Spying on Area 51 with Google

[Apollo]

Peoples Industry Sixty Six stealth interceptor vehicle, modelled after the decadent American's Knight Industries Two Thousand.

[Alchemist]

Stayed in Skipness for a few days about 5 years ago
and was woken about 2am with what I first thought
was a strong earth tremor. Got outside to see something
pass slowly overhead making this unusual sound.
Not really into believing in the whole UFO thing, can only
say it was some sort of aircraft. Yet the strangest thing
I did notice there was no nav lights.

Spent a few days in Machrihanish when I was younger
and still remember seeing a lot of cold war activity.
Still managed to get the picture of the Avro Vulcan
though

We thought it was closed

http://www.campbeltowncourier.co.uk/news/archivestory.php/aid/3124/Exercise_around_Machrihanish.html

[Apollo]

Campbeltown Airport commercial services operate out of one end of the 3,049 metre runway. At the other, is the base entrance, where the brave and stealthy can get pics of interesting pillboxes, installations and military buildings behind earth defence walls. We got permission to visit and document the ROC post inside.

Amusing to visit (without permission), although there is a perimeter wall, and you can see uniformed personnel (while lurking in the gorse), the wall has crash gates at various locations. These are made of wood, so that emergency vehicles can crash through them for quick access in the even to of an incident. Unfortunately, the farmer who owns the adjecent field told me he hasn't been able to convince the cows the crash gates aren't there for them to lean against, and go through, and he regularly has to journey round to the main gate to go in after them, as he is not permitted to enter unaccompanied.

[JayKay]

I have some recent shots of Machrahanish, not taken by myself, from inside the base. Nothing much to report to be honest. There are also some aerials taken from a light aircraft using the runway. No flying saucers visible however.

According to some sources the use of Machrihanish for black aircraft testing ended with the Chinook crash in '94.

The latest rumour is that it is/has been used for testing US UAV aircraft, leading to the surge in "UFO" sightings on the west coast last year. These sighting apparently coincided with increased activity at one of the hangers.

There is currently a temporary restricted airspace until the end of June so there could well be something going on at the moment or at some time during this period. My thoughts are however that it could be planned as an out-of-the-way place for G8 related flights, although that takes place in early July.

Would love to take a wee look though

[Apollo]

I like a bit of conspiracy with my tea, but having been there a few times over the years, the stories around Machrihannish are laughable. More likely to be raised by sad people counting on the fact that it's out of the way and most folk won't take the trouble to make the trip.

Anyway, back on to real things, one good thing to come out of this thread was finding something I thought long forgotten from the 50s and 60s, the Valkyrie XB-70:



Like the SR-71, Mach 3+ cruise capable, but also able to carry a 50,000 weapons payload, a range of 7,500 miles, and a flight deck that doesn't require the crew to wear spacesuits.

Clearly larger than the SR-71, the XB-70 housed 6 special engines to achieve her performance, but more interesting is that it was developed about the same time as the the A-12 (predecessor to the SR-71) and the construction and operating principles are completely different. Much of the construction is of a stainless steel honeycomb (so thin, it was describes as tinfoil) rather than expensive titanium. The SR-71 used all they had in America then anyway, and they had to import more. In flight, the outer part of the wing folded down in stages, reducing drag and increasing lift using an effect known as compression lift.

Unlike the SR-71, it wasn't a secret, and was seen, supersonic, at airshows.

After a stupid midair collision (basically during a photo shoot) in 1966 killed one crewmember, the pilot of an F-104 escort, and destroyed one of the two aircraft, the Air Force finally pulled out of the program in 1969, and the remaining aircraft was hangared the Dayton Air Force Musuem.

The site http://www.labiker.org/xb70.html is worth a long browse, containing not only the story, but a photo gallery and links to archive footage of the Valkyrie in action.

[Alchemist]

Apollo, that's an awesome plane for the 60's. It's very sad
the way things have slowed down now in development
Things just seem to be in stagnation. Concorde, awesome.
One of my friends I work with, was a service engineer for the
the legend. Still big fan of the Tu-160. I know some ex-RAF
and some of the Tu-160 stories concerning them are legendary.
Perhaps something to do with low electronic profiles. Have to
be careful with what I say

P.S Eurofighter, yuck, get it to ****

[Apollo]

It does seem to be a bit of a shame that all the impressive capabilties of these aircraft were conceived as far back as the 50s and born in the 60s. Stagnation in that there is nothing new since then, notwithstanding advances in the avionics. Backpedalling in that some of them are gone, and might even prove difficult to build today. (Personally, I'd add irritating to the list with the 'black-ops' myths perpetuated, that largely fall down if you challenge them with physics).

