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SR-71 In-Flight Breakup
- rhizome 13y agoYou guys ever heard of this "A-10" plane? S'posed to be pretty cool.
- ipsin 13y agoMy favorite plane is the [A-Z]+\-[0-9]+
- ape4 13y agoAh yeah the AJHHUDHAHDUDHUWHDUHUDHWD-9935935888
- staticfish 13y agoIt's too early on a Saturday morning for RegEx jokes :-)
- ape4 13y agoYou are right. I got no points in the morning, afternoon, but lots in the evening.
- gyepi 13y agoThey are cool. A bunch of them were stationed at an Air National Guard base near my house and they would frequently fly overhead. Eventually they moved elsewhere; which is just as well. They are noisy too.
- Luc 13y agoI can just imagine the sound they made as they flew overhead.
- wldlyinaccurate 13y agoIs it just me or does HN appear to have had an influx of aviation enthusiasts?
- Tloewald 13y agoI'm not really an aviation enthusiast. I like planes. But isn't anyone with any interest in things technical an SR71 enthusiast?
- bobowzki 13y agoCertainly seems like it
- mschuster91 13y agoCertainly something different than the daily "my framework foobar is the next successor to angular"-kind of posts. I'm actually happy for a bit of... rather unusual content. As for the article: it's a pity. The US could fly to the moon with less computer power than a dumbphone, put people in things like the SR71 (how did they actually put enough processing power for all the flight computers in a plane back then?!)... and now? Space Shuttle's been retired, no near-time replacement. No SR71 (or anything that can be seen as a replacement), and stupid Republican teabaggers caring more about their pockets instead of the population. Seriously, America what's wrong with you? We Germans needed the Marshall plan after WW2, maybe it's needed the other way round this time...
- raverbashing 13y ago"how did they actually put enough processing power for all the flight computers in a plane back then?!" I'm not sure about the SR-71 but not all "computers" (or better, control devices) were digital. PID controllers are "trivial" in analog electronics (which were already small at that time) as well as other types of controllers. Several studies on chaotic movement comes from this time, as well as things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_stability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_stability
- 13y ago
- danbee 13y agoSeeing as there have been a couple of SR-71 stories on Hacker News right now I thought I'd share my favourite: http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/favorite-sr-71-story-1079127041 http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912...
- andrewchoi 13y agoI always get shivers when I read that story.
- leapinglemur55 13y agoBookmarked to save forever. That must have been incredible
- protomyth 13y agoLove that one, here is my other favorite http://www.vfp62.com/SR-71_flyby.html http://www.vfp62.com/SR-71_flyby.html about the SR-71 going a bit too slow
- ghshephard 13y agoI wonder if kayoone realizes he submitted the same story about seven months ago. Ironically, I recall reading the story as well on HN when it was submitted yet another time here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652643. Must be something about this story, or perhaps the SR-71, that grabs our attention.
- kayoone 13y agoI know, but as nobody looked at it back then and i think it is relevant again this week i just posted it a second time. Its a really interesting read, so i hope people dont mind.
- el_benhameen 13y agoI for one have read this story before, and I'll happily continue to re-read it every time I run into it. Exciting and interesting, with plenty of neat details (100-mile turning radius?!). Thanks for posting it.
- gwern 13y ago> Must be something about this story, or perhaps the SR-71, that grabs our attention. The SR-71 is a fantastic setting for any story, but I think what grabs me most about the story is the rationality of it. He wakes up in a strange situation, starts deducing where he is, what his situation is, how his safety systems are functioning, etc, and lands safely; then, a thorough investigation replicates the accident, finds all the root causes of the breakup, and addresses them one by one. It's no more surprising that the story is catnip for HN than, say, the comic "Fleep" is http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/fleep/ http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/fleep/
- gnoway 13y agoIs anyone here familiar with how flight testing is actually performed? One thing I wonder about after reading this is why, if they were able to recreate the entire flight profile in a simulator the next day and see the same result, would they not just test everything in the simulator first?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoYou can't test everything. There are so many independent variables, to try to test every possible scenario is a combinatorial nightmare. More so when you factor in transient events like engine unstarts and so forth.
- skj 13y agoBecause testing every sequence would take exponential time relative to the length of the sequence. For the post-accident simulation, they say "ok since we know we are in this modification of the SR-71, in this phase of the flight, and this accident happens, and this backup fails... ok yeah it looks like that's pretty bad.
- gnoway 13y agoI misunderstood the article I guess. I thought they knew specifically what they were testing, i.e. 'we have altered the airplane this way and we will now do these things.' After the failure, they were able to essentially reconfigure the simulator to match the test parameters, rerun the test and observe the same failure in simulation.
- skj 13y agoThe failure was not inevitable. Two things happened to go wrong at the same terrible time.
- GICodeWarrior 13y agoI am sure they ran some sort of simulation first. However, "the right engine inlet's automatic control system malfunctioned". That probably wasn't part of their simulation. While it sounds like they could have erred on the side of caution and cancelled the remaining tests after that occurred, they must have been confident in their manual control abilities. Even if they had simulated with the inlet(s) under manual control, real life airflow and reaction times are going to vary.
- NAFV_P 13y ago> The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude, so I wasn't even sure what state we were going to land in. I wouldn't have guessed the Blackbird has better handling than the modern Ford GT40.
- BrentOzar 13y agoBecause Barthworks is pretty much down due to load, here's another version of the pilot's story on Jalopnik: http://jalopnik.com/5951233/this-is-the-man-who-made-the-first-supersonic-parachute-jump-just-not-on-purpose http://jalopnik.com/5951233/this-is-the-man-who-made-the-fir... tl;dr - the plane disintegrated around him before he had the chance to eject, and he floated to the ground thanks to his parachute. Copilot, not so lucky.
- jraines 13y ago"I just feel like we're moving too fast"
- doug1001 13y agoamazing--"Touching the Void" for the aviation world. "[E]xtracting myself from the parachute harness, I discovered the source of those flapping-strap noises heard on the way down. My seat belt and shoulder harness were still draped around me, attached and latched." in the blockbuster film adaptation of this account, (starring Keanu Reeves) the pilot is still holding the stick when his parachute brings him to the ground.