All I can think about is what could have been with the A-12.
(Source: navylive.dodlive.mil)
Apprentice air traffic controllers train with model aircraft at Andrews Air Base in Maryland, March 1957.
Photograph by Robert F. Sisson and Donald McBain, National Geographic
At work today, pilots shared stories of take-offs and landings and wind shear they have known.
Future concept supersonic aircraft, Boeing (via NASA)
Future Vertical Lift (FVL) Medium Utility. Concept by AVX Aircraft. Coaxial rotors! (via Ares)
SpaceShipTwo (via Wired)
Quartet of fleet F-94 all weather jet fighters leaving foaming white wake as they maneuver high over Thule Air Base. (Photo by George Silk//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images; via xplanes)
How Airline Ticket Prices Fell 50% in 30 Years (and Why Nobody Noticed) || The Atlantic
Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” was the best-selling album in the United States for five weeks in 1958, but the irony of its popularity (or, perhaps, the source of its aspirational appeal) is that practically none of us could take up the offer to “glide, starry-eyed” on an aircraft with anybody in those days. More than 80 percent of the country had never once been on an airplane. There was a simple reason. Flying was absurdly expensive.
And there was simple reason why flying was absurdly expensive. That was the law.
There are many sad stories to tell about the U.S. economy in the last 30 years, but here’s a happy story for everybody (except the airlines), from radical capitalists to the most liberal consumer advocates. Getting government out of the business of regulating the skies has led to a remarkable collapse in airline prices.
Airfares have fallen by about 50 percent since 1978 and, even after you include the recent uptick in fees, the per-mile cost of flying has also been chopped in half.
A happy story for consumers isn’t necessarily a happy story for the airline industry, which bled an astounding $51 billion between 2001 and 2011 and lost money in every other year since 1981.
So, why have the last three decades been so good for flyers? And why don’t we appreciate it?
High-Speed VTOL - DARPA Tries...Again || Ares
DARPA does not want bidders for its new VTOL [vertical take off and landing] X-Plane program to “just revisit old concepts” for vertical take-off and landing that combine the high-speed performance of fixed-wing aircraft with the low-speed agility of helicopters.
A look at the American Helicopter Society’s wonderful V/STOL Wheel (of fortune or of shame, take your pick) shows how hard that could be, as it lists no fewer than 45 different concepts that have been tried, of which only three can be considered successes - the Hawker Harrier, Yakovlev Yak-38 and Bell Boeing V-22 (four if you include the Lockheed Martin F-35, but I won’t go there).
VTOL X-Plane program manager Ashish Bagai says DARPA has seen “a few isolated and novel approaches” that might work, but he acknowledges the answer could lie in “more astute integration” of concepts that have been tried before.
“Hybrid Wing” Uses Half the Fuel of a Standard Airplane || MIT Technology Review
Aerospace engineers have long known that ditching a conventional tubular fuselage in favor of a manta-ray-like “hybrid wing” shape could dramatically reduce fuel consumption. A team at NASA has now demonstrated a manufacturing method that promises to make the design practical.
Combined with an extremely efficient type of engine, called an ultra-high bypass ratio engine, the hybrid wing design could use half as much fuel as conventional aircraft. Although it may take 20 years for the technology to come to market, the manufacturing method developed at NASA could help improve conventional commercial aircraft within the next eight to 10 years, estimates Fay Collier, a NASA program manager.
The manufacturing technique lowers the weight of structural components of an aircraft by 25 percent, which could significantly reduce fuel consumption. The advances are the culmination of a three-year, $300 million effort by NASA and partners including Pratt & Whitney and Boeing.
At top, the Northrop Tacit Blue technology demonstrator — aka the famed flying Twinkie! At bottom, the Boeing Bird of Prey (via Urban Ghosts)
Top Secret Tombs: The Classified Stealth Aircraft Burial Grounds of Area 51 || Urban Ghosts
Top secret aircraft, even those that have been publicly disclosed, remain mysterious long after emerging from the black world. When – and if – secret planes are declassified, they’re treated differently from other military aircraft, and the specifics of their hardware may remain under wraps for decades. While some ultimately go to museums, others are placed into storage well away from prying eyes, awaiting a fate that may take years to arrive.
One such fate that has befallen crashed, retired or failed projects over the decades is burial. Aircraft have literally been dragged into deep pits miles from public land, often near the enigmatic Groom Lake test site in Nevada, famously known as Area 51. Not only does Groom serve as a testing ground for the U.S. government’s most advanced programmes, it also serves as the final resting place of many of its most secret aircraft. Some of these classified planes have never been publicly acknowledged.
Neuron UAV first flight (via Ares)
“Model of the balloon which was executed for the coronation of Napoleon in 1804” (xplanes, via, see also)
Boeing’s Phantom Ray, one of the next generation of drones (via Wired)
(via shapeshiftingandlife)
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