The legendary B-52 is about to get a lot more lethal

[SodiumChloride]

Always liked how it looked Very fast one too.

Literally the edge of human technology capability.

Those streaks you see on the wings ... that's fuel that has leaked during take off. The plane is put together in such a way that it's only completely sealed when it flying and the components heat up and expand.

[Skroe]

Why not use the fighters from WW2 aswell?

Actually.... it's not exactly a world war II aircraft, but it looks like one:




The Embraer Super Tucano.

An extremely economical ground attack aircraft for counter insurgency warfare. $15 million a piece. $500 per flight hour. The US is buying a few dozen. Afghanistan is buying a few dozen. Around the world hundreds have bene ordered by middle income countries with insurgency problems that need cost effective solutions that don't involve bombing rebels with F-16s.

You wanna know how much money the US would have saved if it spent the years from 2003-2010 in Iraq, hitting the insurgency with these, instead of F-16Cs and F/A-18C/Ds? Billions of dollars. Doing that flew the wings off both those air frames and into an early grave (probably 10 years off their service lives).

The US should be pounding groups like ISIS with B-52s, A-10s, and SUper Tucanos, or T-6 Texan IIs (basically the same thing) or Air Land Scorpions (probably the best of them all) and leave the high performance multirole aircraft to Europe and East Asia.

So yes, in a funny way, not a WWII fighter per se, but something very much like it. And it's one of the best ideas to come around in a long time. Because spending $36,000 / flying hour on a tactical aircraft to drop a $90,000 guided bomb on a $12,000 Toyota with $2000 of weapons inside of it and 4 ISIS loser brigade suckers, is absolutely retarded.

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they need to bring this guy back for being cool as fuck

The SR-71 was retired probably a decade and a half to early (if it was indeed retired in 1998... it's been rumored to fly as late as 2004). If it were serving now, it would be time for it to go.

The thing is, it's hard to say if the US just screwed up building a successor for it or not. Bill Sweetman at Aviation Week, one of the world's premier aerospace journalists, is 100% convinced the US has been flying several high speed, high altitude stealthy reconnaissance aircraft (one of which is occasionally called Aurora, which is famous, but there are others, such as TR-3 Black Manta, which probably exist). So the SR-71 may have been retired to make room for something better that we'll either never hear about, or hear about 40 years from now.

I mean once again, the US is flying at least 2 unknown flying wing designs over the US. One or both may be B-21 LRSB prototypes, or drones, or operational covert aircraft, but none of them are the B-2 or SR-71.






That second one was seen in a formation with 2 other identical aircraft (see below, big picture)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EQnWvVspB-s/UzXUt10jWmI/AAAAAAAAV48/4YGy1fziOlQ/s1600/enhanced3s.jpg


So yeah. Who knows what secret aircraft out of Skunkworks have flown over the years. Here's hoping the son of SR-71 was reason enough to retire it.

It's a remarkable aircraft, if you've never seen one in person. I'd actually say it's smaller than you think it is.

[Deleted]

they need to bring this guy back for being cool as fuck

If aliens visited earth this would be their craft. Just look at it.

[mizeri]

Actually.... it's not exactly a world war II aircraft, but it looks like one:




The Embraer Super Tucano.

An extremely economical ground attack aircraft for counter insurgency warfare. $15 million a piece. $500 per flight hour. The US is buying a few dozen. Afghanistan is buying a few dozen. Around the world hundreds have bene ordered by middle income countries with insurgency problems that need cost effective solutions that don't involve bombing rebels with F-16s.

You wanna know how much money the US would have saved if it spent the years from 2003-2010 in Iraq, hitting the insurgency with these, instead of F-16Cs and F/A-18C/Ds? Billions of dollars. Doing that flew the wings off both those air frames and into an early grave (probably 10 years off their service lives).

The US should be pounding groups like ISIS with B-52s, A-10s, and SUper Tucanos, or T-6 Texan IIs (basically the same thing) or Air Land Scorpions (probably the best of them all) and leave the high performance multirole aircraft to Europe and East Asia.

So yes, in a funny way, not a WWII fighter per se, but something very much like it. And it's one of the best ideas to come around in a long time. Because spending $36,000 / flying hour on a tactical aircraft to drop a $90,000 guided bomb on a $12,000 Toyota with $2000 of weapons inside of it and 4 ISIS loser brigade suckers, is absolutely retarded.

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The SR-71 was retired probably a decade and a half to early (if it was indeed retired in 1998... it's been rumored to fly as late as 2004). If it were serving now, it would be time for it to go.

The thing is, it's hard to say if the US just screwed up building a successor for it or not. Bill Sweetman at Aviation Week, one of the world's premier aerospace journalists, is 100% convinced the US has been flying several high speed, high altitude stealthy reconnaissance aircraft (one of which is occasionally called Aurora, which is famous, but there are others, such as TR-3 Black Manta, which probably exist). So the SR-71 may have been retired to make room for something better that we'll either never hear about, or hear about 40 years from now.

