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Out of curiosity, why does the F-35 require climate-controlled hangars? I remember some stuff about the B-2's RAM coating melting off in the rain, or something, but I would have thought they'd figured that out by now. And frankly if an aircraft's skin can't take the extremes of Canadian weather (-40 to +30 celsius, generally) I don't understand how it's supposed to stand up to high altitudes and supersonic flight.
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Dec 13, 2012 00:39
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MA-Horus posted:Yeah, the CF-35 is turning into a gigantic poo poo-show for the current Government. Linedance posted:Just read in the paper today that they've scrapped the purchase and are now going to do a proper competitive tender. Frankly, I'm pretty shocked that they ever went with F-35s at all when the Super Hornet was out there. One of the key reasons Canada went with the -18 in the first place, instead of the -16 or similar, was because it has two engines and "arctic sovereignty" (  ) requires long flights over desolate, isolated terrain where ditching would be almost as bad as ditching in the ocean. The -35 throws that one out the window. Plus, I'll bet it would be way easier to sell the government on what looks like just an upgraded Hornet than a clearly new airframe -- the USN sure bought it right up.
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Dec 14, 2012 06:53
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Godholio posted:I doubt we'll see these things operate in such conditions for at least 20 years. This reminded me of an interesting bit of Aeronautical Insanity that is probably common knowledge, but which I recently learned and which I thought was pretty cool. I'd heard for many years that the MiG-29 (and most other Soviet aircraft) was designed with "screens" over the intakes to prevent FOD from debris ingestion when operating from lovely airfields. Makes sense to me. I never really understood what those "screens" were, though until I saw this photo  Yeah, those aren't "screens", like a window screen or the anti-radar mesh over the F-117's intakes or whatever. Those are goddamn doors. Turns out they just swing shut and close off the main intakes entirely during takeoff, feeding the engines from those funny louvered grilles on the plane's dorsal side  and then swing them open again once the plane is clear of the ground. 
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Dec 16, 2012 21:20
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Why would they cut off its wings?  The YF-23 really was the one that should have been. It makes the F-22 look downright bloated and completely out-of-date. Why did the -22 win, again? I had heard that the -23 was stealthier and faster, but the -22 could turn tighter thanks to the thrust-vectoring, and we all know that the Russkies have been able to pull off those dumb airshow backwards-firing missile moves for years so damned if we can allow there to be a dumb airshow backwards-firing missile gap, says the USAF. Is that actually the case?
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Dec 21, 2012 04:12
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Even if it's something developed by an independent contractor out of the blue? Assuming Northrop stripped out sensitive stuff and replaced it with internationally-available parts, what's stopping them from taking the YF-23 airframe and shopping it around to other countries? Sure, it was entered into a USAF competition, but if you take out the weapons and military radar it's just a big fancy carbon-fiber personal jet.
Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Dec 21, 2012 |
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Dec 21, 2012 22:37
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Huh, interesting. So what exactly causes something to fall under those regulations? Cause like you said, a gun barrel is just a tube with some specific grooves cut in it. A smoothbore tank cannon barrel and a high-strength steel pipe for industrial hydraulics are different...how? Does it only come into effect if the company sells things that specifically go into/are classified as weapons, or is my Classy Brassy Steampunk Grooved Tubes business on Etsy going to have to file a bunch of government paperwork? I assume this is why every time I order a sample microcontroller from TI I have to certify that I'm not going to install it into a cruise missile or resell it to the North Koreans. But I'm a private citizen living in the USA, and said parts are totally benign chips that appear in millions if not billions of consumer electronics world-wide. What's the deal?
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Dec 22, 2012 04:45
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NightGyr posted:having grown up near Indian point, it's pretty much the focal point for every uninformed anti nuke scare tactic in the area. I've seen literature implying that NYC would be wiped out in a nuclear fireball if something went wrong. e: never mind, I read your post wrong. Yeah, that's stupid as hell. Sigh. People like that prevent us from developing reasonable new nuclear technologies that could actually supply us with the power we're going to need very soon. Hope they enjoy rolling brownouts and lots more stopgap coal plants! Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Dec 26, 2012 |
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Dec 26, 2012 23:09
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Godholio posted:Several military jets don't have windows, and fly for longer than all but trans-Pac flights. It kind of sucks because I like looking out the windows and always try to get a window seat when I have to fly commercial, but otherwise there's no real reason to have them. People with severe motion sickness will get it whether there's a window or not. How common is airsickness, anyway? I'm not a jet-setting businessman, but I fly pretty regularly and I only recall a single flight where someone got sick. (And it was a big enough deal, happening right after SARS, that they quarantined the plane on landing for 2 hours. Stupid.) I've never seen anyone carrying one of those little bags or heard anyone throwing up or anything like that. Seen a lot of people puking off the side of ferries and tour boats, though.
