orange lime posted:

The ski-jumps on those Russian carriers reminds me of of a story I heard once. On a ski-jump takeoff in a swept-wing plane, you don't build up enough speed to start flying for a few hundred yards. Pilots would hit the throttle, release the brakes, get flung a hundred feet into the air by the jump...and then fall 80 feet down towards the water as they built up speed. To prevent pilots from being lost should the takeoff screw up because of a tailwind or something, a number of Soviet jets had a short-range radar altimeter built into the belly that would arm as soon as the weight was off the wheels and automatically fire the ejection seat if it read less than about ten feet or so. This system was enabled and disabled with a switch in the cockpit.

So, on occasion, a new pilot would have made a successful takeoff and flown their mission, and would be returning to the carrier on a perfect approach. They'd have their flaps and hook down, and high alpha, lined up perfectly on the runway, sweep over the fantail...

...and get punched out a fraction of a second before contact by the radio altimeter that they'd forgotten to turn off.

2ndclasscitizen posted:

MisterSparkle posted:

success!

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/SR-71/Large/EC98-44817-2.jpg

3000x2690 big enough for you?

Nerobro posted:

They're very much going the wrong way with military aircraft these days. Simple is good. These flying supercomputers are putting way to many eggs in a basket.

JBark posted:

New pictures of the Qantas A380 damage:
http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/fuel-tank-puncture-qantas-a380-lucky-to-escape-catastrophe-say-reports-20101119-180bq.html


Talk about 100% luck that thing didn't turn into a giant flaming fireball.

Nerobro posted:

I think they're making lots of mistakes. Stealth is passive tech. Jets need only minimal electronics to keep users from doing stupid poo poo and making them flame out. It takes less horsepower than is available in a micro controller to keep an inherently unstable aircraft pointed forward.

And yet, somehow, we're running around with the equivalent of a cray supercomputer in these things? IIRC, there's two of them, for redundancy.

We're to the point where the price for aircraft and maintenance means we need to maintain very, very small stocks of them. That single F22 going down took out what, 0.8% of the entire inventory?

I can think of half a dozen ways of defeating such a small force of aircraft. What immediately comes to mind is very large bags of gravel... Or any opposing force with numbers 4x greater than the attacking sortie.

Unless we're talking naval vessels, taking out a single anything shouldn't make that sort of change to the inventory.

The design groups, and number of roles we want a single aircraft to fulfill is downright stupid at this point. Multi-role never beats specialist.

I am not "all for" drones. I think if there's a place where they can have clear room to defend against anything, I think they've got a place. (I'm thinking fleet defense, and foreign airspace patrols in particular)

Taking great care as to what information reaches your pilot matters. I think not nearly enough thought has been put into this. I think this is something that would easily be solved by a very small group of people, instead of the very large committee style planning that goes on now.

Manny posted:

As much as the F-15 is one of my favorite aircraft, I don't really understand your math

grover posted:

Meanwhile, the contractors are flying in business class and charging us taxpayers for it. gently caress them.

MA-Horus posted:

Those two stars are CIA Intelligence Stars. I wonder if who won them and why will ever be released to the public.

Maybe in another hundred years or so.

EDIT: On further investigation, it appears that particular bird was part of operation OXCART. The pilot and RO both got intelligence stars for that one.

Godholio posted:

We need to bring a few of those bitches back home.

DJCobol posted:

Went to the USS Intrepid Sea-Air-Space museum today and took some pics for anyone interested:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djcobol/sets/72157626464852276/

Saw a couple old guys arguing about whether or not "that big black plane" was a SR-71 or an A-12. Once that was settled, they started arguing again whether or not the A-12 was worthy of the "Blackbird" moniker.

Delivery McGee posted:

They should at least pull the mounting brackets and send them to museums.

FullMetalJacket posted:

NASA's humor is out of this world, i doubt you'd understand it.

slidebite posted:

Great. Welp, thanks for saving me the dough.

OH GREAT.

Look out for my thread in a week or two:

Ask me about developing a DVT

jammyozzy posted:

Reckon there's any chance they'll post that to the UK?

grover posted:

I saw Air Force One doing touch & goes in Norfolk once, which was pretty wild. Not something you see every day! Though, I guess it wouldn't technically be "Air Force One" without the president on board, would it?

Revolvyerom posted:

Considering how many years he's no doubt been flying (I assume somewhat consistently since the plane's introduction to the public market), wouldn't he be doing his own 'chute packing?

Still impressed with the awareness to ejectbail as he was entering an ever-more-rapidly decaying situation.

edit: I'm an idiot, he had to actually pull himself out of the cockpit, didn't he? Even more then, jesus.

Ropes4u posted:

The speeds are still to high but there are people making very low openings on wing suits. Sooner or later someone will try, the crowd has a large contingent that lives on pushing the envelope.

