That plane is oddly attractive.
Beautifully functional.
Here's another purely functional ship, the Wilga, formed by its mission: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images
NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#32Earlier 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…
Designed by W.E.W. Petter. His previous designs, Westland Whirlwind and Welkin had narrow wings, which caused problems, hence the broad wings for the Canberra.
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#33Does anyone know why the ends of the wings are missing in some of the photos?
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#34That plane is oddly attractive.
> Oddly attractive.
Pretty much sums up all british jet aircraft from the 40's to the 60's.
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's a good answer. A data visualization would be something like a 2-d graph of altitude vs airspeed and in theory something could be made to fly over every point on that plane, and NASA does aeronautical research over every point on that plane. 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 alt…
These old spy planes are perfect examples of what you can do when you build something for a single purpose.
Planes like the F35 are designed by someone who read a bunch of blogs about the perfect way to design a plane. You don't design a plane, you design a plane framework on which you can add whatever feature the customer asks for.
A lot like SW design these days. We all know this doesn't work well and yet...
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#36Earlier 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…
And also, of those two, only the U2 is still in service. All SR-71s have been sent to museums now, sadly. This includes NASA's which were the last in service, operated until the mid nineties.
Interestingly, NASA _does_ operate a variant of the U2 currently, as the ER-2 [1] high-altitude earth-resources observatory.
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-046...
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#37Maybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane for doing what they're doing?
There's some discussion that it's for flying either the 'BACN' comms system or 'HALOE' lidar system.
https://warisboring.com/what-in-the-world-is-nasas-research-...
https://www.wired.com/2012/09/air-force-universal-translator... (caution anti-adblock)
Like the B-52, it's far cheaper to use an old plane that fits the role perfectly than it is to try to build a new one.
Re: NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
#38Does anyone know why the ends of the wings are missing in some of the photos?
Runway clearance - the wing droop at the tips is low enough to possibly hit the runway lights (usually below 18" high). They remove them for high speed taxi tests, and for the actual flights they temporarily replace the "high" lights with mid-height ones and install the wingtips.