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Boeing Bird of Prey Stealth Fighter
An anonymous submitter writes: "Revealed: Boeings new secret stealth bat-plane! For years stealthchasers (those guys who sneak around secret USAF test bases in search of secret aircraft) knew the Bird Of Prey existed. They knew it was being tested over the secluded Nellis Air Force Base ranges in Nevada. They knew what hangar it was being secreted away in at Nellis (on the northeast corner) and they even managed to obtain a squadron patch depicting the aircraft itself!... but the government still denied its existance until today. At a ceremony at Boeing's St Louis plant their super-secret Bird Of Prey batplane was revealed today for the world to see and marvel at. You can view exclusive photos of it at popsci.com and projectblack.net."
Cool looking plane, but it does make one wonder if the fabled "Project Aurora" (spaceplane) also exists. Goodness knows the shape is similar to some of the stories that have been put out there about it (for example, here).
it's not exactly a tail-less aircraft as some have said
e le ase/q4/high_res/dvd-226-5.jpg
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2002/photor
as you can clearly see in that picture (very high res, modem users beware!), the tail is beneath the plane, instead of the traditional spot, on top of the plane
it is pretty small, though
-- This Sig is currently under construction
Didn't the U.S. military did something similar in revealing officialy the F-117
shortly before attacking Irak the first time?
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
But unfortunately the lumbering military-industrial complex of the United States seems unable to tear itself away from the idea of yet another project that will provide a steady stream of cash into the bank accounts of corporations and away from anywhere it might conceivably be of any use to Joe American. Just look at how much of our tax money is wasted each year in endless projects, half of which never come close to realization and yet still cost hundreds of billions of dollars!
The Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves to see this blatent abuse of power in providing corporate welfare in the name of national defense. Rather than any kind of true free market competition, these kind of jobs are farmed out between a small number of corporations who fall over themselves to provide kickbacks and bribes, knowing a successful contract will ensure fat profits for the next decade.
We don't need another stealth plane. What we need is to get our priorities right. It's a new millenium, and threats like that of China and India mean that we need to ensure that we remain ahead of the game, not chasing new toys and pumping our resources into waiting corporate mouths.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
For years now I've been hearing that stealth fighter technology is the "American Maginot Line"... all those billions of dollars have been invested in it, yet it was designed only to defeat the radars used by the former Soviet Union. I've heard that it can easily be made obsolete by using lower frequency radar, or heat-sensitive infrared radar systems. In any case, the enemy need only make a comparatively tiny investment in radar to render any form of stealth techology useless.
The Bird of Prey looks pretty, but I'm worried that it will turn out to be a costly debacle. Does anyone who knows more about this than I do than I care to comment?
There are certyain things called "Lifting bodies" which require little wing area to fly. Granted they are not very economic designs but they do have their uses. One problem with them tho is that the more you lesson the wing area, the greater the take off and landing speeds must be (one of the reasons Groom Dry Lake has a huge runway).
"at least our new robot masters will look cool"
:)
Actually, from the PopSci article (emphasis mine):
"The airplane was made from a small number of carbon fiber composite parts, and--amazingly, in view of its shape--had a simple all-manual flight control system without a computer in sight.
In this day and age, this fact impresses me more than its radar invisibility.
So, this will be the plane we use to fight back against the robot masters.
A few things dont make sense to me though, I thought it was flying low because it *looked* to be quite large, but I hardly heard any sound (meaning it could have been far away), but from my perspective it was traveling very slow meaning it would have to have been far away to keep a minimum airspeed [paralax motion]... so I dont know :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
This is just a radar/areodynamic test prototype and is quite a few years from production. And as the "skip a generation" approach the current administration has the UAV version is probably the future.
The location of the air intake also implies that this is going to be a subsonic aircraft design. Perhaps the future replacement for the F117A rather than a fighter.
Even the Boeing PR points this out:
So it seems unlikley we'll see a manned version of one of these in the future. They may have been thinking that way in the early 1990s when they started to build it but not today.
The video is interesting -- the plane looks so different from different angles and there is one angle where the wings look more like a flying squirrel rather than a bird of prey(tm).
Don't forget the KH-11 satellite... It had at least a 6" resolution that we know of. Now this was a satellite that was from the mid-80's. Imagine what they have now, 20 years later!
I don't the US is too worried about us though, particularly as Lockheed Martin is a joint venture partner in the project...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It was 5:30am and it was still dark out. Me and a friend of mine were looking out over Blackwater Sound when I noticed three slightly illuminated rectangles moving just above the cloud deck (about 3000 feet I guess), heading NNW from the Atlantic. At first I assumed it was lights shining on the bottom of a jet, as it was moving a little faster than a prop plane would. But I couldn't hear anything, nor could I see the shape of the plane (it was just starting to get twilight). Me and my friend were stumped as to what it was.
I wanted to entertain the fact that I had just saw a UFO, but all my instincts told me it was a secret gov plane. The flight path made me think it might be a spy/recon plane that had just returned from checking out Cuba.
Now that I've seen a bottom profile of the Bird of Prey, I'm almost certain the strange tri-rectangle shape I saw was the bottom of one of these things with its landing lights on. It was probably on final approach for Homestead AFB.
I can't say whether you're right about F-117A's first use in combat, but for the record, the aircraft entered active service in 1982 or 1983. In 1974, the Have Blue stealth technology demonstrator program was launched, and it culminated with the first flight of the Have Blue aircraft-- which was identical to the F-117A in most respects, apart from some differences in tail geometry-- in 1977. In '78, the F-117A went into active development under the code name Senior Trend. The first F-117A left the ground in 1981.
Funny story about how the F-117A got its designation. During the late 70's and early 80's, a squadron of Soviet aircraft-- called the Red Squadron, obviously-- operated out of Groom Lake. The pilots of those aircraft used the designations YF-110 through YF-116 in their flight logs. The pilots on the Senior Trend program used the designation YF-117A, simply because it was next in the sequence. When Lockheed printed up the manuals for the first aircraft, they put "YF-117A" on the covers, and neither the government nor Lockheed wanted to pay to have 'em reprinted.
I write in my journal
When the place finally banked so that we could see its shape, the crowd was even more shocked. It seems that the people were much more comfortable with the idea of a flying saucer that with a giant black bat-like warplane flying over head. The pilot probably just wanted to check out the falls on his way back to the States. I assume that wherever B-2's fly they get that kind of reaction, but how often do you think one cruises over a major tourist destination?