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Dec 30, 2012 02:49
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slidebite posted:People must think I'm a little kid because when I fly I almost always have my face plastered against the window looking out. It loses a lot of its appeal though over the ocean though and at night. Likewise. I usually alternate between staring out the window, and sleeping when there's nothing to see. I absolutely love the last twenty minutes, seeing everything go from "satellite photo" to "city advertising photo" to "museum diorama" to "model railroad" to right on the ground. I often end up with my camera glued against the window too, filming the flaps going in and out and the heat ripples from the engines distorting the cars on the freeway below and the sun reflecting off the skyscrapers...everything's magical from far above. And I've got some sweet videos of takeoff and landing too (gently caress da police) e: cell phone goes in airplane mode from takeoff to landing; it's not like it's going to get any usable signal anyway. I do like having the GPS with some offline maps, though, so when I see something neat on the ground I can tag it for later inspection. Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Dec 31, 2012 |
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Dec 31, 2012 05:13
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wolrah posted:The cockpit crew would probably want to turn theirs off though. I've heard that it's quite common for the pilots on long, boring flights to screw around with laptops or iPads or whatever, even to the point of watching movies and playing video games. I've even heard some suggestions that Warcraft III (or some other game) was what caused NWA 188 to overfly its destination by a full hour. True or false?
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Dec 31, 2012 05:22
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dissss posted:There must be hundreds of people who accidentally (or not) leave their electronic devices on on aircraft every day. If it was truly a serious issue I'd doubt they'd laptops and similar in the cabin at all. Thousands, I'd say. How many people do you think actually turn off their cell phone, or put it in airplane mode, vs. just closing it or putting the screen to sleep and forgetting about it? One thing I've never understood is why FM radios, portable TVs and other things that receive terrestrial broadcasts are "prohibited at all times". Why aren't you allowed to operate an FM radio receiver? It doesn't transmit anything at all, beyond maybe a tiny bit of re-radiation from the receiver heterodyne or something.
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Dec 31, 2012 20:48
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:When I flew .mil, they didn't care what flight regime you were in, all everything was OK. I wonder if that is in part because of EW hardening? If the avionics are able to handle military-grade jamming without screwing up, a guy in the back with a cell phone isn't going to cause much of a problem. Or maybe it's just "this is a military flight, there are about ten thousand things more dangerous than a grunt watching movies on his iPad." Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 00:40
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xaarman posted:If it hasn't been posted yet, the U-2 Flight Manual from 1959 was recently declassified and posted online: I like this part from the Technical Data Changes in the front: quote:(Delete) - Engine icing is not a problem on this aircraft. Wonder how they figured that one out.
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Jan 9, 2013 23:47
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I had no clue that you could get a working MiG-21 for so little. http://www.aerotrader.com/listing/1967-Mig-21U-102734641 I mean yeah, you're going to be burning up about $5000 an hour in fuel and god knows what kind of maintenance, and I imagine keeping up whatever batshit certification it requires is a huge pain, but for less than half the price of a new Ferrari you can have a real goddamn mach 2 Soviet fighter jet. Some day... 
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Jan 12, 2013 01:10
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Neither carbon nor glass are good to have in your lungs, but they're relatively inert in your body and the worst you'll get is mechanical lung damage. At the molecular level, carbon fibers are just graphite and fiberglass is just sand, after all, again neither of which are good to inhale but they won't kill you. Asbestos, however very much will kill you. It causes mesothelioma, a particularly nasty cancer that kills rapidly and painfully, which can be triggered by as little as a single high dose (like a faceful of dust when you're ripping out old insulation). You won't know whether you have it for the twenty or thirty years it takes for the cancer to develop, though, in which time there is no preventative treatment beyond not smoking and trying to live healthfully. Obviously you should be wearing a respirator any time there's a bunch of dust in the air that you don't want in your lungs, but asbestos is A Particularly Big Deal for a good reason.
