21–30 of 38 posts
Maybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane for doing what they're doing?
Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.
Is it my browser or is this website disabling right clicks? Javascript needs to die...
As for this bs code, the people who wrote this will find other ways to discredit themselves, it's not a job of a platform's maker to babysit everyone and prevent their stupid decisions.
Be thankful that you can actually override this due to platform's (and JS's) openness, it could've been far worse, in many other cases you'd need disassembly to fix something like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.
So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?
The SR-71 is monstrously expensive to operate and flies in an utterly different regime -- high supersonic/low hypersonic flight, at higher altitude. And, again, it has a smaller payload.
It's kind of amazing that an aircraft specc'ed in 1944 as an emergency wartime replacement for the de Havilland Mosquito is still flying in anything other than an air show display role.
Article is from 2013. Is anyone familiar enough with flight trackers to see if it is still in use? The tail number is N927NA.
Maybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane for doing what they're doing?
Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.
So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?
SR71 is horrifically expensive to fly and service plus it's engineering is complex (and the jigs don't exist anymore) and expensive to maintain (lots of fancy titanium parts) and the airframe hours are better spent on doing what the SR71A was built for.
The 'nice' thing with old planes is they are comparatively simpler to maintain and where often 'over' engineered by modern standards so are more forgiving.
>> The ap-22s-2 Full Pressure Suits were my biggest immediate problem. The suits were ADC hand me downs, all going over age. New suits were finally procured after numerous equipment failures, but depot support managed to keep the suits going pending replacements. The suits did their job on at least seven occasions of cockpit pressurization loss at altitude and allowed the crew to return safely to base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.
So the key quality here is high-altitude performance? Like higher than the service ceilings of current civilian planes or military transports?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?
U-2 is notoriously hard to fly (at altitude the difference between optimal cruise speed, tearing the wings off or stalling is 12kn ). SR71 is horrifically expensive to fly and service plus it's engineering is complex (and the jigs don't exist anymore) and expensive to maintain (lots of fancy titanium parts) and the airframe hours are better spent on doing what the SR71A was built for. The 'nice' thing with old planes…
Unfortunately real aircraft only safely fly inside weirdly shaped polygons on that graph. And the U-2 is a really pointy narrow little shape that crosses all the Y-axis altitudes but the speed is restricted such that its shape is practically a line both above and below the plane can't fly so no data or research is possible off that narrow line. If you merely want to get to 70 Kft then its awesome, if you want to take engineering data or science experiments at exactly 352 knots not 351 or 353 knots, and 70 Kft, then unless you're very lucky you're not flying a U2 on that research mission.
That's the secret of the U2. Everyone knows back in the good old days it was developed and flown in months for no cost compared to the F-22. However the engineering criteria were staggeringly different and there's a big difference between "fly extremely high without crashing while carrying a camera" vs "outfly and outfight every tactical fighter aircraft and missile system on the entire planet, everywhere, under every circumstance" and the difference is about 19 years of development and about a trillion bucks. There is no management secret or space alien technology secret to the U2, its just a very restricted aircraft that barely flies under ideal conditions, but when it does, it can fly higher than any plane built up to when it was designed...
Add a third dimension of cost and you've got the slightly bigger polygon of the SR71 but it costs a bazillion dollars per flight hour. So the Z-axis to the graph of cost. The SR71 is like a skyscraper compared to the new plane.
The plane in the linked article is pretty cheap. It can fly in the part of the 3-d graph where the U2 can't and at maybe a hundredth the cost of the SR71. Also if can fly at speeds much slower than the SR71 at altitude. Its a pretty cool research tool.
A really bad car analogy is NASA already has the worlds most expensive, fastest pneumatic torque wrench in the world AND also has the longest Phillips blade screwdriver in the world. However they've just obtained a pretty high end adjustable crescent wrench. Superficially, "aren't they all just tools?" "Is there any difference between those tools?" "can't they save money by having only one tool that tightens things?" but in practice that doesn't really work and having a new tool in the toolbox is going to help quite a bit for some of their jobs.