Parked aircraft, same model, just south at Whiteman AFB.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7249682,-93.5601479,19z/data...
Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
61–70 of 390 posts
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only ~25 miles from the one base in the US that hosts an active B2 wing. There's another on the ground there in Google Maps; https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B043'29.7%22N+93%C2%...
I don't think I realized how huge the B2 actually is.
Google maps measures the wingspan at ~170 ft which is about 4-5 school buses.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#63The measured wingspan (using the Google Maps distance measure tool) is around 200 feet whereas the measured wingspan of a B-2 on the ground at nearby Whiteman AFB is the nominal 172 feet, so its altitude AGL is roughly 14% of the altitude of the camera plane that took the photo.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#64I live on a farm very close to this area. All the B-2s are based at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. They fly over often -- one even fly over my farm today about an hour ago. This one was probably on final approach during the summer when the winds are usually out of the south and was probably about 2,000 feet above the ground.
I was about to say, I grew up about 10 minutes from here and they were a common sight. Always thrilling to see.
IIRC Whiteman has an air show every year where you can get "up close" to them.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#65Not so stealth eh?
During the 1999 yugoslavia bombings, after the first one was shot down, there was a joking apology on the TV, something along the lines of "Sorry, we didn't see it" :)
> During the 1999 yugoslavia bombings, after the first one was shot down
That was a F-117 Night Hawk “Stealth Fighter” (a type which is now retired), not a B-2 Spirit “Stealth Bomber”.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#66Archived before it's taken down: https://archive.ph/E8xih
(don't spam click it, it is already extremely slow to load, the last thing we want to do is DDOS archive.ph)
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#67The aircraft seems to be a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. > The Northrop (later Northrop Grumman) B-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber, is an American heavy strategic bomber, featuring low observable stealth technology designed for penetrating dense anti-aircraft defenses. Designed during the Cold War, it is a flying wing design with a crew of two.[1][3] The bomber is subsonic and can deploy both conventional a…
My father-in-law helped design the pilot seat for that.
Unfortunately he was unable to make the transition to computer aided design. After the defense cutbacks in the 90s, he could only find minimum wage jobs for the rest of his working life.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#68Interesting how the three separate R/G/B images are taken independently a few ~seconds~ milliseconds apart, with a different color filter placed over the image sensor. I assume this is to maximize resolution, since no Bayer interpolation [0] is needed to demosaic the output of a traditional image sensor that integrates the color filters onto the sensor pixels themselves. As these satellites are not intended to photog…
I wonder if there are ways to get superior (compared to Bayer) color images from conventional raw-capable monochrome digital cameras (like Leica Q2 Monochrom) in static scenes using similar workflows of taking three separate shots.
The first imaging driver that I wrote was for an HD frame store that had a camera with a spinning filter disk.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#69Screenshot for when it will have been deleted by Google https://i.imgur.com/toSC5a0.png .
Would be disappointing for them to remove it for basically no reason, especially considering you can see a B-2 parked on the tarmac (https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B043'29.9%22N+93%C2%...) in the nearby Whiteman AFB. The B-2 was first flown 32 years ago. Its existence is neither covert or secret, but often used to do flybys at freaking football games where thousands of recording devices are present and active. There's virtually no national security risk with these images because any imagery obtainable by Google Maps would've been obtainable by whatever adversary long ago, plus some more.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#70Artist James Bridle calls them "Rainbow planes" and has used this in his art.
Rainbow Plane 002: Kiev. October 29, 2014: https://booktwo.org/notebook/rainbow-plane-002-kiev/
Rainbow Planes: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/sets/72157637938061015/