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Speaking of electronic tomfoolery, have a French ELINT DC-8. I can't think of too many other military-specific DC-8 modifications. I think the U.S. Navy used one for training for a while.
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Nov 7, 2012 05:20
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iyaayas01 posted:They did...I'm too lazy to go find the post but it was a one-off that is now parked at AMARC and a goon went and took pictures. It was called the EC-24, and it was an electronic aggressor that had an underfuselage canoe fairing that held jammers that pumped out gently caress-off huge amounts of energy. They also apparently used a Convair 880 for aerial refueling and cruise missile tests. Unusual choice. Maybe they were going for engine commonality with the F-4 Phantom? 
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Nov 7, 2012 07:01
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On other aviation boards I post on discussions about Iran's military aviation capabilities nearly always segue into fantasy war bullshit so can I distract you all with a little more French weirdness from Le Bourget? I didn't get a full photo of it, but this is like the rotor mast for a helicopter experiment. Except the rotors are biplane wings.  Me am bizarro 737-200!  Okay so this unusual one is German but it's in a French museum so there. These planes may be old news to a lot of you but they're the sort of thing I had no idea existed before I became a complete spergy diehard airplane nerd so I thought I might share them with people who aren't necessarily so.
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Nov 9, 2012 17:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The picture of the Mercure is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing that! I find the Mercure interesting, it's kind of one of those "missed it by this much" designs. Apparently it almost got CFM-56s under it, which had it happened would have made an interesting comparison to the MD-80 series.
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Nov 10, 2012 01:21
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Apropos of nothing in particular, please enjoy one of the coolest looking prototype fighters I've ever seen in person: One of the Mirages around it is a VTOL prototype version, I think the foreground one you can see the canopy of.  Also this because it has a Texan in it and I don't want to be left out
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Nov 18, 2012 05:39
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That's a beautiful plane. 
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Nov 19, 2012 05:07
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This is one of the more AI aviation photos I've taken, I was standing in the grandstands at the conclusion of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the airplane belongs to Volkswagen. Likewise:  Belongs to the FIA.
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Nov 27, 2012 00:53
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In addition to what the above posters mentioned, my understanding is that they do sometimes charter a bit of extra capacity from Southern Air, Evergreen, Kalitta, et al. around Christmas. Also FedEx does have a bunch of things parked up in the desert right now but bringing a plane back from Victorville or Marana and into service sounds like a lot of expense and effort so I don't know if they ever bring those back online for peak season.
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Nov 28, 2012 04:13
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There is something unique about the F-14, as far as perception goes, and I guess I'm not surprised to hear that it applies to its pilots as well. Might be Top Gun, might be that it sat on the pure anti-air role for so long while everyone else started slinging bombs too, might be that it was a swing-wing and the U.S. didn't make many of those, might be that sort of technical-numbers fetishism because it could engage a whole lot of targets from a long way away (though it rarely was authorized to do so, IIRC.) They do look very much of an era. Cold Warrior type planes, like the MiG-25 and -31.
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Dec 1, 2012 07:28
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Captain Postal posted:it was taken 40 years ago by a photographer who wasn't very young at the time. I don't know that that'll work. The 990 was also pretty fast, though I'm not sure if you need to make a distinction between the two. Speaking of which, if you're in the area of MHV they've got at least one sitting around still. 
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Dec 4, 2012 07:42
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On airliners.net there are some photos of a Convair 880 in Portugal that had been being used as a strip club.
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Dec 4, 2012 07:56
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Speaking of Constellations, two years ago I saw the L-1649 Starliner that Lufthansa Technik had under restoration in Lewiston, Maine. I wonder how they're doing with it, if the project is still going on. This was their parts donor, the actual aircraft they were restoring was parked indoors and they let me photograph it, but not for "commercial usage" so I didn't post it up on the internet anyplace.
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Dec 9, 2012 00:25
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Man, I've spent way too much time engaging in/reading F-35 chat... Anyway, UK goons should visit the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.  I think they were offering you a chance to take one of the sets of controls on this thing.  There was an airshow the day after I visited, this was practice.  Most of the photos I took were of their British airliner collection.  But they also have a wing devoted to American aircraft, two other hangars with British aircraft, and a nice collection of tanks.  When I was there they would let you into one of the airliners on a rotating basis, I got lucky and went inside the Super VC-10.   And then I bought a 15-minute ride on this De Havilland Dragon Rapide, pretty expensive but I did at least get an in-flight upgrade to the fire-extinguisher-duty seat.
