Re: Q – U – I – Z !!!

Bhuwaaaa!
A good one!

#1 — a cargoplane with 10 jet engines.
a – name aircraft
The Do-31: two Pegasus, eight lift engines.
b – date of first flight.
February 1967 with the Pegasuses only, from July on with the other eight as well.

#2 — a VTOL that actually flew. Two engines, but only one propeller, but four landing gears, is not a helicopter nor an autogyro.
a – name aircraft
You mean the Convair XFY-1 Pogo and/or Lockheed’s XFV-1? Both had two coupled T38 turboshafts, and i guess a couter-rotating prop could count as just one prop. The Lockheed one flew around with those dody extra landing gears for conventional take offs and landings, but both had four tiny little landing gears on their tail surfaces.
b – date of first flight(s)
Pogo: April 1954 first runs still tethered, then some more playing around, first real hover was on November 1st.
Lockheed: March 1954
c – name pilot.
Hmm… John Glenn was a Navy test pilot at that time. Besides, i don’t know any others 🙂

#3 — from 1957 on the RCAF used two Avro Lancasters for a special mission.
a – what was that mission?
Launching Firebee drones.
b – which unit did those two Lancs belong to?
Central Experimental Proving Establishment
c – which serial numbers did they have?
KB851/PX-851 and KB848/PX-848
[b]d – where are those two planes today?[b]
KB848’s cockpit is in the National Air Museum in Ottawa, i don’t think KB851 still exists.
e – when did the RCAF cease to exist and what is it today?
January 31, 1968 the Royal Canadian Air Force became Canadian Armed Forces – Air Command, and i think it’s CAF – 1st Air Division (or 1CAD) from 1997 on.

#4 — what UAV holds the speed & altitude record for sustained level flight? (no, not Buran or ISS, please!)
Waaah…. so Voyager is wrong too?
a – designation and manufacturer of UAV
The official FIA record for altitude is with the Helios, but i don’t think that it’s all that fast. Also, i doubt the 29524m altitude limit wasn’t reached by the D-21, so i think the answer should be the Lockheed D-21.
b – the record in numbers
The last time someone offered me that information, he said he’d have to kill me afterwards. Back then, i wasn’t suicidal yet.

#5 — name at least eight rocket (co-)propelled manned tactical aircraft that actually flew (self-powered only!)
By self-powered you mean they should be able to take off under their own power?
Me-163, BI, Mitsubishi J8M, NF-104A, S.R. 53, I-270, SO 9050 Trident, XF-91, and (i think it fits the description) the B-47s with internal JATO bottles.

#6 — name all propeller-turbine powered strategic bombers ever flown
Obviously the Tu-95, and then you had the XB-47D, that Chinese AI-20 powered Tu-4… there haven’t been all that much, have there?

#7 — name a forktail twin-turbine powered tandem-prop with fixed landing gear
TURBINE? Now unless there are either turbine-powered Cessna 337s or Schweizer RU-38s around, i don’t know.

#8 — name first aircraft flown with forward-swept wings
There were probably some other gliders before it, but i think the Cornelius XFG-1 fuel-transport-glider is obscure enough to warrant a pic:

For the first ‘real’ (=powered) aircraft to fly with FSW, my guess would be the Junkers Ju-287.

#9 — name the first aircraft with electrical “fly-by-wire” controls
There were IIRC quite a few from the 1950s on, the one springing to mind most prominently is the A3J Vigilante. I’m not sure though.

#10 — the RN uses the Sea King for AWACS/AEW duties quite some time now. But the Sea King was/is not the only helicopter destined for that role. Name three other helicopters used for the same mission.
Purely for AEW?
The Ka-31 obviously.
Then you had the SH-2E LAMPS helo which was ment to give over-the-horizon warning for incoming missiles, and actually shoot them down.
And the Czechoslovak Mi-17Z-2

I don’t think the Cougar Horizon (or Orchidée) count, as these carry surveillance radars.

#11 — what was “Operation Damon”?
As said before, good old fashioned Tribesman-hunting with aircraft. Organised by the RAF in Aden, 1960.

#12 — I’m looking for a Texan aviation company [a – WHICH COMPANY? WHERE WAS/IS IT LOCATED?]…
Temco, Grand Prairie, TX.

… that started business after the war from the local remains of another quite well known aircraft company [b – WHICH COMPANY?]….
a local North American factory?
… by building venetian blind clips, mailboxes and three-seat water-bicycles, later became part of one of the largest U.S. business conglomerates (was e.g. huge in the field of Texan beef) [c – NAME IT! WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THE HEAD OF THAT CONGLOMERATE?]….
Ling-Temco-Vought, run by Jim Ling.
….and is now part of another big U.S. defense contractor [d – NAME THAT CONTRACTOR! HOW DID THAT COME?]….
They are now with Northrop-Grumman, after bancrupcy in 1992 and a short-term bailout/help/shady stuff with the Carlisle Group (you know, that all-the-president’s-men-defence-contractor-investment-bank Overlord of the Military Industrial Complex).
… They also built the first operationally used primary jet trainer for the U.S.Navy [E – NAME THAT PLANE PLUS THE DATE OF THE FIRST FLIGHT].
If you wouldn’t have asked this, i wouldn’t have been able to look for the rest! The airplane was the TT-1 Pinto, first flight in March 1956. An interesting little plane: designed to withstand G-loads of 11,25!!!

Shooting down an airliner without apologising?

Yup, an MD900.

Well, there were plenty of uses of aviation which were downright horrible. From gassing Abessynians and Kurds to accidentally/intentionally bombing civilians with napalm or cluster munitions, but i think that’s a bit beyond the scope of the thread. Besides, it would get my pacifist nature out and we don’t want that to happen.

But i just thought of what IMHO was the most hideous crime ever committed against flying objects: filling Zeppelins with hydrogen.

Just imagine, if disasters like the Hindenburg or R101 hadn’t happened, and those magnificent silver objects, combining elegance and humongous dimensions, would still float across the skies…

Scrapping the thing above to make radar dishes was also a crime, IMHO.

A wide field of view not a long ranged missile make.

The R27T/ET, R40TD and most likely R98MD have a longer range though.

Second-hand German Tornados? Those could be very dangerous to Poland’s Su-22M4’s, for starters. And basically any country in the ‘pre-F-16’ era without either modern strikers or decent multirole aircraft.

Good question!

It’s a nice result of Soviet five-year planning and pre-allocated production of certain goods. This means that the Irkutsk factory already was given the production order before the aircraft was actually cleared for service. Usually this meant that by the time an aircraft was cleared, there were plenty available to make a decent operational force.

However, this clearance never came for the Yak-28P even though those airframes were delivered. When production ceased in 1965 (Irkutsk then started building Su-15s), i would guess the whole acceptance bit of the original Yak-28P was simply transferred to the upgraded variant. So operationally-tasked regiments were for a while flying non-operational aircraft for quite some time. Some of those units probably were two-type regiments (Su-9 + Yak-28 for example), which would at least give them an operational status on paper.