3 quick points: 1) I agree with you Martin, this is the best series made on flight. Thanks for the post. 2) The Vietnam War. As the son of a career Air Force officer with 2 combat tours there and Army vet, I can tell you that our military never lost a major battle in the honest attempt to help keep free southeast asians out of communist hands. It was lost by politicians and specifically Pres. Johnson running it from Washington, DC instead of letting the military fight an overall winning strategy. 3) We've never actually quite going into space. We built a scaled down unmanned version of the space shuttle the x37 which is flying and the Aurora space plane was built and did fly. When I helped set up the Walmart near Edwards AFB, we employed children of employees that worked on it. They told us what we saw, felt, and heard once was it coming in for a landing. There is no doubt that there are black programs going on that we won't learn of for years to come.
Aurora was not a space plane. It was the codename for the F-117 before it was revealed to the public, but when people heard "project aurora", they assumed it was a Mach 5 space plane that Reagan had mentioned in a speech, but in reality it was the nighthawk. Read "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich. He mentions it.
The Aurora was a supposed "pulse jet" technology demonstrator of the 90's meant to replace the SR-71. Most think it failed, as the SR-71 was brought out of retirement for a while during this period. The F-117's predecessor was code-named "Have Blue." It evolved into the airplane known as "Senior Trend," THE actual F-117A.
TheDavidp82 not true. Reagan hinted at the existence of such a plane, and the media heard about project aurora in the late 80s and assumed it was the mach 5 pulse jet, but was actually the code name for the F-117 that lockheed martin was working on in secrecy at the time. Read "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich. He goes over it in detail.
Dude, YOU are WRONG!! Damn!!!! Here, you pissed me off enough to go hunt down the documentation to prove it!! The F-117A was called, is called, and will ALWAYS be called the "Nighthawk." www.lockheedmartin.com/us/100years/stories/f-117.html Aurora was a line entry for an Air Force "Black" program (and was widely deduced to be the Mach 5+ pulse jet. The Nighthawk had been out for quite a while before Aurora ever was accidentally printed in the congressional budget handout. YOUR SOURCE, Ben Rich and his book "Skunk Works," are cited in the SECOND paragraph of of the page below titled "Background" it quotes the book you stated above with the following from pages 309 and 310: " In the 1994 book Skunk Works, Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, wrote that the Aurora was the budgetary code name for the stealth bomber fly-off that resulted in the B-2 Spirit.[6]" "[End quote] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft) There is dispute though. Many have said we never saw or knew the real Aurora. But either way, it is known by timelines that the F-117A was called Nighthawk and never at ANY TIME was the F-117A, it's predecessor test models, variants, or any air-frame associated with the F-117A was EVER called Aurora. Point. Set. Match. Touchdown. Home Run. Goal. You were wrong and I tried to correct you nicely. I cannot stand to gently correct someone, but someone who sits there and tells me what I'm saying is not true and I need to read "xyz" and educate myself when I have read more books on modern aviation than many just REALLY pisses me off to some kind of bad extent. Did you think I was lying when I wrote the first response to you? Why would I lie? Seriously? What would I gain? You may now go through the world with the correct information my son, and yet, one day, you may become the master.
I saw the Enterprise on display at Edwards during an air show. Later I saw Columbia make it's first landing there. Even though I lived many miles from Edwards, I could hear every shuttle landing's sonic booms.
Hey, wait a minute -- if the M2F2 is flat at the top and round at the bottom, wouldn't the lift be DOWNWARD??? You know, Bernoulli principle and all that?
+agentorange153 Nope, the role played by Bernoulli in airfoils is basically a myth. The primary source of lift is the airflow under the wing. Basically, a wing is a structure that beats the air down and out of the way and gets lift from the reaction of the air. The top of the airfoil simply maintains a smooth airflow so the air doesn't start beating *down* on the wing, which is basically all a stall is. There are a lot of RC aircraft with perfectly rectangular wing cross sections and they fly just fine. It just isn't optimal.
+agentorange153 Bernoulli principle for airfoils stands up only for non-viscous fluid, so it's a simplification. Aircraft aerodynamics is essentially about vortices (consequence of viscosity) which generate and maintain lift and drag (e.g. see- "starting vortex"). The more intense vortex is the lower pressure it has (Bernoulli principle can be factored in here). That's why there's such thing as "circulation" in theory of viscous fluid mechanics. As this was a lifting body (bassically it has no aspect ratio) its shape was used to generate vortices that would suck the whole ship up on the flat surface. Probably simplicity of the design was one of the targets as well.
You got it right.. Vortex lift is usually used in aircraft operating at high AOA and high speeds. The first type of wing design to meet those requirements was delta wing. Concorde's slender delta wing (same as the shuttle has) or e.g. F-18 LEX wings have greater capabilities than simple delta. Semi-round shape of the M2F2 could also have a potential for less intense heat exchange while re-entring into the atmosphere (see late X-15's and Space Shuttle's nose). At hypersonic speeds you would like to have the shock wave moved away a bit from the airframe. Best regards.
+JLDoctorWho - That is a very good point. The Bernoulli effect is not really applicable, and never did a proper job of explaining airfoils and lift. Took me about 3 decades to figure that out, but I was asking that same question when I was only 17. Good point. The flow of air over the wing is another effect, and I can't remember the name of it - but it works, and that's why the air over the top speeds up (and lowers the pressure). But most of the lift is simply because of the angle of attack and the air pushing against the bottom of the wing.
