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NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years
- jws 11y agoArticle is from 2013. Is anyone familiar enough with flight trackers to see if it is still in use? The tail number is N927NA.
- jstrate 11y agoLooks like it flew yesterday https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01
- jonah 11y agoThat's a strange flight pattern, any insight into it? Erratically gain altitude, make a long run and then a tight spiral back down before returning to land?
- Sanddancer 11y agoThere's a pretty strong weather system in that area, and that looks like a flight pattern to try to figure out what sort of risk the storm has in generating tornadoes. Head out in case there's another area that could use a little extra info, and then come back home.
- dingaling 11y ago> The tail number is N927NA. As a European, the phrase 'tail number' was unfamiliar so I did a few searches. It seems to have derived ( in the USA ) from original airline fleet-numbering practice, where the aircraft would have an arbitrary and unhelpful state- or even city-issued registration and a separate self-assigned fleet number painted on the tail, which was easier to handle for scheduling purposes. Once national N-numbering for registrations was introduced this became less common because the FAA permitted reservation of blocks of sequential registrations, but some large airlines continue to use a parallel fleet numbering scheme. And the phrase 'tail number' stuck in parlance instead of 'registration'. In Europe it is common to use to the last two or three letters of registrations repeated on the tail or nose-wheel doors as the fleet airframe identifier and 'tail number' is unknown.
- Timshel 11y agoThere is a nice video of it flying in formation in December : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmVTzN8exQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmVTzN8exQ
- Fuzzwah 11y agoI got to see an English Electric Canberra flying at a Temora Air Museum flight day. Very impressive machine and it boggled my mind that it was originally introduced to service back in 1951. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU
- Neil44 11y agoLove it. I have only seen the static one at RAF Cosford, they are really nice looking planes. IIRC the one there is white and fitted out for reconnaissance.
- jonah 11y agoSuch a cool looking plane. Great to see it has a new purpose in life.
- Toenex 11y agoAs a child raised on Gerry Anderson's designs, this is how aircraft should look!
- arethuza 11y agoThe inevitable link to a pic of a TSR2 - which is what the future really looked like in the 1960s: http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC-TSR-2/0979919/L/ http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC-TSR-2/0979919/L/
- Theodores 11y agoI got the restoration but I didn't get what this plane is actually to be used for. Why do they need this plane? How will it help open up the first tourist hotels on Mars? Seems going backwards to space exploration.
- softrock 11y agoNASA does much much more than just space exploration.
- Sanddancer 11y agoAeronautical research. The Aeronautics part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration isn't just a bygone relic. Their most visible projects are their space side, but they do a fuckton of research into making planes fly better/faster/safer. They do research on new control methods of planes, new geometries, how weather phenomena affect planes, etc.
- cm2187 11y agoIs it my browser or is this website disabling right clicks? Javascript needs to die...
- zackp30 11y agoNot just you, it's doing it for me also. Probably caused by: (function($) { $(document).bind('contextmenu dragstart', function(event) { var target = event.target || event.srcElement; target = $(target); if (target.data('ngg-protect') || target.parent('a').data('ngg-protect') || target.attr('id') == 'fancybox-img' || target.attr('id') == 'TB_Image' || target.attr('id') == 'shTopImg' || target.attr('id') == 'lightbox-image' || target.hasClass('highslide-image') || target.parents('.ngg-albumoverview').length == 1 || target.parents('.ngg-pro-album').length == 1 || photocrati_image_protection_global.enabled == '1') { event.preventDefault() } }) }(jQuery)); It's extremely annoying when sites do this...
- gear54rus 11y agoIt's JS hate that needs to die. Maybe there's a name for a condition where people are so stuck up in their ways they can't accept objectively positive change (of The web platform). As for this bs code, the people who wrote this will find other ways to discredit themselves, it's not a job of a platform's maker to babysit everyone and prevent their stupid decisions. Be thankful that you can actually override this due to platform's (and JS's) openness, it could've been far worse, in many other cases you'd need disassembly to fix something like that.
- Quequau 11y agoMaybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane for doing what they're doing?
- JorgeGT 11y agoCompanies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.
- mozumder 11y agoSo why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?
- cstross 11y agoThe Canberra is a lot bigger than a U-2 (crew of 2-3 instead of 1, has a large bomb bay that got repurposed for instruments/recon payloads, etc). Also, there are probably a lot more spare parts kicking around -- over a thousand were built, and it only went out of front-line service (last operator: the Indian Air Force) in 2007. The SR-71 is monstrously expensive to operate and flies in an utterly different regime -- high supersonic/low hypersonic flight, at higher altitude. And, again, it has a smaller payload. It's kind of amazing that an aircraft specc'ed in 1944 as an emergency wartime replacement for the de Havilland Mosquito is still flying in anything other than an air show display role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito
- noir_lord 11y agoU-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 is they are comparatively simpler to maintain and where often 'over' engineered by modern standards so are more forgiving.
- eternalban 11y agoThat plane is oddly attractive.
- imglorp 11y agoBeautifully 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 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images
- noir_lord 11y ago> Oddly attractive. Pretty much sums up all british jet aircraft from the 40's to the 60's.
- prplhaz4 11y agoThe comments on that article are great too: >> The ap-22s-2 Full Pressure Suits were my biggest immediate problem. The suits were ADC hand me downs, all going over age. New suits were finally procured after numerous equipment failures, but depot support managed to keep the suits going pending replacements. The suits did their job on at least seven occasions of cockpit pressurization loss at altitude and allowed the crew to return safely to base.
- arprocter 11y agoDoes anyone know why the ends of the wings are missing in some of the photos?
- jonnycowboy 11y agoRunway 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.