Here is a link to the Dutch-German windtunnel, it’s at Marknesse (a sh!tty little settlement on mopped up seabed). Quite a few interesting pics in the gallery, including one of a hypersonic air-breathing vehicle.
http://www.dnw.aero/index.php

Originally posted by ELP
This is a funny photo everytime I see it…(snip)… I don’t know what this guy is doing unless it is a staged photo to make it look functional or just a bad time to snap the photo.

Definately staged, a marketing/PR pic from top to bottom. Much like the “EA-18G Growler” which Boeing put on the static of a number of high-key airshows (Andrews AFB, nice and close to the Pentagon and the policy makers). Make it look more than it is (yet), then you can get sales. The “F-15E Strike Eagle” made it’s first airshow appearance in 1980, just six years even before the first funds for Strike Eagles were allocated. The aircraft put on display was of course nothing more than the famous lizard-painted YF-15B, 71-0291.

Originally posted by crobato
Lol. KnAAPO cranked out the majority of nearly 700 Flankers between 1983, when serial production began up to 1989, with peak years around 85′ to ’88.

And you’re right, SAC isn’t KnAAPO. SAC is much bigger, located in the center of Chinese industrial heartland, the former capital of Manchuria, while KnAAPO is in a small town of Siberian backwaters. KnAAPO still relies mostly on hand driven labor, commenting proudly about its only piece of automation is a pneumatic hand drill. SAC has benefited from modern investment, which includes precision machine tooling from Europe, the US, and Japan.

Before, and partly during, Su-27 production at Komsomolsk, this factory also churned out Su-17/20/22s by the hundreds, production of which was over 100 a year by the early 1980s. In addition to building Fitters and Flankers, they also took care of the massive Su-27 rework program of the as yet undelivered Flankers in the mid-1980s. It’s quite a big more than just a backwater town in the Siberian desolation with nothing more than just one pneumatic handdrill. For one, KnA is the biggest industrial centre along the Baikal-Amur Magistral railway. Apart from the aircraft plant, there are massive steelworks, it has huge shipyards (the Soviet icebreakers were all built there), and is the biggest pacific fish processing centre. Don’t underestimate the city – it’s nowhere near what it was back in Soviet days, but it’s definately not some backwater town as you say it is.

If anyone has a log of the Yuri Gagarin Aircraft Factory Museum, i would be happy of course 😉 http://www.travel2russia.com/destguide/komsom.htm

And great info guys, keep it up.

Originally posted by vicky ten
She just looks so out of place where she is displayed, I think the arguaments about who deserved a Concorde have long since run their course, but displayed on a barge in a city???

New York has of course a reputation with airliners in the city centre… (we used to have a devil icon in the old forum, i really wish we had it again).

Originally posted by Comet
That’s what I call justice. At least you have to agree, it is the only proven method of preventing re-offending! That thing will not kill any more children will it?

I think you’re hopelessly soft on criminals. Babies should all be drowned at birth, in order to prevent them from becoming criminals. If every kid who ever stole an apple was drowned (or hung, or smashed against a wall, or impaled) at birth, the world would be a better place indeed!

:rolleyes:

Yep, the Fokker D.24, designed together with Republic, work starting in 1962. It was Fokker’s last fighter design, still with the old D-designation which was originally reserved for biplanes.

Here is a sideview of what seems the very same D-24 model, it shows the exhausts. The model used to be at the now closed Aviodome museum at Schiphol, but i haven’t seen it during my quick visit to the Aviodrome in Lelystad (which has taken over the Aviodome collection) a few weeks back, unfortunately. There is an interesting bit of info on it at http://www.aerofiles.com/repub-vfx.html

Other European projects have continued to evolve as well. Alpha Jet was developed until the AJet III (which failed to get orders), the Atlantic’s development is still ongoing (ATL 3 now being on offer), Italy’s jet trainers, French helicopters, and i don’t think anyone can say that any Mirage variant hasn’t grown ever after entering service, even though it has to be said that the manufacturers are generally more active in developing upgrades than the countries are in buying those upgrades (the M2K-5 being a great example).

But no continued development by European products? Hardly. One could argue the US is even worse than this – all new F-15s offered are hardly more than the Strike Eagle concept of the early 1980s, and the C-130J only came about after some 30 years in which the C-130H was the pinnacle of modern tactical transport…

Those rocket pods look big. Well, if you compare them with the ones hung under one of the IL-76 prototypes that is…