Ropes4u posted:

Look around the base board there are some people making really really low openings with wing suits, forward momentum allows you to open lower that pure vertical. I would like to hear more it you care to type..

iyaayas01 posted:

If you want to discuss geopolitics/strategy, there's a decent thread (started by yours truly) over in GiP, but suffice to say that it's not about whether we are going to fight a war with China, it's that any use of force by them is too terrible to contemplate (due to the opportunity for rapid escalation) so we need to do everything in our power to prevent it...diplomatic and political means play a strong role in this effort, but there is a military conventional/non-nuclear deterrent component to it as well, and putting all your eggs in one basket with "built more A-10s/all low-intensity warfare all the time" is dangerous and the opposite of strategic thinking intended to mitigate risk.

Anyway, enough of that geopolitics derail, back to the technology.


The US consistently overestimated Soviet capability during the Cold War. We have just as consistently underestimated the timeline on the development of Chinese technology. Only two years ago, the Varyag was a floating casino and we expected it to stay that way, the DF-21D was barely into development and most people expected them to be lucky to have it in an operational configuration within a decade (much less deployed), and the J-20 was J-XX and no one really expected it to amount to much of anything...maybe have a few enter service 25 years down the road. Now the Shi Lang has started sea trials, they've reached IOC with the DF-21D, and the J-20 has publicly flown, and is expected to be operational by the end of the decade. You raise a fair point, particularly with the J-20 since we don't know very much about it (unclassified, anyway) and there is a lot of speculation, but in general the trend with Chinese tech has been to underestimate, not overestimate.


This is a fair point in that China's historical weak point in its aerospace industry has been jet engines, but they have been making a lot of progress (just look at the WS-10) and as I stated above, the general trend is to underestimate Chinese capability and timelines, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were completely self sufficient within a few years.

movax posted:

I just assume that anything and everything the United States develops in any industry is up for grabs. It's just easier that way, I'm never surprised. Corporate security is loving abysmal everywhere because nobody gives a flying gently caress.

I mean, if your brother-in-law the CTO fucks up, you call in your other brother-in-law's firm to take care of "security audits" right? All while 15 years of R&D and trial and error was acquired by China for instant use because some fuckwit somewhere couldn't be assed to patch a server.

Drop a USB stick in the parking lot, and watch how many retards will pick it up and plug it into their work PCs. There was a story a little while ago about this being the most effective way to get software running on a corporate network.

quote:

Also regarding last page and discussion on engine cores, it's a sweet gig for the aerospace industry. Granted, they deliver some of the most complicated engineering systems in the world, but it's nice to take that product you developed for Uncle Sam and with his money and adapt it for civilian use to feed your other business units.

movax posted:

The first comment is amazing:


Also, I just ordered this book after reading an excerpt from it in the September issue of Men's Journal. Russian cargo pilots own. There's this story about ISAF needing a generator flown into a remote operating area in Afghanistan, but no cargo charter will do it because it's contested, hostile territory and the plane won't be able to get back out.

So these Russians call up, and say "hey, we'll do it for $2 million". ISAF has no choice, has to pay them. So these ex-Soviet Air Force pilots fly back through the Afghanistan of their youth and land this POS Il-76 right on the dot on the runway, dropping off the generator they need. The Americans are like "well, gently caress, how are they going to take off?"

This bus rolls up, and the Russians hop on-board, ready to leave. They explain they bought the plane for half a mil, patched it up with tape and some rope, and intended to just abandon it on the airfield once the delivery was done.

Net profit: $1.5 mil and immeasurable

Phanatic posted:

Yeah, you're right, Boeing wouldn't tweak the numbers to present its case in the most optimistic light or anything like that. It's a business proposal, you can trust it.

How tired's an engine going to get sitting around full of preservative with no hours on it?

fknlo posted:

From the military/former military people I know, this has to be the last thing that would ever come up as a justification for something like this. There's probably a Navy or AF aircraft dumping fuel over your house right now!

Slo-Tek posted:

I don't get the mission here. What does the Navy want to do with a slow, short-legged, micro-helicopter with a couple hellfires on it?

Wiki thinks it has to be within line of sight? That is just weird.

Rot posted:

We did this for Movember:

molima by Brian.M.K, on Flickr

grover posted:

A typical 70mm Hydra has a warhead roughly equivalent to two RPG-7 rounds. So, Fire Scouts aren't going to be blowing up hardened buildings with one, but it's more than enough to take out a car or really ruin someone's day.

iyaayas01 posted:

At least these engines will probably work...half of the time when we upgrade to something "new" (read: several decades old, but newer than what we were using before) it doesn't even loving work. Still dumb though.


There is a thread over in GiP that may be more to your liking.


Who does P&W own in the office that made the decision? Sadly I'm only about 25% joking.

Mr.Peabody posted:

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

Tsuru posted:

As much as I hate to point out the obvious, and as incomprehensible as this concept may be to a proud American such as yourself: bigger is not necessarily better.

LobsterboyX posted:

My grandfather Managed, built and flew dc-3's from the first to the last prop driven. He was the biggest influence in my life so much so I decided to do this.



