Is a snow plough even the right answer to the type of weather we experience in the winter?

I don’t think it is. Most of the snow we get causes slush at worse, but more normally slippery, icey conditions that make operating aircraft rather dangerous.

With a heavy snow squall you can just plough the snow out of the way in one fell swoop. Ice and slush, at only borderline freezing temperatures, is much more dangerous and much harder to clear away.

You think grit/salt would be a better way of dealing with it?

Its even easier to stick a salt trailer on the back of a fire truck :diablo: 😀

I like smart people. Please add some important details.
What distance covers a SR-71 per second?

@ Mach 3 at 70,000ft?

In the tropopause the speed of sound is approx 295 m/s, thus at Mach 3 an SR-71 will cover approx 885 m/s or 0.9 km/s

What accuracy do surveillance radars have over a distance of some hundred km? (height , distance, direction f.e.)

You know as well as I do that is dependent on each individual system – their wavelength, antenna gain, output power, the algorithms of the processing end, the power of the processing end, the radar signature of the target (for the relevant radar wavelength and azimuthal angle), the atmospheric conditions at the time etc etc.

You like detailed answers, but if you knew the detail involved you wouldn’t be silly enough to ask for them!

You have no idea what stealth does mean, do you?!

What does stealth mean Sens?

Does it mean you design an airframe to have a low RCS, but then waste that by having a massive underexpanded jet full of shockcells behind it?

Or does it mean you have an end product that can sneak in and around FC radars?

By my definition (the latter), the SR-71 is not stealthy.

The main advantage of effective stealth is, that it delays the detection by “fire-control-radars” to point till that becomes useless the possible reaction time in mind. That can be added by an powerfull EW-suit.

Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what the airframe is doing if you have that jet exhaust.

If you’ve an F-22 thats running around trailing a big aluminum ball behind it, its not going to be sneaking anywhere.

There is no radio chatter! (See “traffic lights” at the belly of the KC-135Q and some other items too)

uh-huh.

The KC-135Q is not stealth and the typical pattern of that can be spotted.
But that did not matter because it is not the”target” in search for.

If you know where something is at any point in time, you can quickly figure out where it can be X minutes from there. While not a track, it serves to give your air defence a good heads-up.

When the SR-71 lights up its afterburners to climb to altitude you know exactly where it is, and due to the heads up, your ready for it*.

*which is only useful if you have missiles with the necessary Pe to make the kill.

The average aluminium tail lift on a 7.5 or 17.5 tonner adds another half a ton to the weight of the truck (slightly more in some cases). I suspect a large, solid, 3 foot high steel plough with large, solid mountings would add somewhat more than 500k’s!

Not a chance dude.

The front bucket (not incl arms) on a 3CX wouldn’t weigh a ton (infact, the max lifting weight is around a ton on the front end), and its coping with much, much heavier loads than a plough.

You seem to be basing your theory on this one picture?

Nah, just generalisation. It would be very easy to do. It isn’t much of a grand theory either – its more a simple ad-hoc fix solution that no-one seems to have bothered with.

OK, some may have winches, but many/most won’t. Leave the winches on and put ploughs on the ones that don’t.

It would also be the kinda thing that the maintenance engineers will jump at – a chance to build yer own doo-hickey equipped with widgets 😀 – Heck, the fire crews would probably want do it to offset the tedium of sitting on their arses during a normal shift.

Plus what about ground clearance. Aircraft dont always crash on tarmac, off road capabilites need to be achieved at any time. A snow plough on the front would mean it would be very hard to ensure ground clearance whilst still remaining effective. If you are going to talk about lowering/raising it for ground clearance, then you have visibility issues and yet more weight to the front of the tender.

You ever seen the blade on a mini digger? Since the blade isn’t actually having to lift anything besides its own weight, the moving mechanism won’t be much addition in terms of weight. Proportionally, its even less than a mini digger as that blade can be used for stability.

As you point out, the issue will be visibility, but for the headlights, the driver’s eye line is too far above the ground to be an issue. Thus, it probably would require moving the headlights to the roof-line or better addition of more worklights to the roof-line and leave the headlights where they are – which is no bad thing anyway, you can never have enough light.

A very fair point. Let’s leave the specialised equipment alone to do the job (or hopefully not to do the job) it was designed for.

And have airports closed because of a few mil of snow? :confused:

I’m sure big airports have dedicated ploughs, but smaller ones can’t always afford to duplicate equipment when a common solution could do the job of both.

Would that not add weight and make them slower?

Paul

The difference would be negligible.

Your talking adding maybe 500 kilos to a 30+ tonne vehicle.

Would handle a plough no problem.

Update for y’all.

flight global

Flightglobal.com has obtained an image of the first Airbus Military A400M flight-test aircraft resting on its own landing gear at the final assembly line near Seville, Spain. The transport is awaiting installation of its composite wing and empennage, together with its four Europrop International TP400 turboprop engines.

<<<>>>>

For all your arrogant lecturing there you’ve managed to contradict yourself quite a few times.

First you say the exhaust is ionised and hence visible to radar.

Then you say the SR-71 was stealthy (which is directly contradicting paragraph 1). No point having stealthy wings on a B-52 is there?

Then you make the earth shattering statement that radar does not work in the visible spectrum (no ****, otherwise radar stations would be lighthouses).

You then go back again to saying the SR-71 was stealthy (which is still directly contradicting paragraph 1).

Then you state that China could not track the SR-71 from take-off. That may be true, or may not – a typical Blackbird flight involved mid-air refuels = radio chatter = easy to locate. Hence its feasible the Chinese got the take-off time from spies, got the refuel position from triangulation of radio intercepts and then detected the SR-71 on radar as it nudged over into supersonic flight before climbing into its mission flight profile.

You go on to make the statement that the footprint may be “hundreds of feet if not miles behind the SR-71” – which would mean the “glowing flame” (the ionised bit from paragraph 1) is miles behind the aircraft… As the S2A missiles close in on the SR-71, they will undoubtedly detect the airframe itself, the question is were the seeker algorithms smart enough to separate plume from aircraft.

Then you say the shock wave (alluding to the bow shock with the figure of the bullet) is easy to detect… ignoring the shock cells in the burner (yes, the “glowing flame”) that are much stronger and easier to detect.

Arrogant posts =/= Knowledgeable posts.