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Boeing publishes photos of 1960s stealth plane experiment
- dhimes 11y agoI always thought that when they revealed it they should have published photos of empty sky, saying "Look! There it goes!"
- jasonkester 11y agoI went to an air show in the 80s that had a stealth fighter on display. Or rather a plane-sized empty area of tarmack roped off with a sign describing it as such. So it looks like they stole your idea.
- DannoHung 11y agoWoah. It's crazy how similar the air frame design is to all of the 5th gen stealth fighters being produced.
- sopooneo 11y agoOne question, in case anyone here knows: if the "1948 'Key West Agreement' (PDF) that put jet fixed-wing aircraft purely in the domain of the Air Force" is a thing, then how come the Navy runs the Blue Angels? https://www.blueangels.navy.mil/ https://www.blueangels.navy.mil/
- smackfu 11y agoIt's mainly a poor summary of those agreements, of which the Key West Agreement was only the first. A better way to put it would be that the Army is not allowed to have fixed-wing aircraft, and the Air Force is not allowed to have helicopters. The Navy is just restricted to air operations that support a naval campaign.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoThe Air Force also has helicopters.
- hugh4 11y agoYou seem to be correct -- Wikipedia says the USAF has about 200 helicopters for search and rescue and "utility". Presumably an exception to the rule.
- smegel 11y agoWhy link to blogspam instead of the real thing?
- mindcrime 11y agoThese days it seems that anything that contains an embedded link is "blogspam". Never mind if TFA provides additional information, analysis, insight or context, if it's not "the real thing" then it's spam. Or so you would believe from reading the comments around here.
- themodelplumber 11y agoWow, if the design that resulted in those now-well-known aesthetic qualities goes back that far, I wonder what they're thinking is new and cool these days.
- trhway 11y agoone would wish it. Unfortunately, this contraption was Boeing's F-35 competition entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32
- sanoli 11y agoI actually liked the way the x-32 looked. If Disney made a movie like 'Cars' but called 'Jet Fighters', I always thought the X-32 would be a candidate for the protagonist.
- trhway 11y agoi see your point and raise you that :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmLh1sSFs8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmLh1sSFs8Y
- edwhitesell 11y agoPretty cool for the 60s. Even more impressive if they released RCS numbers to compare to the SR-71 and F-117 My first thought is it looks like a cross between the X-47B [0] and the RQ-4 Global Hawk [1]. Interestingly, both of those came out of Northrop Grumman years later. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_H...
- ianstallings 11y agoYes and what is strange is it isn't faceted like the F-117, which Lockheed was making during the same era. As far as I can recall Ben Rich said that he had stumbled on a paper by a Russian scientist regarding how to defeat radar using various angles. But their limited computation capability led Lockheed to create a faceted design instead of a round one. One has to wonder why Boeing didn't do that. Was it just guess work? Or was it some information-sharing between the two groups and Boeing simply took a different, yet better approach? Northrop's Tacit Blue might have been the influencer for both programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Tacit_Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Tacit_Blue
- vonmoltke 11y agoAs mentioned in the article, Boeing did this work two years before Ufimtsev even published his paper. It was also a full ten years before Lockheed even started designing the F-117.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ianstallings 11y agoSorry I missed the article, I thought it was just an image gallery and had to scroll down through a strange(imho) layout. Thanks!
- edwhitesell 11y ago
- roflchoppa 11y agoman i need to get some of the radar signal absorbing paint.. ya know for science n stuff