I’m truly glad that nobody was hurt.
The most impressive aircraft I’ve ever seen take off and land, bar none, is the SR71 Blackbird. The first time I saw one land, I was working on a B52 on the flightline and we all stopped and watched it. Most beautiful aircraft I’ve ever seen. Second had to be the C5-A. They’re so big they almost look like they’re floating above the runway.
The most impressive aircraft I've ever seen take off and land, bar none, is the SR71 Blackbird.
I miss that plane. Decades ahead of its time. Very impressive that the Skunkworks guys made a mach 3+ aircraft almost 50 years ago using slide rules.
It amazes me every time I think about it. But not as much as landing men on the moon.
In some ways, the moon shot was easier. They didn’t have to figure out how to sustain >mach 3 flight for hours on end without using ablative heat shielding, or how to make something go that fast for longer than a few minutes without jettisoning anything, or how to make it survive an enemy attack, etc etc. You might be interested to read Skunk Works by Ben Rich (2nd head of the Skunk Works). He talks about the plane’s development at length. Just designing the movable cones for the engines was a surprisingly crucial and difficult aspect of its development.
(of course, keeping 3 guys alive for 2 weeks, and making the lunar lander both light enough to be functional and strong enough not to kill them was equally impressive)
I have only awe and respect for the skunk works guys and for their creations. Re: the enemy attack, the space hardware actually has to survive more “attacks” from particles under more extreme conditions. And reentry of the capsule into the stratosphere is more environmentally extreme (see link). At the time the SR71 was built, there was nothing fast enough and high enough to catch it.
Both achievements are extremely impressive. There’s no doubt about it.
Last I heard, top speed and altitude for the SR-71 are STILL classified to this day. I think I read somewhere that a few of the blackbird pilots flew so high, they actually earned astronaut wings.
The published service ceiling is 80,000 feet, but I’ve been told they’re really capable of cruising at 100,000 feet. That isn’t spaceman high, but it’s up there.
Mountainbike, everyone around was lucky when the Talon went down The impact was 1/4 mile east of the shop and they were in a steep banking turn towards us which is the normal flight pattern when the wind is out of the north. If that turbine explosion had happened a few seconds later the plane may well have cratered us.
I’ve never been fortunate enough to see an SR-71 in flight but did get a chance to look one over closely at Hill AFB a couple of years ago. The sheer size of that beast astounded me and equally surprising was how small the cockpit is. Anyone would claustrophobia (that includes me) would feel the heartrate go up a bit after wedging in there.
Just trivia, but they had the starting cart on display and that surprised me also. It was 2 Buick Wildcat nailhead engines mated front to back to create a V-16.
I’ll see you that cramped cockpit, and raise you the spacesuit the pilots wore…
@asecular For only one of them (if we’re only talking about the actual moon shots).
Apollos 15 and 17 were 12 days (close enough to two weeks for casual conversation), 16 was 11 days, 12 was 10 days, 13 doesn’t count because they came home early, 14 was 9 days. Only Apollo 11 lasted 8 days.
Well, the definitely weren’t designed to dance in. But, then, neither is any high performance military aircraft. I’ve never met anyone who’s flown one, but I bet they love it.
Cool. I was unaware of the starting cart. I assumed they used a regular power cart like we used on the buffs.
At Beale, they used “shop air.” Compressed air starters installed in the hangar - the compressors had enormous tanks to supply sufficient CFM. The Wildcat (and also big block Chevy start carts later) starters were still used at remote bases.
They also had to inject triethylborane into the engine at startup to provide a catalyst to get the fuel to burn - it was very resistant to burn in order to not ignite itself in the tanks/lines at the temperatures generated by flight. TEB was also used to light the afterburners - the pilot would hit a button to give a shot of TEB into the burners. There was a little counter in the cockpit that told the pilot approximately how many shots he had left before the afterburners would no longer light.
