For those with some time this weekend, I thought I'd put out some air-related links I've been accumulating. As always, the BBC is a good place to turn up the story or two. Major Kong had an entertaining write up of the TU-95 Bear a while back; the BBC takes a look at the World's Noisiest Spy Plane and links to him! (See link in excerpt below)
Tupolev's engines power two sets of 18-foot-long blades that spin in opposite directions; they move so fast that the tips of them break the sound barrier continually as they speed up and slow down on each rotation, creating enormous noise. The Tu-95 is considered to be the noisiest aircraft in current service; it's even claimed that US submarines can hear the aircraft flying high overhead through their sonar domes while still underwater. Western fighter pilots who shepherded Bears over international airspace have reported being able to hear its turboprops above the sound of their own jet engines.
For the history-minded, the BBC put together a timeline of
"The Greatest Turning Points in Aviation" They sort by 4 categories: Pioneering Designs, Wings of War, Record Breakers, Globe Shrinkers. It starts at 1900 and runs to the present. It would make a really eye-catching poster, assuming you have enough free wall space to hang it high enough...
Speaking of history, back in October USA Today had a story on the restoration of the very first 747 It's a rare occasion of a historic aircraft being preserved. Via Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren,
Boeing suffered early engineering problems and poor sales that nearly bankrupted the program, but ultimately the 747 would go on to become the best-selling jumbo-jet in history. The company has built and delivered more than 1,500 747s to date. The rise of that aircraft -- and Boeing -- lifted tens of thousands of Puget Sound workers along with it. The 747 – and Boeing's subsequent success – helped establish metro Seattle as perhaps the world's leading city for the aerospace industry, a position the city holds on to today.
The majority of RA001's descendants left the Puget Sound, going on to fly an estimated 5.6 billion people on dozens of airlines across the globe in the following 46 years. But No. 1 – that first 747 – never left home. It instead went on to serve Boeing as a dedicated test aircraft, first for the 747, and later for other Boeing jets such as the 757 and 777.
By the time it retired in 1993, the airplane had completed some 12,000 flights for Boeing.
While lauding Boeing's impact on Seattle, the article fails to note the company has moved on, both
away from the coast, and
away from a skilled but unionized work force, possibly with
serious consequences for the company reputation built on planes like that first 747.
Meanwhile, here's some living history: The Bob Hoover Project - Flying the Feathered Edge. http://youtu.be/...
Bob Hoover is a flying legend; if you've never heard of him, just do a search of Youtube for Bob Hoover videos and prepare to be amazed. There's a schedule of events around the movie here: http://www.thebobhooverproject.com/...
Re Bob Hoover, the business of designing and testing new aircraft is inherently dangerous. All the computer modeling in the world can't provide the information that actually bending metal and putting it to the test in the real world provides - and we haven't had computers all that long compared to how long we've been building airplanes. Here's an overview of what a test regime used to be like.
In contrast to today's combined test forces, a typical flight test team for a fighter project consisted of one test pilot, one flight test engineer, and if they were lucky, a grunt to perform data reduction. A test team for a large, multi-engine bomber or transport aircraft test program might include one test pilot, a co-pilot, other required aircrew such as a navigator, bombardier, or loadmaster, one performance qualities flight test engineer, one flying qualities flight test engineer and one or two grunts.
This 1957 story on
the last flight of the X-2 from Air Force Magazine archives gives a taste of how dangerous probing the unknown can be. The tragedy of the flight is that it appears the loss of
the aircraft and pilot,
Capt. Milburn Grant Apt, came about because the flight came off exactly as planned - and that put it in unknown territory where no one had any experience for a guide. Read the whole thing - it's a gripping story of when "The Right Stuff" is not enough.
While the focus on test pilots usually goes to those in fighters and rocket planes, multi-engine aircraft also need to be wrung out, and one of the best in the business was Fitzhugh “Fitz” Fulton. He had a long career, both with the Air Force, with NASA, and with Scaled Composites. He was the only Air Force pilot to fly a plane equipped with a nuclear reactor, the Convair NB-36H. He passed away at age 89 last month. It is a testimony to his skill that he enjoyed such a long career and did not make the headlines until his passing from old age. You may not have heard his name till now, but he made a lot of history in his career.