Later on, my grandfather worked on the x-3, was a consultant on the thor missile, and his final project was the planning stages for the DC-10.



his influence has been the guiding force for just about everything in my life.


(RIP Liberty Belle)


the saddest thing is that i have never flown in a dc-3. Ive been on a constant lookout for years about dc-3 flights in or around los angeles.

Cygni posted:

I can't wait to see air travel in California in 50 years, if the train doesn't get built and these population/travel projections hold true.

LAX, SFO, Oakland, San Jose, Ontario, Burbank, John Wayne, SDI, Montgomery, Gillespie... all locked for expansion barring a massive amount of island building or imminent domaining. Only airport in a major metro with any chance of expansion is Sac because they smartly built it out in the middle of nowhere.

Yet they are projecting TWICE as many people flying in the state? gently caress sake...

The industry will have a goddamn heart attack when LAX goes to slot auction.

Phanatic posted:

Going through security loving infuriates me.

I do it all the time. I have my poo poo together. It's not the security process itself, it's that all this loving money and time gets wasted on an absolutely *useless* loving process administered by people who could barely manage to work the frier at a Chik-Fil-A without scarring themselves for life.

It's right when the planes have been turned back on after 9/11. I'm flying from Dulles to Norfolk. That morning, I'd been setting off NAVSEA-related explosives. Three charges, 60 lbs of HBX each. My jacket and backpack are laying on the ground outside our bombproof trailer. I'm not the one pressing the button, so I'm watching from the quarry shore as they go off. Once, twice, three times, I see the plume of nitramine fragments and TNT residue drift down across the bombproof, and my backpack, and my jacket.

So of course I get picked from the line in Dulles that night for a random explosives. They swab my backpack down with that little pad, and put it in the sniffer. My internal monologue is going "Oh, gently caress," I'm going to have to call the base's security guys, my boss, his boss, etc.

Nothing. Not a goddamned thing from the detector.

But that was years ago, surely they've gotten better since then? Surely security's more coherent than that ad hoc mess we all had to deal with, with NG guys standing guard in the airports with M16s at port arms, sometimes with their *loving fingers* on the *loving triggers* (which was probably still safe since they didn't have rounds chambered or anything, which demonstrates how purely for-appearances-sake the whole thing was).

Cut to 2010. I'm flying back from Bluegrass Station to Philly with a solid-state drive packed with data. Wouldn't ordinarily do that, but a test flight with a 160th SOAR G-model Chinook went wrong (broken control actuator, pilot was instantly 180 degrees out-of-phase with the aircraft, pitching up and down like a roller coasted 20 feet off the ground) and people needed to look at the data *right now*. On X-ray, the drive unit looks like a big opaque brick, since it's entirely clad in metal. So they make me pull it out for an explosives inspection. Great, the drive's been on a 160th bird for like two months, who knows what the hell it's got on it. Yep. *Ping!* Positive for explosive residue. Security's response is to ask me what the thing is, look through the rest of my bag, and then let me board the plane. Entirely a rational decision, because I wasn't a terrorist with a bomb, but the entire system is set up so that they can't admit that it was a rational decision, they can't say "Well he clearly didn't fit the profile" because they can't even admit that there *is* a profile.

Last year. Flying back from Huntsville to Philly, connecting through Charlotte. At Huntsville, I check my bag, because I know it will be too big for the overhead compartment on the little puddle-jumper to Charlotte. Lots of people don't check their bags at check-in, and so have to check them planeside, because they're too big for the overheads. So, we land at Charlotte, and they've pulled off all the planeside check bags for people to collect as they get off the plane. I see my bag on that rack. It's clearly got the big white coded tag on it, says PHL, and not one of the little pink tags. I say "That's supposed to be checked through to Philly," luggage ape tells me "You have to take it with you now."

So now I'm in the secure area of the airport, with a bag that could have a firearm in it. Or box cutters. This is airport security.

It's a loving joke. It is a colossal and staggering waste of money, and time. Going through security isn't bad at all, but *having* to go through security, *having* to have my bags searched through or my person groped by the same organization of monkeys that rips out colostomy bags, can't tell an insulin pump from a bomb, and seriously has to pretend that grandmothers in wheelchairs and prosthetics are a threat, is definitely in the Top 5 Stupidest Things in America, it's right up there with the War on Drugs and the Washington Nationals.

grover posted:

Hasn't the reliability of modern turbofans increased by orders of magnitude, to the point where a single modern engine is more reliable than two 1970s era turbofans?

The Electronaut posted:

Speaking of wingsuits, got a shot of a little ol' PAC 750 flying away a week ago.

Advent Horizon posted:

I first thought that would be really stupid from a 727 given the rear engines, but they probably just removed the Cooper Vane and lowered the stairs (thus making a 727 an awesome aircraft to jump from).

Actually, I wonder why somebody like Zero G doesn't offer jetliner skydiving?

Edit: Oh God, I know better than to read comments, but drat. People are saying Fox wasn't allowed to do it because they're conservative and Discovery was only allowed because of liberal favoratism.