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Companies 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-

by JorgeGT 11y ago

Companies 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 ago
So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?
- cstross 11y ago
  The 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 ago
  U-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.
  - VLM 11y ago
    That's a good answer. A data visualization would be something like a 2-d graph of altitude vs airspeed and in theory something could be made to fly over every point on that plane, and NASA does aeronautical research over every point on that plane. Unfortunately real aircraft only safely fly inside weirdly shaped polygons on that graph. And the U-2 is a really pointy narrow little shape that crosses all the Y-axis altitudes but the speed is restricted such that its shape is practically a line both above and below the plane can't fly so no data or research is possible off that narrow line. If you merely want to get to 70 Kft then its awesome, if you want to take engineering data or science experiments at exactly 352 knots not 351 or 353 knots, and 70 Kft, then unless you're very lucky you're not flying a U2 on that research mission. That's the secret of the U2. Everyone knows back in the good old days it was developed and flown in months for no cost compared to the F-22. However the engineering criteria were staggeringly different and there's a big difference between "fly extremely high without crashing while carrying a camera" vs "outfly and outfight every tactical fighter aircraft and missile system on the entire planet, everywhere, under every circumstance" and the difference is about 19 years of development and about a trillion bucks. There is no management secret or space alien technology secret to the U2, its just a very restricted aircraft that barely flies under ideal conditions, but when it does, it can fly higher than any plane built up to when it was designed... Add a third dimension of cost and you've got the slightly bigger polygon of the SR71 but it costs a bazillion dollars per flight hour. So the Z-axis to the graph of cost. The SR71 is like a skyscraper compared to the new plane. The plane in the linked article is pretty cheap. It can fly in the part of the 3-d graph where the U2 can't and at maybe a hundredth the cost of the SR71. Also if can fly at speeds much slower than the SR71 at altitude. Its a pretty cool research tool. A really bad car analogy is NASA already has the worlds most expensive, fastest pneumatic torque wrench in the world AND also has the longest Phillips blade screwdriver in the world. However they've just obtained a pretty high end adjustable crescent wrench. Superficially, "aren't they all just tools?" "Is there any difference between those tools?" "can't they save money by having only one tool that tightens things?" but in practice that doesn't really work and having a new tool in the toolbox is going to help quite a bit for some of their jobs.
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      These old spy planes are perfect examples of what you can do when you build something for a single purpose. Planes like the F35 are designed by someone who read a bunch of blogs about the perfect way to design a plane. You don't design a plane, you design a plane framework on which you can add whatever feature the customer asks for. A lot like SW design these days. We all know this doesn't work well and yet...
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    Designed by W.E.W. Petter. His previous designs, Westland Whirlwind and Welkin had narrow wings, which caused problems, hence the broad wings for the Canberra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.E.W._Petter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.E.W._Petter
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    And also, of those two, only the U2 is still in service. All SR-71s have been sent to museums now, sadly. This includes NASA's which were the last in service, operated until the mid nineties. Interestingly, NASA _does_ operate a variant of the U2 currently, as the ER-2 [1] high-altitude earth-resources observatory. [1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-046-DFRC.html http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-046...
Quequau 11y ago
So the key quality here is high-altitude performance? Like higher than the service ceilings of current civilian planes or military transports?
- JorgeGT 11y ago
  I believe this is correct. The service ceiling for a very modern Boeing 787 is ~13,000 m whereas in 1957 a Canberra achieved the then-record altitude of 21,430 m: http://www.fai.org/fai-record-file/?recordId=9843 http://www.fai.org/fai-record-file/?recordId=9843

by JorgeGT 11y ago

Companies 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 ago

So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?

cstross 11y ago
The 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 ago
U-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.
- VLM 11y ago
  That's a good answer. A data visualization would be something like a 2-d graph of altitude vs airspeed and in theory something could be made to fly over every point on that plane, and NASA does aeronautical research over every point on that plane. Unfortunately real aircraft only safely fly inside weirdly shaped polygons on that graph. And the U-2 is a really pointy narrow little shape that crosses all the Y-axis altitudes but the speed is restricted such that its shape is practically a line both above and below the plane can't fly so no data or research is possible off that narrow line. If you merely want to get to 70 Kft then its awesome, if you want to take engineering data or science experiments at exactly 352 knots not 351 or 353 knots, and 70 Kft, then unless you're very lucky you're not flying a U2 on that research mission. That's the secret of the U2. Everyone knows back in the good old days it was developed and flown in months for no cost compared to the F-22. However the engineering criteria were staggeringly different and there's a big difference between "fly extremely high without crashing while carrying a camera" vs "outfly and outfight every tactical fighter aircraft and missile system on the entire planet, everywhere, under every circumstance" and the difference is about 19 years of development and about a trillion bucks. There is no management secret or space alien technology secret to the U2, its just a very restricted aircraft that barely flies under ideal conditions, but when it does, it can fly higher than any plane built up to when it was designed... Add a third dimension of cost and you've got the slightly bigger polygon of the SR71 but it costs a bazillion dollars per flight hour. So the Z-axis to the graph of cost. The SR71 is like a skyscraper compared to the new plane. The plane in the linked article is pretty cheap. It can fly in the part of the 3-d graph where the U2 can't and at maybe a hundredth the cost of the SR71. Also if can fly at speeds much slower than the SR71 at altitude. Its a pretty cool research tool. A really bad car analogy is NASA already has the worlds most expensive, fastest pneumatic torque wrench in the world AND also has the longest Phillips blade screwdriver in the world. However they've just obtained a pretty high end adjustable crescent wrench. Superficially, "aren't they all just tools?" "Is there any difference between those tools?" "can't they save money by having only one tool that tightens things?" but in practice that doesn't really work and having a new tool in the toolbox is going to help quite a bit for some of their jobs.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    These old spy planes are perfect examples of what you can do when you build something for a single purpose. Planes like the F35 are designed by someone who read a bunch of blogs about the perfect way to design a plane. You don't design a plane, you design a plane framework on which you can add whatever feature the customer asks for. A lot like SW design these days. We all know this doesn't work well and yet...
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  Designed by W.E.W. Petter. His previous designs, Westland Whirlwind and Welkin had narrow wings, which caused problems, hence the broad wings for the Canberra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.E.W._Petter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.E.W._Petter
- grkvlt 11y ago
  And also, of those two, only the U2 is still in service. All SR-71s have been sent to museums now, sadly. This includes NASA's which were the last in service, operated until the mid nineties. Interestingly, NASA _does_ operate a variant of the U2 currently, as the ER-2 [1] high-altitude earth-resources observatory. [1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-046-DFRC.html http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-046...

Quequau 11y ago

So the key quality here is high-altitude performance? Like higher than the service ceilings of current civilian planes or military transports?

JorgeGT 11y ago
I believe this is correct. The service ceiling for a very modern Boeing 787 is ~13,000 m whereas in 1957 a Canberra achieved the then-record altitude of 21,430 m: http://www.fai.org/fai-record-file/?recordId=9843 http://www.fai.org/fai-record-file/?recordId=9843