Hi Andrew: Have you seen that one in person? Looks like a great restore! And how about an origami based F/A-18 Hornet?
I haven't seen her, sadly. I've been following the story since early on, still buried in the ice in Greenland.
One of the BEST aircraft ever made. Aircraft designed around the GAU-8 30mm Gatlin gun. I get a little misty eyed anytime I see a picture or hear it's designation spoken...
It's massive firepower was also considered ungentlemanly. The goal (at least of those doing the fighting) was to shoot down planes not kill pilots - part of the camaraderie of all who fly. Unfortunately, the "Jug's" 8X .50 caliber machine guns could vaporize a target if hit at the convergence point. Lastly, due to the combination of its powerful engine and its weight, it could achieve extremely high dive speed. Some early models were lost due to flutter induced at high dive speeds.
Hi All: Something you probably did not want to see in the sky over the Pacific if you were in a Zero...
The air intakes look wrong somehow. That may be a later development? Ah, nope. Wikipedia says that the "chin intake" I am used to seeing started with the P38J, and the above is an earlier one.
Hi All: Anyone remember the F-104 Starfighter? It could not turn worth a damn but it was fast - mach2 + fast - as hell!
Hi All: Not the Blackbird but still flying 61 years after its first flight on Aug. 1st, 1955. The Lockheed U-2.
There were a couple of those (U2s, though technically they were ER2s then) that used to fly out of Moffett when I worked there the first time. It was amazing watching them take off--they'd get about halfway down the LONG runway and then tilt back to about 45 degrees and UP they would go! You could see the little orange dot of the jet exhaust after the rest of the plane was no longer visible, and the sound was very present for a long while after that. Evidently they had to do a lot of coordination with the local ATC (SF Bay Area is a very busy airspace!!) and had about a three-minute window. All traffic was cleared out above them, and if they didn't make the window they had to scrub and re-schedule. They would basically just go straight up and through the "layer cake" to altitudes where passenger aircraft don't fly. A guy I knew who used to fly them said it was pretty intense. At the altitudes they flew, the speed of sound (decreases with altitude) was just barely faster than the stall speed of the aircraft (which doesn't change as much with altitude). So they had about a 5 MPH window to keep the airspeed in, for hours and hours and hours. -soD
Hi Dave: Excellent detail on the U2! The pilots had a word for that small window between ripping the wings off and stall but I forgot what it was called? The next one shows a Spitfire and an F-22 Raptor. I have never seen this one before. Wayne
But is it real or cgi? Hard to tell sometimes. Edit: Doesn't it look like someone's been doing vertical flights out of the clouds ahead?