I mean once again, the US is flying at least 2 unknown flying wing designs over the US. One or both may be B-21 LRSB prototypes, or drones, or operational covert aircraft, but none of them are the B-2 or SR-71.






That second one was seen in a formation with 2 other identical aircraft (see below, big picture)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EQnWvVspB-...enhanced3s.jpg


So yeah. Who knows what secret aircraft out of Skunkworks have flown over the years. Here's hoping the son of SR-71 was reason enough to retire it.

It's a remarkable aircraft, if you've never seen one in person. I'd actually say it's smaller than you think it is.

i have seen the SR-71 at a museum, its a pretty small bird

[Gheld]

^ Everybody knows project Aurora exists. Because the project synopsis was accidentally released in an FOI request and the government promptly claimed it was a weather balloon.

What's not known is specific flight characteristics. (or I guess which defense contractor it comes from either)

EDIT: I'm willing to bet though that claims of it's speed are highly exaggerated and that it's design focuses more on stealth and altitude than on speed.

[Independent voter]

I'm guessing that this laser isn't fixed, that there is some kind of lens and a turret so that it can be pointed in any direction?

[Azadina]

^ Everybody knows project Aurora exists. Because the project synopsis was accidentally released in an FOI request and the government promptly claimed it was a weather balloon.

What's not known is specific flight characteristics. (or I guess which defense contractor it comes from either)

EDIT: I'm willing to bet though that claims of it's speed are highly exaggerated and that it's design focuses more on stealth and altitude than on speed.

Why would they replace Blackbird with that, if it didn't have speed also. Blackbird had all 3 of those.

[Skroe]

^ Everybody knows project Aurora exists. Because the project synopsis was accidentally released in an FOI request and the government promptly claimed it was a weather balloon.

What's not known is specific flight characteristics. (or I guess which defense contractor it comes from either)

EDIT: I'm willing to bet though that claims of it's speed are highly exaggerated and that it's design focuses more on stealth and altitude than on speed.

Yeah I highly doubt Auroa is Hypersonic. Supposedly it uses a Pulse Detonation engine, and there have been the tell-tail contrails of such an aircraft visible for years. Maybe it's a high Mach 4 aircraft. But there is a logical failure here: the Air Force is chosing the route it is chosing with it's hypersonic research program, namely going for powered hypersonic flight, rather than a glider (which is a much harder, but far more rewarding goal) as a waypoint to a hypersonic engine that could be used in a bomber around 2045. If Auroa was Mach 5+ and did it via PDE... wouldn't that make a hypersonic engine unnecessary? Double dipping, even for Black programs, is generally not how the US works. The Stealth Black Hawks in the Bin Laden raid for example, supposedly inherit a lot of the legacy of the canceled Comanche helicopter. If Aurora exists, justs a guess, it's probably super stealthy, super high altitude, and maybe... just maybe... faster than SR-71 (at least at some modes of flight). Or the speed could be dropped due to the IR signuatre it would generate, and it could just be an ultra-high altitude stealth aircraft, in that kind of hard-to-reach midground between an orbital satellite taking pictures and a drone.

We'll probably never know. But the existence of the known Hypersonic program makes me doubt that there is a secret aircraft that really does anything like that, at least in a viable way.


But it does it exist.

For what its worth, most people around aviation circles thinks the more arrow-shaped photograph examples are TR-3. TR-3 has been rumored to exist for 30 years. Supposedly it was the sister aircraft of the F-117. Super stealthy, but carrying no armaments. It would act as the point man for an F-117 raid and paint targets, and otherwise do stealthy reconnaissance. No reason why that couldn't still be useful. And it would explain why there seems to be three of them (as in, numerous copies were produced).

It makes me a bit bad. There are countless pieces of important aviation history... test articles, variations, prototypes, one offs, and even operational aircraft, we'll never know about because after they were decommissioned, they were just buried in the desert in Nevada (which is where some of the F-117s will likely end up all said and done, along with the B-2s eventually).

I hope somewhere the Air Force has a vault of everything that they ever made, so maybe when we're grandparents, they can tell the secret history of mid to late late 20th / early 21st century aviation. Wanna know how freaky it can be?



http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/nev...ept-1732308296

This is "Quitebird". A Boeing mock up - not even a flying airplane, from 1961 that was the proof-of-concept of the basic tennants of stealth.

Holy crap look at what it does.

-It has a gold one piece canopy
It has a stealthy trapezoid shape and curved bottom
_it hads canted, F-35 like tails... and no horizontal stabilizers!
It has S shaped intakes that are recessed behind hte forward fusalage.
- IT has a forwarf fusalage that looks almost exactly like the YF-23
-It has a goddamn chine-line

It's an out of place object, that the world learned about last year. 55 years later.

