I get a kick out of it looking like an airliner tooling around out on the water.
It's not until after it lifts off that it is noticeably a boathull fuselage.
They had big problems with the engine intakes. Those cone things sticking out of the front of the engines were moved back and forward in flight as the plane changed speed.
The engines inside the housings could only ingest subsonic air. When the plane was flying supersonically, the idea was that the incoming supersonic air would bounce off the cones in a series of shock waves. This both slowed down the air and compressed it which meant that the compressor stage of the engine no longer had to work so hard to get the desired pressure inside the combustion chambers.
At different speeds, the cones had to be in different positions. The original control system for positioning the cones was an analogue computer. When the computer made a mistake, the engine would give a huge backfire - this was referred to as an 'unstart'. Because the two engines were fairly widely separated, when one engine experienced an unstart and lost thrust, the plane would yaw violently as the other engine continued to push forward. Sometimes the yaw would cause the other engine to unstart too. If the sequence repeated, the plane would zig-zag along for a while with the engines alternately emitting loud bangs and clouds of smoke.
Later a more sophisticated digital computer was fitted to control the cones, but unstarts were never entirely eliminated.
Didn't it allow the engines to function basically like a ramjet, needing less compression for combustion, resulting in greater fuel efficiency at high speed than at lower speeds?
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
Yes. Concorde was the same. If an engine failed on Concorde mid-Atlantic, it could no longer maintain its usual Mach 2 cruise on the remaining three engines. It had to slow to subsonic speed. Concorde was less fuel efficient at the lower speed and could no longer make its destination airport at New York, London or Paris. There were contingency plans for it to divert to Iceland in this situation.
Concorde's engines also couldn't intake supersonic air. They had a similar mechanism to the Blackbird's cones, but it was in the shape of a large 'ramp' - basically a big paddle inside the squarish intakes that could be jacked to different angles to suit the different flying speeds. As far as I know, Concorde didn't suffer from unstarts.
Decent day at the field. It was calm and just a little chilly. Some pics. We have a flyer of some repute in our club. The guy flying his plane right next to himself is a national champ of some esoteric form of showing off with toy airplanes. The blue and yellow Stearman biplane is one of my friends new toys. The little tan biplane is a SPAD. Biplanes are in this year I guess. I flew the ME-262 and P-38 today, all home in one piece. I'm third slob from the left in the group pic.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
To carry building materials over inhospitable terrain? Like if you want to build a castle on a mountain outcrop? I'd assume from the picture, it would sling the cargo below itself.
I love the ad. It gives you the impression that they can drop you to any target you might desire, just like Enola Gay.
I recognized the airliner as the US military cargo plane, C-97. I see that a grand total of 56 Boeing 377 commercial airliners were built. On the military side,
"While only 60 C-97 transports were built, 816 were built as KC-97 Stratotankers for inflight refueling. The civilian derivative of the C-97 was the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, a very luxurious transoceanic air liner which featured a lower deck lounge and could be fitted with sleeper cabins." (wiki)
The Stratocruisers were displaced by Boeing 707s and de Havilland Comets during the mid-60s in the airline races, but the KC-97 Stratotanker continued to provide in-flight refueling services until into the late seventies. It's biggest contribution was as a flying gas station. Well...It did introduce the pressurized cabin to commercial flights, setting the standards for passenger comfort thenceforth.
How big is it? What does it carry as 'payload'? How?
Reputedly, it's a UAV. It doesn't look like any aircraft I'm with which I'm familiar. Indeed the picture looks shopped.
Apparently the twin-rotor Hoder is still at the concept/mockup stage. Or at least it was when the blog (link below) was posted, in July 2009.
But you can see a vid of its single rotor brother flying, and read a bit more about the company at this blog. (Also explains the names. The company is (was ?) named after a group of Norse Gods, with each individual model being named after one of the Gods).
ETA: Oops - didn't see that godfry had already found the same link.
I got pics of another variant, similar to the ones in Curse's pics, at the Dover AFB museum. Dover is one of Bort's old stomping grounds. It's a fuel tanker. I don't know what the first model tanker was, but I'm guessing this is one of the earliest. It has jets outboard. Freakeh.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
I haven't checked the whole thread yet, but has anyone mentioned the A-10 "Warthog" yet? The closest thing ever built to a flying tank, and with the possible exception of the SR-71 probably the coolest aircraft of all time, in my opinion.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I used to see B-52s and B-1s doing practice runs down Monument Canyon in San Juan County, Utah. The first time I saw a B-52, all I could see of it was its huge tail fin sticking up out of the canyon as it went by my location. The next time I was parked at a wellsite right at the edge of the canyon. The first time I saw a B-1 was as I was coming back out of the canyons on the way to town. It had rained most of the day. I was on an east-west section of a road that zigzagged along section lines when saw the plane come out of Squaw Canyon a few miles to my east, almost straight up. It climbed almost straight up and went right through the only spot of blue in the sky almost full of rain clouds. After that I saw them flying Monument Canyon several times too. Right before I moved there, one of the B-1s crashed at the head of that canyon while on low speed computer-controlled run, about straight east of Monticello, Utah. The pilot was killed because the escape pod parachute failed to deploy properly.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
Re: Ze Plane! Ze Plane!
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