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Dec 11, 2012 18:36
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Polymerized Cum posted:Oh, Lockheed, you used to be so very good... In the U.S. at least, they don't really have anybody to keep them honest anymore. Every now and again the special operations divisions and the less-important second-line roles pick up an aircraft designed (or sometimes even built) far outside the country and I'm completely down with that concept expanding to more roles if it means our defense contractors keep their poo poo together better.
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Dec 14, 2012 06:31
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grover posted:I wanna see Canada go with the F-71 interceptor as their new front-line fighter. What better way to patrol the desolate wastes than with a Mach 3 aircraft? Twin-engine, too! It depends on whether the next request will be tailored to Canada's actual needs or shiny cool-looking technological dead ends. If the latter, might I suggest the Sud-Ouest Trident? Man was Le Bourget's air museum awesome
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Dec 14, 2012 21:40
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rscott posted:It's too bad they didn't go with the Shocker nickname, they could have based them out of McConnell AFB in Wichita, home of Wichita State who's sports teams are the Shockers. Seriously, I normally don't care that much about what they name military aircraft (judging by the wide variety of nicknames they get, I don't get the impression that the people who actually fly them do either) but that would be just hilarious to see happen.
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Dec 15, 2012 01:49
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Space Gopher posted:Yes, bureaucratic bullshit is pervasive at every level, and impossible to solve completely. But here, it's particularly egregious both because of the scope of the problem, and because there is an easy solution. Just tell the navy's army's air force, who pride themselves on being a force that's had to do more with less, that they aren't going to get their very own special snowflake VTOL supersonic stealth fighter for Christmas. Question for folks in the know: has the design around VTOL for the F-35B compromised the rest of the airframe for the variants that aren't going to include it? The airplane already had a lot of design goals- how far is the non-VTOL version from what they'd be if that hadn't been considered?
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Dec 15, 2012 22:48
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I'm not an acronym Nazi and I kinda get the gist from context, but what's the meaning of SWAT? Some kind of mid-program redesign?
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Dec 16, 2012 01:05
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MrYenko posted:Trying to cram the A, B, and C models' missions into one program is like trying to build a flying car that can also transforms into a submarine. This is an idea that I will soon be pitching before the Department of Defense.
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Dec 16, 2012 04:29
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Aargh posted:It always surprises me to see just how large Americas military expenditure is. From an Australian point of view with only 5 or 6% of your population our expenditure comes nowhere close. According to Wikipedia Australia is 14th in the world in military spending, and it's 1.9% of the country's GDP (to the 4.7% spent by the United States.) The spending is about $893 per capita, to the United States' $2,141.
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Dec 20, 2012 03:33
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Hey guys, 'tis the season for holiday package rush flights!    
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Dec 22, 2012 21:08
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Interesting that they mention Asiana. As far as I know they still have only the one 767-300F. I've always wondered about single-plane subfleets in larger airlines (another example: Icelandair's TF-FIX, their only 757-300 amidst 757-200s.) It seems like it would be a hard thing to schedule around. But I'm really unfamiliar with how airlines schedule their fleets.
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Dec 22, 2012 22:01
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Good grief, there'd have to be a magnificent payoff to justify such an absurdly elaborate and dangerous operational pattern. Though around that time they were putting reactors on B-36s just to see if they were light enough for the plane to fly so eh. Speaking of dangerous, when I first found this thread a very excellent discussion of Air Koryo had just happened. Seems they've got a new plane, guys! (Not my photo, obviously.) I thought I read somewhere that it was an NTU from somebody else but now I can't find that information again so it might well be incorrect. StandardVC10 fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Dec 24, 2012 |
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Dec 24, 2012 14:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:You can see the airship hanger when they fly over Moffet airfield I wanted to check out Moffett when I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, but nobody had access to a car. There used to be some cool stuff there from NASA and others, I don't know if that's still the case.
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Dec 29, 2012 03:24
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Kilonum posted:Tupolev Tu-204 just had its first fatal accident in 18 yearsa of service, 4 dead, only the crew was aboard the aircraft at the time. Looks like the pilot overshot the runway. I thought they had wrecked one already? Guess it wasn't fatal though.
