Plane / Planes / Aircraft / Aeroplane / Airplane appreciation

Air national Guard innit

Runway too short? That'll buff out.

Apparently there was something obstructing the last section of the runway and the pilot came in waaay too fast and had to go off road. Another plane did the same thing a couple of hours later. Seems a bit of a stupid mistake to make really. Considering how much slower the first plane came in.
I doubt they'll fix it, probably just get used for spares.

Armchair pilot >>>>>

Once I've got my CPL and ATPL and accrued many thousands of hours I'd love to move to Canada and fight forest fires:

On the subject of amphibians, this is on my "Euromillions" shopping list

We did a project at primary school about this plane. I can't remember anything about it, other than I enjoyed it.

We also did a project on the Outer Hebrides, which might slow the pace somewhat if I post some photos.

Is this the F117? It was supposed to be 'invisible' to radar, so when they shot one down over Serbia during the war there, my wife and her friends made a big banner that they pitched on the side of their apartment block in Belgrade which said "Sorry Bill (Clinton) we didn't know your plane was meant to be invisible".

On the subject of amphibians, this is on my "Euromillions" shopping list

Grumman Goose?

Grumman Goose?

..ish

It's the Antilles Goose, based on the Grumman but all new construction, turbine powered, modern avionics etc.

It was supposed to be 'invisible' to radar,

No, it was supposed to have a reduced radar cross section. And it did, most of the time, if the RCS reducing features were properly maintained. There are still ways of detecting such aircraft, even by radar, because "no reflections" isn't the same as no effect on radio waves.

^ Veh nice. Wish they would do the same for some classic cars. Cool but reliable.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/performance/speed-record/sea-dart2.jpg

Is this the F117? It was supposed to be 'invisible' to radar, so when they shot one down over Serbia during the war there, my wife and her friends made a big banner that they pitched on the side of their apartment block in Belgrade which said "Sorry Bill (Clinton) we didn't know your plane was meant to be invisible".

Part of the F117's stealth technology involves changing the standard reflections of radar waves.

Your radar sends out a wave and expects a response back. It logs the time the wave was sent and received and depending on the time taken for it to be received it says there is something here by form of a green blob on a display.

The F117 was designed so that a very small reflection of the radar wave is sent back to the receiver, the rest is bounced off in other directions and phase-shifted. IF (and it's a big IF) you can work out the reflection pattern and shift, you can set up a separate receiver where you expect to receive a return signal and get the correct green blob for an F117.

They did not manage this when they shot down the F117, it was dumb fucking luck. I don't say this as a fanboy or complete trust in technology, post conflict intel showed that they did not have the tech to implement this method, they literally just got lucky.

At the time, it was a fucking huge deal though, F117s were a plane that you couldn't see, you didn't know where it was, but it would rain destruction. Radio chatter would consist of we can hear it but we can't see it, and the fear was huge. The fact that they managed to shoot one down proved that it wasn't an el chupacabra style enemy and it could be stopped. It was a shiny shiny win against USA when it was sorely needed.

And was then sold to China!

I realised I missed the point I was trying to make that it was never really 'invisible', more very hard to see. The invisible part was propaganda and bluster. Why make a plane that is truly stealth when you can tell people it is. If it looks like it is and enough people say it, people will believe it. But now we're verging on war tactics which I don't want to start talking about.

So interesting (no irony)

OGStealth

... they literally just got lucky.

What are you basing that on? There's a quite detailed wikipedia article on the SAM battery commander that says there was a bit more to it than that, and a few other articles kicking around the web with a bit more in them.

The main points:
They used 'obsolete' low frequency radar which they modified to even lower frequencies to overcome the stealth effects so they could track the bombers. The nato warning systems ignored low frequencies. The Serbians only used high frequency radar to illuminate the plane so the missiles could track it - and they'd separated the targeting radar and the launchers so the missiles would come in at a different angle from the radar, making the stealth less effective.

They put together a lot of information from radio intercepts, observers and spies to know what was going on and what they could get away with. Specifically, to engage at short range and to attempt targeting illumination for longer than normal.

They also did something unspecified to make the missiles track stealth targets better.

(I'd also picked up the idea that they did some off-line processing on raw radar data to enhance detection and so learned that the bombers were using the same flight paths night after night, but now i can't find any references to that.)

So i think they worked hard for their luck.

OGStealth

Read a lots about those after watching the fake* that was portray the nazi's advance in aeroplane engineering;

And of course, Return to Castle Wolfenstein too.

*Indiana Jones

Looks familiar...

De Havilland Comet.

Still with us, albeit in military form.

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Nimrod[/ame]

Nimrod.

Always makes me lol

The Mighty Hunter is now just a museum piece too, the last Nimrod R.1 was retired last year after protracted airworthiness issues, and the MRA.4 replacements for the MR.2 have been unceremoniously scrapped after billions were spent on them.