well I had a nice little chortle reading this thread…..I know some people that’ll make any aircraft you want, disappear. Make missiles disppear, in fact probably just about anything disappear from radar.

I see most of you have read the janes article or whatever article it was on the stealth talk last year in london?

well I had the privelidge of being there to hear the talk on plasma stealth, and see the video’s of it in operation, since my uni dissertation is directly related to calculating radar cross sections.

Let me tell you, you dont need a super computer to predict the RCS due to bounce back, of a surface, or any collection of surfaces! If you want to incorporate all the other funky stuff, including materials, atmospherics and other absorption techniques, well, excel does the job fine for me! Its true that once your familiar with how the whole physical bounceback system works you can get a good ‘first principles’ idea of what your target is going to look like in terms of RCS signature.

you dont have to ‘fill’ nosecones or anything else for that matter with plasma gas to effect the right kinds of attenuation, in fact you can apply your material directly onto the antenna. and hey, why use ‘plasma’ when there are some quite ordinary everyday mechanisms that will do the job for you pretty well.

if you apply plasma generating material to an antenna the problem has been raised regarding use of said antenna, when the plasma has been activated, well since your looking at on/off times in the micro second region, I think thats a pretty good solution to that problem.

regards energy required by a plasma generating system in terms of electricity, well I think two lyulka turbofans can do the job admirably, for the predicted use of the system. remember what is the point of EM stealth if you can see the target with your (assissted) eyes anyway?? stealth is only soo good, there is a point in time when there is no point in using these systems, and also there is a tradeoff as to what areas these types of systems are used on.

the solution to the russian LO problem (notice I use LO and not stealth? ) is one of tradeoff. The russians cannot afford to spend the money on generating the obviously extremely high tech RAM materials used on aircraft such as the raptor (which to my mind at least probably has an electrical FSS nose cone plugged into the freq. agile radar). so whats the next best thing? do what they do best (IMO) which seems to be researching physics and finding useful applications for the technology.

I think you’ll find that rcs reduction treatment of the cold parts of an engine is pretty much a breeze aswell, altho I’d prefer a low RCS DESIGNED duct.

It is quite true that depth of material assissts in the attenuation of EM waves, as can evidently be seen by the requirements for VHF RAM, although that depth has been quartered in not too long a time period, and therefore theres no reason to think it wont go down again. Direction of material might be food for thought in contribution to RCS reduction…..

frankly the americans have it down in terms of design process there understanding of the physics and current technology directly dictates the design and engineering processes at least as far as I can tell.

we dont know much about what goes on in the UK, but at least I do know that some of this stuff is comparable to american (if not directly feeding) american technology.

Russia just seems to toy with the idea.

The berkut does indeed have internal weapons carriage.

swingkid obviously knows what he/she is talking about in terms of physics.

garry, your just argumentative! 🙂

coanda

lifting body airship…….

I see thats aircraft number 4 in the first foto, the A380 is shorter than the A346 but again I dont know by how much.

well you will all be pleased to know that we should be able to give in all of our offices first flight data for MSN001 on monday at 8 AM we’ve all been working long hours to meet airbus’ deadlines, some of us up to and past 60 hours (for reasons I wont go into but we dont like some people in airbus deutsch right now! )

as for stretches, we are working on the A380-800 and all work has been done for this type (and some on freighter) we expect a life growth of 30 tonnes, and we have stressed for FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TONS. In anyones book thats a s**t load of metal! I dont think you’ll get it any longer than this, its 79.2 by 79.8 if memory serves.

oh, and thats not the fourth aircraft in build its the third, it goes MSN001…..MSN002…..MSN004……MSN006….then 5, 7 and 8 and then sequentially onwards, dont ask why they do this because I dont know!
regards

coanda

yes indeed, its fair enough to divert an aircraft away from its destination if there is a bomb threat but what if the threat is real and the bombers just blow it up at hte diversion, job still done me thinks.

interesting,

given the spacings you require, of what I would say would be 30+ seconds if its only one aircraft on the runway at once, and that your speeds are not abnormally high (theres no real ‘break’ as such) this should not be any cause for concern. If all aircraft bank at the same rate and roll out on same headings into downwind with the required spacings, your not going to be a problem for anyone, this is no more formation flying than following aircraft in the circuit. The actual risk in what your suggesting, which I understand to be a widely spaced trail formation, with decent and current pilots is low.

I find that some civ pilots who dont ‘have’ to do somthing with any kind of moderate risk (aero’s might be one example) dont and subconciously inhibit themselves. Whilst this is no bad thing for the warm fuzzy feeling, sometimes you learn more by actually going out and doing an excercise than by thinking it through and deciding that its too ‘dangerous’.

I wholly agree that if you wish to carry out formation manouveres such as Vics, line asterns, echelon or whatever you would be stupid and a downright liability to go out and ‘give it a go’ without any sort of training. I have done some formation flying and I wouldnt do any more without a deal of continuation training, so I do see the point.

from a flying aspect, as long as all pilots concerned are happy with the plan there is no more risk than being in the circuit.

however, convincing duxford ATC that your going to be ok is another matter, a thorough joint brief would be req’d of course, and if anything, it is they who would put the ‘safety’ anchors on anything.