The sky-high aircraft and aviation thread

You know what? I forgot about the Mustang's very strong multi-role pedigree. It was originally built as a long-range fighter for the RAF. The USAAF was very impressed, but didn't have the allocations in the budget to buy more fighters in that year. So, looking through their budget, they saw they had money in the bank to buy dive bombers.

So North American put a set of dive flaps on the Mustang and the USAAF gets the A-36 Apache, a dive bomber that racked up 83 air-to-air kills during the year or year and a half that it saw front-line combat duty, in addition to the considerable success it saw in the ground attack and recon roles. It wasn't until the next fiscal year that the USAAF was able to order the fighter version.

Old-ish article, but: a longtime pilot and software engineer weighs in on the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco.

Could Some Of The UFO's Navy Pilots Are Encountering Be Airborne Radar Reflectors?

Tyler Rogoway makes a case for The Oldest Trick In The Book, the UFO's are actually weather balloons.

Too many discrepancies and inconsistencies for that.

But the ultimate question then becomes, has the Navy or Air Force ever tried or wanted to shoot down a UFO?

If it's a foreign government trying clandestine shit a la the CIA they wouldn't try it again if one of their balloons or drones used for this stuff is shot down lest they compromise Plausible Deniability.

If it's the US doing this shit to our own guys, it'll be traced down to exact unit, branch and the chucklehead who did it, perhaps leaving the subsequent asschewing part classified. (There have been scandals of objects being seen as UFO's that were Air Force black projects like the F-117.)

If it is indeed extraterrestrial, it's probably not military seeing as they make no attempt at defense other than evasion. Unless it is of course extraterrestrial equivalent of the CIA. If it is extraterrestrial, there isn't really any reason NOT to try shooting one down at least once. If it's not actually real, what's a few rounds from an F-18? Nothing! It we shoot down an actual extraterrestrial craft and recover it, we have quite possibly the biggest scientific boon and discovery in human history.

All I'd be saying in this possibility is what's the harm of doing some actual science? "What happens if we give a UFO the Vulcan Salute from an F-18?"

Edited by MajorTom on Jun 23rd 2019 at 6:38:45 AM

Tom you idiot remember why your country joined WWI?

If, and this is a big fucking if, but IF it is Aliens, and non military Aliens, your probably going to get a repeat of that, and this isn't independence day, if there capable of interstellar travel, they aren't going to be vulnerable to Jeff Goldblum with a macbook.

More realistically, you waste a couple thousand dollars of ammunition, and possibly injure some one with fragments coming down where they shouldn't.

Neither is a good option though.

Edited by Imca on Jun 23rd 2019 at 1:49:01 AM

There is one notorious example of the US military attempting to shoot down UF Os, the Battle of Los Angeles during WWII, a couple of months after the US joined WWII. That said, the defenders thought they were trying to shoot down Japanese bombers that they later never found any evidence of. As far as they could tell after the fact, the instigation of the literally one-sided battle was... a weather balloon.

That said, balloons themselves have a long military history, not just for weather forecasting, but also for recon (a poor man's spy satellite) or for hoisting assorted radio equipment, well into the modern age. I could see someone using them as a sort of unmanned alternative to spy planes if they could deploy them near an area of interest.

Regarding the extraterrestrials having run-ins with the local military forces, another reason for evading rather than returning fire might be an Alien Non-Interference Clause. Basically, they're not allowed to shoot at the local apes. Just keep your distance and they're mostly harmless anyways.

Someone (most likely the Chinese or Russians) is playing with the US Navy. More than likely it's just and intel gathering mission - see scramble times, SIGINT,etc.

Anyone powerful enough to cross the "ocean of stars" does not need to get into dogfights with Maverick and Goose.

I could see us doing the same thing to them, even unintentionally, if we're using stealthy airframes for recon missions in various parts of the world. A weird intermittent signal return from a stealthy vehicle being uncooperative with search radars would probably result in some kind of vaguely directed response.

Just when you thought the 737 MAX grounding fiasco couldn't get any worse, they're parking undelivered jets in the employee parking lot at Boeing's Washington factory. I'm not fucking joking.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

It had something to do with prevailing political climate favoring joining the war (heavily influenced by censored/propagandized news reports coming out of Europe specifically Britain), a certain telegram issued by a guy named Zimmermann, as well as apparent threats to US soil and interests at the hands of the Central Powers owing to their naval operations.

If you're referring to shooting down a UFO being the equivalent of the Lusitania sinking you'd be wrong. Lusitania went down in 1915, we didn't enter until 1917. I highly doubt any advanced spacefaring civilization is going to suddenly hair trigger spark an interstellar war simply because the local monkeys got tired of the ceaseless visits without saying hi and decided to try and take one of them down.

Russia is developing a gunship based on the An-12 platform.

Neat. I'm guessing they're using an older airframe as a test bed because they're less likely to be missed than new builds if they end up scrapping them or keeping them in the gunship role.

Or yet another export toy.

They're not the first, mind. Jordan had a couple of CN-235s kitted out with M230s and APKWS pods, which I think are up for sale after several deployments to Syria and Yemen. Indonesia is developing another CN-235-based platform, which is expected to take flight some time this year.