I see where they're going, but I've always been uncomfortable with the design principle to build unstable craft and use technology to stabilise them. Feels like starting with something that's broke, and fixing it, rather than getting it right and then improving it. And we do have a number of accidents that have resulted from failure of the control technology, rather than the craft or crew.

I'm not knocking the technique as such, just the logic and application. The technique, properly applied, has given us ground based optical telescopes with adaptive optics, exceeding the performance of the Hubble, which is on the 'correct' side of the atmosphere, and that would have been thought impossible a few years ago.

[JayKay]

Yup, the xb-70 was a beautiful aircraft



sad ending to the story



anyway, here's another great supersonic aircraft...the TU-144*


*Of course, this is the TU-144LL, when the old concordski was dusted down for some joint experiments with NASA. the original too met with a bad ending, similar to the xb-70 during a photo shoot at the paris airshow.

[Apollo]

Tu-144 update: (and movies http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Movie/TU-144LL/)

Although not a simple copy, Concorde's info undoubtedly helped. When Sergei Pavlov, officially head of Aeroflot's Paris office, was finally arrested in 1965, he was in possession of details of Concorde's brakes, landing gear and airframe. However another agent, Sergei Fabiew, whose successes included obtaining the complete prototype blueprints, was not arrested until 1977.

At the Paris Air Show on June 3, 1973, the development program suffered a severe blow when the first Tu-144S production aircraft crashed. While in the air it undertook a violent turn down (allegedly to avoid a French Mirage fighter plane that was, apparently unknown to the Tu-144's crew, escorting it to photograph the SST's innovative canard wings). Trying to pull out of the subsequent dive, the plane broke up and crashed, destroying 15 houses and killing all six on board and eight on the ground.

Recent information released from archives shows that the black box was actually recovered to Russia and decoded. The cause of this accident is now thought to be due to changes made by the ground engineering team to the auto-stabilisation input controls prior to the second day of display flights. These changes were intended to allow Tu-144 to outperform Concorde in the display circuit. Unfortunately, the changes also inadvertently connected some factory-test wiring which resulted in an excessive rate of climb, leading to the stall and subsequent crash.

[Apollo]

Well, they did it to Concorde, so no surprise they did it to the Valkyrie.



Sukhoi T-4 "Sotka", "Su-100" or "Project 100", first flew in August of 1972. A remarkable lookalike to the XB-70, but completely different under the skin. It may have been the first aircraft to use fly-by-wire, with mechanical backup.

Note the droop-snoot for low speed and ground visibility. Unlike Concorde, there was no visor, and forward vision was by periscope when the nose was raised:



Again, designed for Mach 3, only Mach 1.3 was reached in tests before it was cancelled. The test pilot was Vladimir Ilyushin, son of famed aircraft designer, S.V. Ilyushin.

This surviving airframe lives in a Russian air museum.

[JayKay]

Monino air force museum is a place I'd really like to visit.

[Apollo]

The above east/wast aircraft 'pairings' got me wondering why there was no common knowledge of a Russian SR-71.

A few suitably phrased searches, and the internet came up with the answer: the Kremlin was besotted with ICBMs and killed the funding of this project, the Tsybin R-020 (click for larger pic):-



I quote (note the date): "In 1953 Pavel V. Tsybin at the Letno-Ispytatel'nyi Institute (LII) at Zhukovskii started development of RSR (reactivnyi strategicheskii razvedchik) capable of Mach 2.8 flight at altitudes around 100,000 ft."

This was preceded by test aircraft, the Tsybin RSR and the Tsybin NM-1 which provided the test data for the 020.

I've never come across Tsybin Paul Vladimirovich (23.12.1905 - 4.02.1992) - the Soviet aircraft designer before, and note that he was conceiving spacecraft that would fly and land like the shuttle before 1960.

Durng the same search, I found the Avro 730 supersonic bomber, a kind of 'son of Vulcan', cancelled by the British government on the notion that missiles would replace planes.

[greywolf45]

So, what do we have in 00s technology to top these two throwbacks of 50s design and technology?

Aurora


Brilliant Buzzard



TR3B Black Manta


*all allegedly

It's kind of hard to deny a base that can be clearly seen from space, but that's typical for my government.

[lordsleek]

If you try to zoom in using NASA's world wind program you get....

wait for it....

bugger all just big white squares

damn

[JayKay]

Avro 730 (perhaps)

Good programme on C4 at the weekend, Britain's Cold War Super Weapons.

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/B/britains_cold_war_super_weapons/index.html

It was a two-hour programme with loads of archive V bomber/ Blue Streak footage. Particularly impressive was the film of Blue Streak being transported by road to Spadeadam. A massive rocket being hauled past tudor pubs and 1950s cars on itw way to Cumbria was a little different to the way the Amerians and Soviets ran their rocket programmes.[/url]