DragonflyerYama,
Actually, the AF did try something like that in the late 80s. SAC was pushing a program called the “Conventional G”. The DoD was cancelling the full Buff fleet except the B-52H, which would have given them 100 B-1Bs, and about 80 B-52Hs. SAC wanted to retain 50 existing B-52Gs modified to do only the conventional weapons mission, with enough visible mods to allow the Russians to tell the G from the H and maintain the proper accounting capability to be legal under the existing nuclear arms treaty at the time. DoD said no, there wasn’t any money to pay for it (several hundred million dollars). SAC immediately countered that they could get the money by cancelling the SR-71 and putting the money saved from that budget line into the “conventional G” program. I was running the U-2/SR-71/TR-1 ops branch at HQ SAC at the time so had numerous discussions with the bomber staff guys about the proposals. We tried to explain to them that while the SR money did exist in the current SAC budget (AKA “Program 1 Strategic Forces” in the Congressional Budget program), but it was really “Program 3 Intel” money from someone else’s pocket book and would disappear if SAC cancelled the SR from their budget. Unfortunately, the SAC and HQ USAF “bomber mafia” was convinced that they could pull it off and went through with their plan, wrote the SR out of SAC’s budget for the next fiscal year (FY 90, I believe). They signed the input to DoD late one week, and by early the next week, as I recall, the SR money was gone and no money for the Gs ever appeared. Of course, the exact process probably wasn’t quite that simple, but the outcome was.
DragonflyerNo. There’s strong suspicion and some visual indications that the aircraft experienced a loss of both engines on the left side, but that’s not really the “cause”, only the result. The cause will ultimately be whatever happened to cause the engines to lose thrust. Given the near vertical impact and massive damage to the engines and fuselage, I suspect it will take a while to uncover the root of the problem.
Dragonflyercrash video: go to https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/military-plane-crash-savannah/index.html (scroll down a little)
DragonflyerInteresting to see the ramp in picture 1. That’s the ramp where we operated the U-2s and DC-130s (RPV/Drone launching motherships) in the early 1970s,
DragonflyerYeah…AF plant 42 at Palmdale is pretty sensitive site. Among the other super secret airframes built there were the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar airliner, the USAF’s T-38 supersonic trainer, B-1 bomber and F-5 lightweight fighter. Certain specific programs are classified by their nature, but the facility itself is hardly a “top secret desert assembly plant”.
DragonflyerI had an opportunity to fly in one once. I had just started USAF pilot training at Williams AFB outside of Phoenix and was going to fly home to Seattle for Christmas in December 1967. One of the IPs mentioned that I should call the Air National Guard unit at Phoenix (Sky Harbor Airport). Sure enough they had a KC-97 going to McChord AFB south of Seattle. Great deal…a free, quick flight home. It turned out to be a direct flight, only 10 hours flight time! As we approached McChord the runway was closed and we had to divert to Fairchild AFB, 350 miles away outside of Spokane, which took another two and a half hours. By then I was virtually deaf and nearly numb from the vibration. As I deplaned, an old guard Chief Master Sergeant asked me how I liked the flight. After my attempt at a tactful response, he laughed and replied that it wasn’t really an airplane, just a collection of nuts, bolts and aluminum panels flying together in close formation! No wonder they called it “Old Shaky”. Once was enough for me.
DragonflyerWell, a bit of semantics here. NO turbojet (or turbofan) engine is “supersonic. Jet engines can’t ingest and operate in a supersonic airflow. They use fixed or variable ramps (or spikes) to create a shock wave in front of the engine to slow the air to subsonic speeds and allow the engine to operate. It’s the airframe that goes supersonic, not the engine (except as a part of the overall airframe structure.
DragonflyerToo early to make that assessment. Perhaps the pilot did not initiate the ejection for some reason such as spatial disorientation, perhaps there was some other physical reason, perhaps he thought he could recover but misjudged his flight attitude, etc. It happens, unfortunately.
DragonflyerAs I suspected: a recent news article reported the box was identified as an “AN/DMQ-1 gondola” balloon reconnaissance payload from the 1950s, part of an operation called “Project Genetrix “,
intended to collect information about the USSR and China. The news report, referencing information and photos from the “Military Communications and Electronics Museum” in Kingston, Ontario and “declassified documents on the CIA website” also says that there were 516 balloons sent up, with only 34 recovered (I guess that’s 35 now).
DragonflyerI have no direct knowledge, but back in the post WWII-early cold war days, before satellites, various countries were known to have launched large balloons with camera pods as payloads, and allow them to drift around the world to collect pictures from places they couldn’t get to in other ways. Maybe the “box” is such a payload that was lost and never recovered. It looks like an appropriately-sized payload container for that purpose. If the military collected it but wouldn’t acknowledge it later, that sounds like it was something they didn’t want to advertise. If it was your side, you didn’t want to admit it, if it was the other side you didn’t want to admit you recovered it and might have learned something about their capability.