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Jan 13, 2013 07:35
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Nebakenezzer posted:Now here's a dumb question: on a mission that long, what are the toilet facilities and food like? B-52s have a chemical toilet but I don't think they have any facilities for cooking or anything, so the food was probably MREs. More modern airframes like the B-2 have more crew comforts -- a better toilet, a little oven for reheating food and I've heard even a little folding cot. If I were a pilot going on one of those ultra-long raids I'd ask for a coffee maker, too. e: beaten, rcman50166 posted:On board closed cell lavatory and MREs? yes
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Jan 14, 2013 03:41
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That is pretty shameful. The Air Force burns up 20 million dollars a day in Jet-A, and they won't chip in to feed the flight crews? Wow.
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Jan 14, 2013 06:41
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Godholio posted:Someone stays there. Depending on the aircraft (ie, what classified stuff is with it) you may need multiple people. It pretty much sucks. If there's a military base in the area they may be able to provide security personnel. If not, it's a campout on the flightline. Does this ever happen with planes that are armed? I could imagine there'd be some pretty severe restrictions, both from the military and the civilian side, on storing a couple of active AMRAAMs in a public hangar.
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Jan 16, 2013 01:46
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Not Futura, it's nowhere near geometric enough. Akzidenz would be my next guess but the lowercase A is wrong. Hard to say.
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Jan 17, 2013 22:09
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I want to go to there
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Jan 18, 2013 07:04
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Skilled formation flying sure is impressive. (they're all at a visibly different angle from the other three, look at the stabilators and particularly the V-shaped gap between them)
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Jan 18, 2013 10:21
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CommieGIR posted:Oh I know, hence why I hypothesized a second laser would be required. Input power requirements go up exponentially with output, though, and the amount of energy required to burn out even hardened electronic parts is orders of magnitude less than that required to melt aluminum and destroy the missile itself. Not saying it isn't possible, but there's a reason that the YAL-1 is built out of a 747.
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Jan 26, 2013 04:15
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The MEZ is the missile engagement zone (the danger zone) around a surface-to-air missile battery, in this case an SA-6 Gainful. The CG driver (pilot) was complaining that he was having trouble hanging around in an area defended by antiaircraft missiles, basically. I don't know what CG means in this context -- I've only heard it to describe Coast Guard but that doesn't make sense to me. Does the Coast Guard actually take part in exercises where they're coming up against heavy-duty SAMs? No idea about CJ tactics. Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jan 26, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 21:31
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I was going to ask the same thing. Those look pretty skinny and low-bypass for a modern heavy transport. I bet it's really loud.
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Jan 27, 2013 20:00
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Previa_fun posted:I'm going to design a Super Super Arrow that can fly up to one million...no...infinite feet. I heard that the Domination 313 (that is what the Iranian plane is called) can go to infinity plus one feet 
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Feb 3, 2013 21:00
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Bondematt's link says it's an A-G weapons range, so I'm guessing those are actually just mockups of MiG-29s for training target identification or something. I can't see why the USA would be using a real Fulcrum as a gunnery target when they could be taking it apart for research or flying it as an aggressor. (there's another one hiding in the trees at the NE end of the airstrip, too)
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Feb 10, 2013 08:36
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Gullous posted:I incorrectly thought the Originals/Classics had a smaller diameter than the NGs... Apparently it's just a stretch. That -100 model with the ADF antenna running between the tail and fuselage is really weirding me out. It reminds me how old a design the 737 actually is 0_o
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Feb 23, 2013 10:27
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I can't help but feel like the F-35 could have been a much better aircraft (not to mention project in general) if they hadn't tried to cram in the VTOL for the Marines. As an F-16 to the F-22's F-15, it would be a really nice little airframe. Why do the Marines need fixed-wing anyway? Goddamn Navy's Army's Air Force.
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Mar 24, 2013 02:49
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No, I think having the Marines around as shock troops that go along with the Navy makes a lot of sense. The Navy can't occupy land, and the Army needs a base to operate from. So the Marines fill that particular role perfectly. I just don't get why, when they are purportedly in that symbiotic relationship with the Navy, they need their own set of baby aircraft carriers and wannabe fighter jets. Just stick to things that directly support the infantry (choppers) and leave the fast-movers up to the Navy.