If anyone is ever in the Ogden, UT area a visit to the Hill AFB museum is well worth the time and extremely easy to access. They’ve got everything there from the early 20th century wire and canvas rigs up into the modern stuff.
They’ve even got an afterburning A7 Corsair (new one to me) and when I was there they were about to start on the restoration of a complete B-29 Superfortress
I second the suggestion to visit the Hill AFB museum–lots of interesting planes and plenty of hands on stuff for kids and adults to do. Wright Patterson AFB museum in Dayton, OH is also worth visiting. When you look into some of the incredibly tiny cockpits of the spaceships you see there’s no extra room for anything…good luck trying to even think of scratching your forehead.
There was a joke years ago about a small plane pilot in Nebraska who got trapped in a terrible blizzard, with incredible winds. Finally, he knew he was going to die, so he slowed up and settled down, luckily finding a lee place with no winds. He shut it off and went to sleep until the sun came out. Then, he realized he had landed in a farmer’s silo.
The latest report on the commercial air liner a few years ago which disappeared on a flight to France was the sensors got iced up, thus stalled, and the captain, when he got back in the cockpit ordered NOSE UP, not down, and that sucker settled into the ocean and killed everyone. The captain only got an hour or two sleep the night before, partying.
As far as having an armed soldier guarding the parking slot for the stealth fighter, many years ago when one of them was being tested, the model plane makers wanted data so they could make the model. The smart-alecky officer in charge let them take a photo of the parking place. They noted debris from rain where the tires were parked, and got a lot of data on plane size and configuration. (I worked on black boxes for the B-1 and B-2.)
Triedaq, I remember my Political Science teacher in the Community College in the 70’s, he often commented about moving from puberty to adultery.
Some years ago, my brother used to go to Osh-kosh. There was a landing strip which required them to come in slow, then make a 90 degree turn close to the ground. Almost every year someone augured it in. He and I had a major argument. I said with that many crashes, they needed to change the lay-out. He stubbornly insisted no matter how many people died, it was still a case of bad piloting, no change needed.
I was in Crash Rescue in 1965 at Gray Air base, Ft. Lewis, WA. Our old barracks were off the side of the north end of the air base. We had one day on; one day off; duty. When we got off, first thing we took a nap. One day, they brought in a C5-A to see if they could get it back up again on a short strip. They parked that sucker back off the grass, and ran it up hard before letting off the brakes. Usually, we slept through take-offs, but with all those motors spooled up hard, we all came out of our bunks at the same time.
Regarding that air France thing, the fo pulled the stick backward the whole time. The captain, who came back from break, couldn’t see the position of the controls, due to Airbus’ controversial cockpit design. When the fo finally spoke up about what he had done, the captain ordered the nose down. But that was too late
The Air France accident seems like it was preventible. When there is a question about air speed, like if there is a disagreement between the various air speed sensor pitot tubes, there’s a manual procedure the crew is supposed to do which makes the plane guaranteed stable and impossible to stall, independent of what the air speed indicators say. It’s something relatively simple, like thrust at 3/4 max, nose up 5 degrees, or something like that. When the controls are in that position, the plane supposedly cannot stall. The only thing the crew has to do then is keep the wings level and wait for the air speed indicators to defrost.
For some reason on the Air France disaster, perhaps it was just the changes in the wind velocity and direction due to the storm, it seems like this procedure wasn’t implemented. Anybody know if there has been a conclusion found why?
Yeah, I was always a firm believer in, “when all else fails, pitch and power settings will save your bacon.” In the event of full pitot-static failure, select an attitude and power setting that will cause a climb at a safe airspeed. IGNORE EVERERYTHING ELSE.
Once you make it to visual meterological conditions, THEN sort stuff out and navigate to a VFR landing.
DO NOT use autopilot…it uses pitot/static inputs and is every bit as confused as you!
The propeller on single engine GA planes is merely a big fan to keep the pilot cool. It has to be, because when it stops he really starts to sweat!!
LOL; good one Pvt.