I know they (at least someone) did in later days, too (balloons, not necessarily similar payloads), because in the early 90″s I was flying a U-2 at about 70,000 feet near the Sea of Japan when five of them, in trail about 20 miles apart, drifted by above me going east well above my altitude. It was hard to estimate their altitude because there was nothing to judge scale against so they could have been smaller and closer or bigger and farther away, but probably were in the 80,000 foot altitude range. They clearly had to have been launched considerably west of the Korean peninsula to get to where I saw them.
DragonflyerRef posts 2047 and 2049, I suspect that the cost increase is less about increases in bits and pieces than about the manufacturing infrastructure that the builders have to maintain. If the buyer decides to build the same number of aircraft over an additional five years, that means they have to maintain their facilities and pay their workers, and perhaps pay local taxes on their inventory (for instance, in California the state has an inventory tax on everything a company keeps on hand to operate with) over an additional five years. That all accrues to the cost of the system. As an example, when the AF contracted with the Skunkworks (Lockheed Martin) for the “TR-1” buy, Lockheed wanted to build them at a rate of about 9 or 10 per year (according to one of the senior Skunkworks guys I knew). The estimated cost would have been about 9 or 10 million apiece (plus gov’t owned equipment, like the J-75 engines the AF had left over from old F-105s) over about four years, but the Air Force didn’t have the money available without killing other priority systems, so they only bought three or four a year over about nine years. That raised the cost to about $18 million each. Efficiency was also affected because the workforce was constantly being perturbed as more senior workers coming off other programs (like the L-1011 program that was closing down) bumped younger guys (union work rules), requiring constant retraining. Their parts suppliers then had to deal with the same kind of things, raising the prices for some of the bits and pieces. Lockheed didn’t like it, and neither did the AF, but the Defense Dept. budget and Congress drove the process. I asked why Lockheed didn’t jest buy more “pieces” at one time and store them, but federal acquisition rules didn’t allow that (if the FY budget said three aircraft, three parts is all you could legally buy that year). That’s where the advantages of a Multi-Year contract come in, but we didn’t have one.
DragonflyerFirst intentional U-2 flight August 1, 1956. There was an unintentional flight a day or so earlier when a high speed taxi test lifted off for a few seconds, but it didn’t “count” and was not recorded as a flight.
DragonflyerAhhh…but do you know the difference between the U-2 and the TR-1?
DragonflyerBoeing built a few “extras” betting on negotiations in progress and the expectation of eventual sales. These “white tails” sat on the ramp for a while but eventually all have been sold, the last being this one.
DragonflyerSanum, while I understand where you’re going, I think you are seriously under-estimating the time required to get there. The development cycle for highly sophisticated military aircraft these days is in the 15 to 20+ year range, from program initiation to IOC, and that’s if everything goes fairly well. Examples such as the F-35 (1990s to mid-teens) and Global Hawk (early/mid 1990s to somewhere near the 2010 period, depending on what you consider IOC) are fairly typical, and certainly not saving the DoD much money so far (mission effectiveness is a different issue, but can also be questionable depending the mission circumstances). Budgets are already planned for 2017 and 2018 in most countries, so a new start in 2019 is probably a pretty quick start. Also, in most countries (certainly in the U.S.) saving money 20 or 30 years in the future doesn’t produce much investment money in the current budget. That puts your 2025 point for “most combat aircraft” mostly in dream land (at six or seven years). Also, the money you expect to save by eliminating the pilot is eaten up by the requirement to train and man the ground-based technicians that plan and fly/maintain the aircraft (save one U-2 pilot, add 5-7 people in the Ground Control Station). You can play with the numbers a little depending on which story you’re trying to sell, but there’s a definite price to pay. We used to emphasize that UAVs are “unoccupied”, but certainly not “unmanned”, the people were just located elsewhere. Add to that the cost of communications and data movement, infrastructure, and satisfying location-unique political and air-traffic issues, and the bill adds up pretty quickly. There’s also a frequently overlooked long range issue: a few decades down the road, where are the experienced pilots who inform the builders how the airframe needs to perform to accomplish a desired mission? Based on my nearly 50 years in the business, I’m not sure I want engineers to decide how to do the mission…their expertise does not lay in combat operations. I see this all the time in my current line of work supporting the acquisition of new systems; building new systems from an engineer’s perspective is frequently not the same as building one that meets a user’s need in the field.
So, I concur that automation and expansion of unmanned (“unoccupied” is still a better word, I think) systems will continue at a rapid pace in the future, but I think operationalizing it on a widening scale will be considerably farther down the road. Besides, what happens when the adversary hacks your system and tells your unmanned systems to shut down?? That’s not an insignificant worry in these times!
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