
NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years - curtis
http://www.globalaviationresource.com/v2/2013/08/10/nasas-new-wb-57-n927na-flies/
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Fuzzwah
I got to see an English Electric Canberra flying at a Temora Air Museum flight
day. Very impressive machine and it boggled my mind that it was originally
introduced to service back in 1951.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU)

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Neil44
Love it. I have only seen the static one at RAF Cosford, they are really nice
looking planes. IIRC the one there is white and fitted out for reconnaissance.

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arethuza
Presumably Anti-Flash White?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
flash_white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white)

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JorgeGT
Highly probably, since several Canberra squadrons were equipped with wither
Mark-7 Thor (US) or Red Beard (UK) tactical nuclear devices.

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prplhaz4
The comments on that article are great too:

>> The ap-22s-2 Full Pressure Suits were my biggest immediate problem. The
suits were ADC hand me downs, all going over age. New suits were finally
procured after numerous equipment failures, but depot support managed to keep
the suits going pending replacements. The suits did their job on at least
seven occasions of cockpit pressurization loss at altitude and allowed the
crew to return safely to base.

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cm2187
Is it my browser or is this website disabling right clicks? Javascript needs
to die...

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zackp30
Not just you, it's doing it for me also.

Probably caused by:

    
    
        (function($) {
            $(document).bind('contextmenu dragstart', function(event) {
                var target = event.target || event.srcElement;
                target = $(target);
                if (target.data('ngg-protect') || target.parent('a').data('ngg-protect') || target.attr('id') == 'fancybox-img' || target.attr('id') == 'TB_Image' || target.attr('id') == 'shTopImg' || target.attr('id') == 'lightbox-image' || target.hasClass('highslide-image') || target.parents('.ngg-albumoverview').length == 1 || target.parents('.ngg-pro-album').length == 1 || photocrati_image_protection_global.enabled == '1') {
                    event.preventDefault()
                }
            })
        }(jQuery));
    

It's extremely annoying when sites do this...

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Quequau
Maybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane
for doing what they're doing?

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JorgeGT
Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical
role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to
do high-altitude high-speed research.

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mozumder
So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?

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noir_lord
U-2 is notoriously hard to fly (at altitude the difference between optimal
cruise speed, tearing the wings off or stalling is _12kn_ ).

SR71 is horrifically expensive to fly and service plus it's engineering is
complex (and the jigs don't exist anymore) and expensive to maintain (lots of
fancy titanium parts) and the airframe hours are better spent on doing what
the SR71A was built for.

The 'nice' thing with old planes is they are comparatively simpler to maintain
and where often 'over' engineered by modern standards so are more forgiving.

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VLM
That's a good answer. A data visualization would be something like a 2-d graph
of altitude vs airspeed and in theory something could be made to fly over
every point on that plane, and NASA does aeronautical research over every
point on that plane.

Unfortunately real aircraft only safely fly inside weirdly shaped polygons on
that graph. And the U-2 is a really pointy narrow little shape that crosses
all the Y-axis altitudes but the speed is restricted such that its shape is
practically a line both above and below the plane can't fly so no data or
research is possible off that narrow line. If you merely want to get to 70 Kft
then its awesome, if you want to take engineering data or science experiments
at exactly 352 knots not 351 or 353 knots, and 70 Kft, then unless you're very
lucky you're not flying a U2 on that research mission.

That's the secret of the U2. Everyone knows back in the good old days it was
developed and flown in months for no cost compared to the F-22. However the
engineering criteria were staggeringly different and there's a big difference
between "fly extremely high without crashing while carrying a camera" vs
"outfly and outfight every tactical fighter aircraft and missile system on the
entire planet, everywhere, under every circumstance" and the difference is
about 19 years of development and about a trillion bucks. There is no
management secret or space alien technology secret to the U2, its just a very
restricted aircraft that barely flies under ideal conditions, but when it
does, it can fly higher than any plane built up to when it was designed...

Add a third dimension of cost and you've got the slightly bigger polygon of
the SR71 but it costs a bazillion dollars per flight hour. So the Z-axis to
the graph of cost. The SR71 is like a skyscraper compared to the new plane.

The plane in the linked article is pretty cheap. It can fly in the part of the
3-d graph where the U2 can't and at maybe a hundredth the cost of the SR71.
Also if can fly at speeds much slower than the SR71 at altitude. Its a pretty
cool research tool.

A really bad car analogy is NASA already has the worlds most expensive,
fastest pneumatic torque wrench in the world AND also has the longest Phillips
blade screwdriver in the world. However they've just obtained a pretty high
end adjustable crescent wrench. Superficially, "aren't they all just tools?"
"Is there any difference between those tools?" "can't they save money by
having only one tool that tightens things?" but in practice that doesn't
really work and having a new tool in the toolbox is going to help quite a bit
for some of their jobs.

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JustSomeNobody
These old spy planes are perfect examples of what you can do when you build
something for a single purpose.

Planes like the F35 are designed by someone who read a bunch of blogs about
the perfect way to design a plane. You don't design a plane, you design a
plane framework on which you can add whatever feature the customer asks for.

A lot like SW design these days. We all know this doesn't work well and yet...

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eternalban
That plane is oddly attractive.

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imglorp
Beautifully functional.

Here's another purely functional ship, the Wilga, formed by its mission:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images)

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jonah
Such a cool looking plane. Great to see it has a new purpose in life.

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Toenex
As a child raised on Gerry Anderson's designs, this is how aircraft should
look!

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arethuza
The inevitable link to a pic of a TSR2 - which is what the future really
looked like in the 1960s:

[http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC-
TSR-2/0979919/L/](http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC-
TSR-2/0979919/L/)

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jws
Article is from 2013. Is anyone familiar enough with flight trackers to see if
it is still in use? The tail number is N927NA.

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jstrate
Looks like it flew yesterday
[https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01](https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01)

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jonah
That's a strange flight pattern, any insight into it? Erratically gain
altitude, make a long run and then a tight spiral back down before returning
to land?

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Sanddancer
There's a pretty strong weather system in that area, and that looks like a
flight pattern to try to figure out what sort of risk the storm has in
generating tornadoes. Head out in case there's another area that could use a
little extra info, and then come back home.

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arprocter
Does anyone know why the ends of the wings are missing in some of the photos?

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jonnycowboy
Runway clearance - the wing droop at the tips is low enough to possibly hit
the runway lights (usually below 18" high). They remove them for high speed
taxi tests, and for the actual flights they temporarily replace the "high"
lights with mid-height ones and install the wingtips.

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Theodores
I got the restoration but I didn't get what this plane is actually to be used
for. Why do they need this plane? How will it help open up the first tourist
hotels on Mars? Seems going backwards to space exploration.

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Sanddancer
Aeronautical research. The Aeronautics part of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration isn't just a bygone relic. Their most visible projects
are their space side, but they do a fuckton of research into making planes fly
better/faster/safer. They do research on new control methods of planes, new
geometries, how weather phenomena affect planes, etc.

