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There's still a big USAF black budget, and it doubled during the Bush years. The question is whether much useful is coming out.

If the US was operating the SR-71 Blackbird, an aircraft that is using 25% of it's engine power, to *cruise* at mach 3 almost 40 years ago I would have little doubt that it's replacement is at least twice as fast. One thing is for certain I doubt we will know what the actual capabilities are for another couple of decades.

This replacement aircraft is allegedly the SR-91 Aurora. I recently watched a documentary by a reporter from a Jane's Defence Weekly who showed weather satellite image of a 'doughnut on a rope' contrails starting at Groom Lake, extending across the United States, over the Pacific Ocean and out of camera range of the the satellite. The conjecture is that the aircraft has been in service for many years and powered by Pulse Detonation Engines. Estimates from an examination of the photo suggests the aircraft was moving at roughly Mach 8.

The development budget was apparently concealed in the budget for the B-2, who knows if it's true but I'd say that the existence of the SR-91(?) Aurora(?) if far more likely than little grey men. Then again who really knows anything in super secret compartmentalised spy world, I'm just a geek who'd one day like to see the technology involved. Here are some more links for those interested.

An example http://www.unrealaircraft.com/gravity/xfy1.php

"I saw a man who wasn't there,
A little man upon a stair,
He wasn't there again today,
Gee, I wish he'd go away."

The XB-70 Valkyrie is one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built.

Count me among those who hopes the AvLeak story is true; I can think of no better memorial to her designers and pilots than to have seen their work continued.

This reminds me a little bit of the Flying aircraft carrier idea that was worked on befor WW2. http://unrealaircraft.com/forever/skyhook.php I always thought it was an interesting idea, and was woundering if it had never been fully abandoned.

I believe the OP was referring to the Boeing SST designed in the mid/late 60's. It was supposed to carry quite a few more passengers than the Concorde, and initially have variable geometry (swing) wings. The linked page indicates it was killed off by Congress for political reasons.

Your comment that this "wasn't even doable on a military budget" made me originally think of the XB-70, a still future-looking aircraft conceived in the 50's that was to fly its entire mission at Mach 3.

That would be from the Skyhook project.

Without wanting to knock the TU 144, which was still something of an achievement, what you say is by and large right. It's pretty clear the two planes didn't resemble each other so closely - right down to the droop nose - by pure chance.

Boeing's SST on the other hand, apart from being bigger, used (or planned to use) one or two concepts radically different from those of the Concorde, such as variable geometry wings.

http://www.unrealaircraft.com/classics/images/sst_ pic2.jpeg

I'd have liked to have seen that beauty fly - from the inside as well as the outside!

Yes, that definitely qualifies as art. Technical, lethal, graceful and screaming fast, but still art.

http://www.bnr-art.com/aeronaut/valkyrie.htm

http://www.unrealaircraft.com/classics/xb70.php

http://www.labiker.org/xb70.html

Well, ten times or not, the draft designs of "hopefully workable" bomb were devices weighting about 200 ton. NOT transportable by plane. At best by a ship/train (but if by train, then in parts, to be assembled at the detonation site.)

By all accounts Nazis were closer to developing a working flying saucer than a working nuclear bomb...

Well, ten times or not, the draft designs of "hopefully workable" bomb were devices weighting about 200 ton. NOT transportable by plane. At best by a ship/train (but if by train, then in parts, to be assembled at the detonation site.)

By all accounts Nazis were closer to developing a working flying saucer than a working nuclear bomb...

Well, ten times or not, the draft designs of "hopefully workable" bomb were devices weighting about 200 ton. NOT transportable by plane. At best by a ship/train (but if by train, then in parts, to be assembled at the detonation site.)

By all accounts Nazis were closer to developing a working flying saucer than a working nuclear bomb...

Well, ten times or not, the draft designs of "hopefully workable" bomb were devices weighting about 200 ton. NOT transportable by plane. At best by a ship/train (but if by train, then in parts, to be assembled at the detonation site.)

By all accounts Nazis were closer to developing a working flying saucer than a working nuclear bomb...

Skyhooks are attached to aircraft, not the equator.
Details here.

Yes, there are actually five different plane-cars mentioned at Unreal Aircraft including a WWII tank-plane and a jeep-plane.

Bigger than the Concorde even, but the hippies all rallied together (they must have been out of marijuana) and had enough protests that Boeing decided it wasn't a good business move.