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F-117A Stealth Fighter Retired
zonker writes "Nearly 30 years ago Lockheed Martin's elite Skunk Works team developed what would become the F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter. A few of their earlier projects include the SR-71 Blackbird and U2 Dragon Lady spy planes. Today is the last for the Stealth Fighter, which is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor (another Skunk Works project)."
No - it wasn't the vacuum it was the heat from the drag caused by the supersonic speed that heated the plane enough to stop the leaks.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They leaked fuel until the heat caused by friction (like on the space shuttle) made the panels fit together by thermal expansion. The fuel was also very difficult to ignite.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
First, fighters generally attract the better pilots than bombers, and since the F117 was a first strike or tactical strike craft, good pilots were of utmost importance...
Second, naming it as a fighter helped with the secrecy surrounding its true capabilities and use, especially in Cold War times...
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
More information on the role of the F-117 can be found at Frontline, AirToAirCombat.com, FAS as well as other sources on the intertubes. Last link has pictures of the aircraft as well as pictures and a non-Flash video of the aftermath of the only F-117 to ever be shot down. In this case, over Serbia.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Um - no it doesn't "make the radar bounce back". Radar works by bouncing back a signal to detect. Meaning if it did - it wouldn't be invisible at all - it'd be working with radar just dandy. It deflects the radar's signal to produce a much smaller return signal. Meaning it was never "invisible" but had a small enough cross-section to be regarded as a non-threat.
Both. The F-22 is the first true stealth fighter, the B-2 is the first true stealth bomber. The F-117 was really a stealth hack. That said, given the long developement times on aircraft, there is always something newer in the works. Also, fighters (among other things) are made to be upgradeable over their lifespan. There have been 3 different generations of the F-18 for the military alone and the older ones are usually upgraded along the way instead of being replaced. That is in addition to 'minor' upgrades such as electronics. If you want to know what is cuttin edge today, you need a high level security clearance and to be in the need to know.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
There was an episode of Mythbusters which, while not directly related, did show that diesel and jet fuel would not ignite even under a plumbers blowtorch.
As always, it's the air/fuel mixture that's the important part. This does not hold for gasoline, which gives off vapors quite nicely, thank you.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, I can't recommend Ben Rich's book Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed highly enough.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So, post your evidence.
We've seen that if you have three feds in a conspiracy, one will blab to the Washington Post, so... name your source.
. . .
I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.
The center tank on TWA Flight 800 was almost empty, overheated and full of fumes, and likely a spark from a poorly wired fuel sensor detonated it.
Oh, if you were kidding, it wasn't funny, emoticon or no.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
My understanding, based on talking to people who have designed systems to detect stealth aircraft, is that the OP is half right. The reason the F117 has all those big blocky facets is specifically to bounce the radar back in very direct lines, like a planar mirror, rather than in all directions, like a sphere. The idea being: you absorb as much as possible in your weird ferroabsorptive paint, but what you have to reflect, you reflect in thin lines rather than in broad arcs, and if possible you reflect them upwards, away from the radar receivers.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Say hello to the Tu-160. And, yes, it look an awful lot like the B-1.
Also note that the B-1B has a maximum speed of Mach 1.25 at altitude. The rapid advances in air-to-air missiles in the 1960s and 1970s changed USAF planing for bomber missions. Instead of flying high and fast (which just makes you a perfect target for SAMs unless you're an SR-71) the idea is fast and low, which is why the B-1s mission profile was changed to flying very fast at very low altitudes. Of course now the thing usually just hangs out on station waiting to be told where to drop its bombs.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
The F-22 was not a Skunk Works project. The F-22 program was acquired when Lockheed bought the General Dynamics Ft. Worth division which is now The Lockheed Tactical Aircraft division.
Numbers restarted from 1 starting in 1962, when the Navy and Marines switched to the Air Force's style of aircraft designations.
Prior to that, a fighter might be designated F8U-3 -- that breaks down to Fighter, Design 8 from Vought (Vought's code was U), 3rd revision. Under the new designation system, that'd be the Vought F-8C Crusader. If it was the first design of a particular type from a company, it'd lack the middle number, e.g. the Douglas AD-2 Skyraider, which was later known as the A-1B Skyraider.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The F-117 and the F-22 have two completely different missions, therefore the F-22 cannot "replace" the F-117. The F-117 is a first-strike night attack bomber, deploying, mostly, precision-guided munitions. It took on roles that would have required much larger formations had they been done with the F-111 (replacement for the F-105) which had much higher visibility, so needed escorts and AA suppression. The F-22 is supposed to replace the aging, but still very potent, F-15 as an air superiority fighter, while the F-15 is shuffled off to the strike fighter role as the F-15E.
F-22s are much more expensive than F-15s. In theory, they are able to provide more kills-per-sortie than the F-15, so we would need fewer of them. The problem with that is that, despite supersonic cruise, there is only so much airspace that an F-22 can control, so, if the missions are geographically dispersed, a larger number of F-15s can provide more coverage.
There is no longer an opposing air force in Iraq, and the Iranians were stupid enough to buy planes from us, so they don't really have one, either. Other than the US, there is almost no long-range bomber capability, so the only remaining function for the F-22 is as an escort for B-2s on first-strike missions into nations with active fighter forces, such as Russia, China, and Western Europe (if they don't stop picking on Microsoft).
You are both right and wrong. I'll try to clarify. The heat transfer between a fluid and a solid wall happens a the viscous zone so called boundary layer, where friction happens. On the other hand, the temperature which modulates this heat transfer is the external flow total temperature which is where viscous effects are negligible.
:P
The total temperature is given by the compressible isentropic flow behaviour:
Tt/Tamb = 1+ (k-1)/k*M^2, where
Tt is the total temperature in K or Rankine,
Tamb is the ambient temperature in same units above,
k is the heat coefficient ratio, for the air is 1.4 and
M is the mach number.
Thus, for a 3.5 Mach number, the maximum for SR-71, the total temperature is:
Tt = Tamb*(1+0.29*3.5^2)=Tamb*4.5,
and for a Tamb of -50 degrees celsius (-58 deg Fahrenheit), becomes,
Tt = 223*4.5=1003K = 730 deg C = 1346 deg F
At that speed, the ambient is sooooo hot! even when the atmosferic temperature may be soo freezing!!!!.
At the leading edge of the SR-71 wings and the fuselage nose, you reach such temperature without any kind of viscous effects; just because you stagnate the flow isentropically there: you are more right than wrong at the end
There's a reason the empty center tank is also called the "Pacific" tank.
A B-52 carries up to 70000lbs in bombs, so an imperial assload would be 46667lbs. A new beetle weights 2743lbs, so an imperial assload is almost exactly 17 (2005) VW beetles, not including any imperial asses (passengers).