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Dec 29, 2012 17:26
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MrYenko posted:Emirates passenger demographics are slightly different than US domestic demographics. (Oil sheikhs and international businessmen versus grandma on a budget flying to visit the kids.) This is the perception, but at the back of the plane Emirates also carries a ton of low-wage labor back and forth from India and Asia over to the Near East and Europe. They lucked out geographically in that DXB is a very well positioned connection point for a lot of economies that are growing right now.
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Dec 30, 2012 00:35
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I'm open to persuasion on other electronic devices, but the day someone can have a cell phone conversation in the seat next to me midflight is the day I go postal and have to be marched out of the aircraft in handcuffs.
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Dec 31, 2012 02:16
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Slo-Tek posted:Ryan Verti-Jet, the best of a very bad batch of tail-sitting aircraft  Tail-sitters: the worst idea anybody has ever had.
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Jan 1, 2013 09:20
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MrYenko posted:Are you sure? Yeah point taken, but at least you have a serviceable jet fighter when you aren't doing that. (Well, okay, maybe just before you do that.)
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Jan 2, 2013 00:00
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Oh hey I remember that article now. Seems you could hear the bastard 22 miles away. 
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Jan 2, 2013 05:15
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Paired engines seem to have a bit of a problem. In World War II the Germans tried to field a heavy bomber of sorts, the He 177, where four engines drove two propellers with common crankshafts, but it was apparently terribly unreliable and by the time they got it working better German heavy bombing was not a going concern.
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Jan 2, 2013 08:03
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The Tu-95 is quite fast for a turboprop and has pretty good legs, maybe the Tu-160 Blackjack could fly as far but they don't have very many of them. One cool thing about the Tu-95 was that they made an airliner out of it, the Tu-114. They didn't make many but it was pretty quick and was basically the highest-capacity passenger plane in business when it entered service- almost as much as the DC-8 Super Sixty stretches. It was also pretty decent on gas. I've always wondered if that sort of concept could ever resurface as a dedicated civilian freighter, just a giant-rear end quickish turboprop to fill with stuff. Of course, a dedicated civilian freighter isn't something that ever really happens.
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Jan 4, 2013 03:11
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:For a freighter, why bother when 1) development costs are such a massive portion of the total program costs and 2) used widebody airliners or new dedicated freighters based off of airliners are readily available? This is why I said it would never happen. I just thought a large long-range turboprop would make a good freighter if you were designing something from the ground up for civilian cargo, which for the reasons you list, you would never do. Also, the Tu-144 was a totally different plane, one that I would be even less happy about spending a lot of time in.
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Jan 4, 2013 03:19
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grover posted:Modern high-bypass turbofans have become incredibly efficient, and have eclipsed turboprops for cost effectiveness and fuel efficiency in all but a handful of small niche applications. There's really no reason to go with a turboprop on much of anything anymore. I see. Your last remark reminds me of the Unducted Fan experiments from the eighties. They never made production but are pretty fun to look at.
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Jan 4, 2013 15:47
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I know what that is now but for a split-second I thought you were posting a shot from the window of a VFW-614. God I'm such a nerd 
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Jan 10, 2013 22:03
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That's a pretty rockin' picture. -- Also, I was at LAX today and the Sultan of Brunei's 747-400 was on the tarmac by the Atlantic Aviation center. There was no acceptable angle for a photo, though. You win this round, Sultan! 
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Jan 12, 2013 00:32
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Mobius1B7R posted:http://www.nycaviation.com/2013/01/faa-orders-airlines-to-stop-flying-boeing-787/#.UPc4TmdrqF8 So much for going down to San Diego and seeing a JAL 787 before school starting next week then.
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Jan 17, 2013 01:23
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Blech, that tail. It's like Dominicana or something except way, way worse.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:48
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Cocoa Crispies posted:The tail's too jingoistic, like a state-owned (or formerly-state-owned) airline. It is very jingoistic, though in photos of aircraft actually painted in it it's more complex (slightly) than it looks in that CG video, there's a bit of back-and-forth gradation in the striping.
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Jan 17, 2013 21:14
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GlassEye-Boy posted:Check out the new heavy transport the Chinese just flew. Size is somewhere between an IL-76 and a C17. Looks like they put an Il-76 under a shrink ray, but only for a little while. I wonder if they'll get any export sales in Southeast Asia or Africa, or if this is just for their own air force? edit: wait, it's bigger than an Il-76? Huh. The proportions make it look smaller.
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Jan 27, 2013 16:56
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