011 |
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Dec 20, 2011 15:37
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Nebakenezzer posted:Good lord, the Challenger disaster? What was that like? I saw the challenger explode as well, but I was also pretty young (4th grade I think?) and I didn't really register the horror that the entire crew was incinerated. I basically just thought that it didn't go up like it was supposed to, with a faint recognition that everyone must be dead. Our whole class was actually watching it, as we were outside and had a decent view of the launches from our school. As far as watching the launches from up close, I think the best part isn't the roar of the engines, but feeling the thrust resonate through your whole body. I get as close as I can when I go for the launches for exactly that sensation.
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Feb 14, 2012 19:38
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A little late on a few conversations, but as a logistics manager we're basically taught that anything over 500 miles justifies the price of an airplane. It's like the magic distance. As far as getting through TSA checkpoints, I also dress for the occasion, wearing shorts with no belt, flip flops, even have a TSA approved laptop case. All that won't prepare you for my last flight out of JFK for example, when the line delay to get through security was literally 1.5 hours due to a screening line shutting down. I had the same experience getting onto a civilian aircraft after redeploying from Iraq, managing to carry an Italian stiletto onto the aircraft along with my laughably "disassembled" M-16. However, in light of all this, it's important to remember that these TSA checkpoints are only one part of the "layers" of TSA security that Kip Hawley explained to Congress. Due to the nature of our military presence, it's easy to see how we might slip past the one layer, ignoring the fact that several other layers exist for foreign travelers. In my example, I forgot I had mine secured in the butt stock compartment of my weapon, typically reserved for a cleaning kit.
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Feb 18, 2012 17:36
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Tsuru posted:Not sure if this is what he is talking about, but it is a video of an F-16 entering a spin during a dogfight. I'm not even sure if a failure of the flight control system is what is needed to get an F-16 to spin, but I'm sure someone can fill in the blanks. Not even close. That's amazingly stable, even in a spin, compared to what the plane will do when the 4 redundant flight controllers all fail.
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Feb 24, 2012 07:00
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movax posted:I like how it has virtual prayer mats for facing Mecca in a prayer room, despite the fact that everyone on the plane is going to be shitfaced and the dude's going to be swimming in women. Nope, just hot chicks. I know the first female pilot for Prince Al-Waleed. According to her, the selection process for his staff is pretty much how do you look in heels and a D&G skirt. She had a commercial license from Jordan at the time of this article, went to London and failed to convert to JAA. She was sent to Flight Safety with over 400 hours and after evaluation, they told the Prince she was ineligible for an instrument rating because she failed to meet the prerequisite skills to hold a private pilot license. After 8 years on staff, they finally reduced her pay from $9k a month to $5k a month until she has completed her training. They're still paying for all her training and housing on top of her salary though. So yeah, you're just going to be lucky as gently caress to fly that plane.
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Apr 3, 2012 04:33
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