Wh knows what other places aviation went we'll only find out about in years to come. .

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Why would they replace Blackbird with that, if it didn't have speed also. Blackbird had all 3 of those.

Blackbird was stealthy for its time (some of which was an accident of design), but by the 1990s it was the most primitive stealth there was. The later F-117 and B-2 had far surpassed it.

The Blackbird was expensive to operate. And lets not forget how Bill Clinton got his balanced budget in the mid 1990s... with the peace dividend bullshit that took a chainsaw to the US Military. The Navy dumped carriers. The Army dumped divisions. The Air Force dumped legacy single-role aircraft in favor of multirole, and slashed air wings by like 75% since 1992.

In the 1990s if you did one job, and were expensive, you had a target on your head. That's how the F-22 became the "F/A-22" for a good four or fivec years, until in a hilarious turn of events I'll never forget, the Air Force declared it operational and magically transformed it's name into "F-22A", because F/A-22 was political marketing bullshit from day one.

The SR-71 was expensive. The U-2 was super cheap. Maybe whatever else the USAF had was too essential to let go. Fact remains, between 1993 and 1998, the US Military retired huge amounts of equipment that had another 15-20 years of life left to it based on recurring cost of ownership. It just didn't want to pay for keeping the small armies of maintainers and industrial bases standing.

[Puupi]

We need more reverse engineered alien technology!

[Skroe]

I'm guessing that this laser isn't fixed, that there is some kind of lens and a turret so that it can be pointed in any direction?

What laser?

If you mean a laser designator for a laser guided bomb, they can point around. If you mean a laser weapon, yeah it'll be able to aim, given that the test articles can. But it's not clear what that looks like yet in an aerodynamic form. It may be a pod. It may be something like the AC-130's "turret" on the side. It may be an integrated part of the air frame somehow (like some F-35 art). We're not there yet.

[Azadina]

Blackbird was stealthy for its time (some of which was an accident of design), but by the 1990s it was the most primitive stealth there was. The later F-117 and B-2 had far surpassed it.

Even if it's stealth was poor by 90's standards, was there still anything around to actually reach it's altitude and speed to catch it?

[Skroe]

you tell em skroe!!!

You're like an encyclopedia of knowledge. Half the reason I even post these types of threads is to get you to post.

Lol I'm always happy to comment. I know folks learning stuff (see above).

[Puupi]

Even if it's stealth was poor by 90's standards, was there still anything around to actually reach it's altitude and speed to catch it?

A rocket.......?

[Azadina]

A rocket.......?

It outran all of them

[Skroe]

Even if it's stealth was poor by 90's standards, was there still anything around to actually reach it's altitude and speed to catch it?

A surface to air missile. :/

Later S-300 missiles (after 1988 i think?) could hit Mach 8.5 iirc to 27km up. The max recorded altitude of an SR-71 was ~24km.

Of course it is not exactly that simple. It takes a lot of energy for a missile to reach that altitude, and there is a range limitation on the missile that the SR-71 might be able to get out of. And it would have to be fired along the right point in the SR-71 flight path to reach it. But still, in principle it was at risk.

IT's worth remembering that for every bit of advanced technology, missiles rule the world. ICBMs couild destroy every major population center. Anti-Ship missiles can wipe out multi-billion dollar ships from 1000km away. Surface to air missiles can reach the edge of space. Conventional missiles can fly across thousands of miles of land to blow something up.

Missiles are expensive. They're highly uneconomical to use in place of bombs for most things. But if your goal is to truly devastate another country's capacity to defend itself, good missiles aimed at the right things is a huge part of what you need, be it a port, a tank, a base, a city, or a super fast aircraft at the edge of space.

[Azadina]

A surface to air missile. :/

Ok, let's add in the "any other plane around to catch it" It's what I ment ^^

[Gheld]

Why would they replace Blackbird with that, if it didn't have speed also. Blackbird had all 3 of those.

I'm sure it's fast. But there's people making some pretty crazy claims. Like one seismometer picked up a sonic boom that some guy is claiming can only been made by a plane going mach 8. (not sure how he comes to that conclusion).

I mean if you look at the only publicly known manned hypersonic "plane" so far (the X-15) pushing those speeds with a human life support system type payload requires a very small aerodynamic cross section. It was basically just a cockpit at the end of a big rocket launched off a B52 travelling at full speed and high altitude fired at a descending trajectory. And weight saving was so important it couldn't even have proper landing gears.

The big triangle depictions of the aurora... While it definitely appears to be a small wing lifting body it's still nothing on the level of aerodynamic "cheatery" that you see on the X-15. And I'm to believe Mach 5+ with a spy plane type payload (i.e. humans, life support, camera lens the size and weight of a person) being accomplished with a jet type engine which becomes exponentially less efficient at mixing fuel and oxygen with speed (and not a rocket which solves that problem by carrying it's own oxygen)