The General Airplane Thread

  • Thread starter Crash
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I knew it was huge, but this picture reallyshows how huge.

Beautiful!

(It might be closer to the camera, but still.)
 
Serious question, are temporary flight restrictions actually placed around concerts/music festivals where lasers and fireworks will be used at night?
 
Dan
Serious question, are temporary flight restrictions actually placed around concerts/music festivals where lasers and fireworks will be used at night?
Absolutley. NOTAMS per specific areas are available to be seen by the public in multiple areas. One that I use frequently is sky vector.

It's more of security for the event so the stray 172 doesn't do some low fly-bys vs letting pilots know "hey, watch for lasers" (well, it kinda is, but there's penalties for flying in or near them).

Wherever the president is, there's always a 150 mile ring that you have to be IFR in when above 10k and within either 50-75 I think, is a no go on VFR, no matter altitude if you don't have flight following.
 
Do you really think it was the Air Force themselves that did it, or those who look at numbers and spew words to please people?

No I think it was the Airforce, especially when you compare black project aircraft between the companies and even throw in Northrop as well. It seems that Lockheed was too big to fail, until it did. I'm a Lockheed fan and would love to work for them, but at the same time even I can't deny that in many aspect the planes of the early 90s to mid were probably picked more so on who the contractor was.

Especially when there were supposed issues with both test planes in both scenarios (Y-22 vs Y-23, X-32 vs X-35), and similar performance between the planes as per spec for what the military wanted. But really the real failure is in the DoD at the end of the day, instead of being smart and spreading the contract to have a company build a specific plane for the different jobs, they said, "why not make it do all the jobs on the same air frame, surely it will cost us less".

Look what it did in reality though...
 
Pretty much! The issue with the F-35 was the idea that one airframe could economically meet each branch's needs. Can't be done. At least not for the reason proposed, which was saving money by making one airplane instead of three.

Those folks over there need arresting hooks and folding wings. (Did the get folding wings? i don't even know!) These guys need VSTOL. Somebody asked why they couldn't make one plane and not have to design three different ones, and what they ended up with was three different ones that look alike.

The closest they ever came before to sharing an airframe was the F-4 between the Navy and the Air Force. Can you imagine turning that into a jump-jet? Would you have saved any money by trying it?
 
You in there?

Wait, did you think I'm the guy in the photo? I'm not nearly that attractive. :lol:

EDIT: About five minutes ago, a large WWII-era plane flew over my house. Twin engines. Looked like it could hold 20-30 paratroopers or a decent amount of cargo. There were some things painted on the side, but I couldn't make them out. No idea which country it originated from. It's probably heading to an airshow this weekend.
 
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This was pretty neat, I've never seen a fighter jet in person (real or fake) and I was blown away how large it was! This is a full scale mock up of the F-35 CTOL they have at Pratt & Whitney (East Hartford campus) on display temporarily. They also had a mock up of the F135 engine as well, but I don't have any good pics of that, sadly.

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This was pretty neat, I've never seen a fighter jet in person (real or fake) and I was blown away how large it was! This is a full scale mock up of the F-35 CTOL they have at Pratt & Whitney (East Hartford campus) on display temporarily. They also had a mock up of the F135 engine as well, but I don't have any good pics of that, sadly.

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Yeah, same here. You just can't really tell how big and heavy a fighter jet is when looking at videos and pictures, especially those that don't show the pilot. And F-35 is a "small" fighter.
 
The F-22 is that small? In all the photos I've seen, I thought it was a monolith of a plane compared to other fighters.
 
Or..... :D

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A couple of pages back I posted a picture of some trying-to-be-a-Russian-prop-fighter airplane that was over the beach while I was birding in the state park. Today we got another one, I was a little bit closer, and this one is obviously a T-6 Texan. No clue where from, though.

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That's the picture that came immediately to mind when you said the F-22 looked huge in pictures!
 
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