So apparently the 737 MAX's software was developed right as Boeing was laying off its experienced engineers, shifting to temp programmers paid as low as $9/hour to cut costs.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jun 29th 2019 at 8:06:39 AM

-_- you have to be fucking kidding me.

So yet another example of you get what you pay for. And like many examples, it ends up costing the parent company a hell of a lot more in the long run than the short term savings they got.

#Pinto

The whole thing was basically an exercise in extreme hubris.

• The engines have grown so much bigger than what the original 737 was designed to carry, with huge nacelles that generate lift at high AoAs, causing aerodynamic instability.
• This also happens with Gen 4+ fighter jets, so the solution should be the same, right? Just install an automatic correction software, add some redundancies and call it a day.
• Except that only one flight computer with one set of sensors is active at any given time; that means that if the computer on the pilot's side is in control, then it's not taking readings from the copilot's side...
• ...and the MCAS stays on when the autopilot is turned off, so it's still in control even when the pilots think they're the ones who are...
• ...and on top of that, the artificial feedback hydraulics are rigged such that the pilot can't physically pull back the stick against the auto-adjusted trim.
• To top it off, market it as just another 737 so that longtime customers won't be scared off by retraining and safety packages, and hand out big bonuses to the fat cats while some unsuspecting flight crew find out mid-flight that it's an entirely different plane from the one they were told they'd be flying.

Weird thing is, that's exactly what happened with the Lion Air bird that went down. The plane encountered a similar mishap just the night before, but an off-duty pilot who was hitching a ride in the cockpit managed to cut the connection to the trim motors before things went out of control. Seems like the report didn't reach the higher-ups in time, and the next crew took to the sky without suspecting a thing.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jun 30th 2019 at 2:18:28 AM

To be fair to Boeing, "pilots overriding automatic safety systems" has a pretty bad pedigree when it comes to safe flying. Lots of plane crashes happened because of this.

I would say the bigest failing is honestly the whole "Marketed as just another 737 so no one was retrained" thing, because IIRC both of the incidents could have been prevented if the pilots had known how to handle the new plane.

From what I've seen, a fair number of planes with reputations as being highly mishap-prone tended to simply have unusual flight characteristics that pilots needed specialized training to deal with, such as the Consolidated C-87 Liberator Express, a cargo hauling variant of the B-24 which had quite a bit of unusual volume near the tail of the plane, along with a tricycle landing gear in an era where the trail-dragger arrangement was still the norm.

tl;dr: It was very easy to put the CG in a Liberator too far aft (even in the bomber variant with most of the payload being in the belly of the plane), which could have results ranging from the embarrassing (plane goes upward-dog, smacking the tail into the ground) to the disastrous (plane goes upward-dog while trying to takeoff or land, smacking the tail into the ground, followed by the rest of the plane, at high speed).

Also, pilots had to be careful about flaring when landing, since one technique you can do with tail-draggers on a landing approach is to flare as you land, slowing the plane and touching the tail wheel down around the same time as the main wheels. Do the same thing with nose-gear, and well, upward-dog, but while rolling with a good amount of speed. Bad for the plane.

Edit: I'm reminded of the story of the Gimli Glider, which due to a number of problems on the ground, ended up carrying considerably less fuel than the aircrew was led to believe. As I recall the story, the crew heard an alarm that nobody recognized, which turned out to be the fuel exhaustion alarm, followed by both engines sputtering out. The cockpit voice recorder picked up a few moments of stunned silence, followed by one of the aircrew saying "Oh shit."

Edited by AFP on Jun 30th 2019 at 5:41:32 AM

Boeing got bit by "Go Fever" or "Get their-itis": the desire to get to the end point/destination without thinking about how.

General Aviation pilots are famous for flying into bad weather because they want to get to the air port on time and don't want to layover. NASA lost several spacecraft because they wanted to meet a launch window - at the expense of everything else.

Boeing use Appeal to Authority - the outsourcing problem? dictated by the bean counters spooked by the 787. And the Sunk Cost Fallacy - the 737 was a big seller so let's market our plane to be just like it even if it isn't.

Time will tell if the 737 Max is a Creator Killer - it may be for members of the board.

Hushkit is launching its 2019 aircraft design contest!

To be fair to NASA, at least in there case launch windows are way less negotiable.... you literally have to do it when celestial bodies allign.

Which depending on your target could be months or years down the road if you miss the current one.

The owners of a brewery in Portland, Oregon unexpectedly found the Civil Air Patrol knocking on their door searching for a piece of their decor.

tl;dr: They bought a airplane that someone had crashed and left in a field in Canada ten years previously, put it up in the rafters of their brewery to give it some character, and managed to set off the Emergency Locator Transmitter, an automatic radio transmitter which is supposed to go off when subjected to the forces of the plane violently crashing to the Earth but sometimes will fail to do that in favor of being set off by someone sneezing nearby.

And that is the nicest way these things can go.

USEFUL AND IMPORTANT NOTE: a lot of un-exploded ordinance and nifty things like explosive bolts, flares etc. can be found if you poke the wrong things. If you find a strange thing with fins or bits of an aircraft CALL THE AUTHORITIES.

I would because I like having 10 fingers and 10 toes....