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Mar 24, 2013 05:43
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I really wish Canada would just buy a couple dozen Silent Eagles. It's a really pretty airframe and it suits what Canada thinks are its air force needs far, far better than the F-35 ever would.
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Apr 9, 2013 00:16
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Dead Reckoning posted:Yes, transport height landing gear, unimproved strips, and fighter-style underwing engine intakes. Nothing can possibly go wrong. Well, the Ace Combat wind tunnel model up there has B-2 style overwing intakes, which makes a lot more sense. While we're on the subject of medium transports, I'd like to see these guys flying around just cause god daaaaamn that sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAafPSWzpOw
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Apr 14, 2013 18:24
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The obvious solution is just to mount them overwing, like the An-72 or the YC-14.  (They have the prototype YC-14 at the Pima Air and Space Museum, go check it out if you can make it there) Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Apr 22, 2013 |
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Apr 22, 2013 04:14
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Yeah, I was actually just about to edit my post to comment on how similar the two are. I never really noticed it before but drat. They both were under development at the same time, too. Sounds like someone was leaking something, one way or another...
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Apr 22, 2013 04:20
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Nebakenezzer posted:The overwing engine design somehow also generates extra lift. It's like super mega blown flaps; a lot of the engine thrust sticks to the wing in this configuration, so when the flaps are down you get a lot of additional downward thrust. I'd imagine the same effect is what reduces fuel economy.
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Apr 22, 2013 04:45
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movax posted:Awesome pictures, though this one is my favourite and way funnier than it should be. At the museum, they have this out near the entrance:  
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May 1, 2013 07:09
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Godholio posted:What? No. There are none of the systems required to employ missiles What "systems" do you need to employ an AIM-9, exactly, beyond a button to uncage the seeker and a button to ignite the motor? I thought part of the idea of the Sidewinder was that it was completely self-contained. You don't even need to hear the growl if you have a pretty good idea of your target's aspect and angle.
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May 5, 2013 19:35
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PhotoKirk posted:So pretty... That's just begging for a "When did this... become sexier than this..." image. The production Phantom is still a pretty airframe, just with too much crap hanging off it. If you shave off all the pylons, pods and antennas it's quite elegant, even with the anhedrals and dihedrals. The YF-4 is a good example:  Or here's an actual production one cleaned up. Take off that little pod under the nose (gun?) and it'd be really clean.  I'm always amazed at how early some of these prototypes were flying. I think of the Phantom as a '60s through '70s fighter, but the first photo above was taken in 1951  PhotoKirk posted:It wasn't at mach 1.8, but this happened... From a few pages back, but just incidentally this is a rural China thing. Not making GBS threads on airplanes specifically, but rural Chinese babies don't wear diapers -- they just have crotchless pants and go wherever they are. In the cities, you'll sometimes see mothers holding their kid over a drainage grate in the street or whatever while the kid takes a dump, but the more urban, westernized and modern-leaning people look down on this and put their kids in diapers because the crotchless pants are seen as a relic of the past and a bit of an embarrassment. The story is basically the Chinese equivalent of something you'd see on the Beverly Hillbillies. iyaayas01 posted:lol USMC Aviation: Fuel goes in, fuel goes out. Fuel goes in, fuel goes out. Fuel goes in, fuel goes out. I wonder now what the ratio is between consumption in full burner : tanker transfer rate. Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Aug 1, 2014 20:36
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What would be an F-104 with pointier wings, a standard empennage and no tip tanks? Cause that's A Fighter Jet as far as 10-year-old me was concerned. e: a missile
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Aug 2, 2014 00:57
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Yep, there we go. A Mirage F1 is pretty much exactly the plane in my notebooks. Sometimes with two exhausts and twin tails but definitely that wing, tail, and intake configuration. e: and that level of pointiness too
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Aug 2, 2014 04:11
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slidebite posted:Short story on an A10 "fighter jet" being reconfigured for storm chaser duty. Well, if there's anything that could take down a tornado, it'd be a GAU-8.
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Aug 2, 2014 19:19
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