Common guys, I want to see pictures of the J-20 before Christmas Eve, please….:)

Painting the antiglare black stripe on the Mig-29.

a basic issue of trapped water in cracks, crevices and bond lines where it can not evaporate — aluminum turns into aluminum oxide, iron into iron oxide, Etc.

Of course humidity and wet atmosphere is playing important factor in galvanic corrosion as well, but doesnt it sound a little bit stupid when saying now to drill more holes into the hull to prevent corrosion, especially in case of the F-22 a 350 million dollar plane. Hail to the Lockheed Martin…:diablo:

copy and paste
GAO says that “corrosion of the aluminum skin panels on the F-22 was first observed in spring 2005, less than 6 months after the Air Force first introduced the aircraft to a severe environment,” and two years later, “by October 2007, a total of 534 instances of corrosion were documented, and corrosion in the substructure was becoming prevalent.” GAO notes that the government is paying $228 million to make F-22 corrosion-related repairs and retrofits through 2016.”

Full report on above defense aerospace site…

Suprised that they went for non chromated primers on Aluminium I guess maybe they thought the internal sections will not retain moisture for long enough to cause a problem or have enough moisture to be an issue (this is obviously in contect of all the HS&E issues with chromated paints and primers)…

The final statement “lackadaisical” although seems to give a emotional summary, there is no retort from LM as to why they chose the same primer system for the F-35 and infact if they had addressed the root cause for corrosion. From actually looking at the document it is evident that they have infact tried to address the root causes of the corrosion.
And some good stuff here

I read this article where I found this sentence.
After being deployed, F-22 jets “indicated corrosion issues resulting from interaction” with stealth materials used to hide the aircraft from enemy radar, Lockheed spokesman Christopher McGee said in an e-mail.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-16/lockheed-s-f-22-jets-corroding-need-228-million-in-repairs.html

To me it sounds like a galvanic corrosion issues between the aluminum panels and various carbon based composite parts, as well as it might be that the non-chromated primer is not full filling the job to protect the anodized aluminium. Do not be angry with me, but such news gives me satisfaction bcs I`ve claimed years the F-22 will be the maintenance nightmare despite the LM propaganda telling about less maintenance hours than its fighter predecessors.

Hi, I’m a bit confused about naming of Kuznetsov’s NK-32 engines. I’m desperately searching for the answer, but with every other new source the situation is even more confused. Sources are often mixing NK-32, NK-321, NK-32-1, NK-32 Phase I/II, NK-321 Phase I/II to
Well, as you can see, the information are very very confused – both on amateur’s webs and official producer’s websites. Is simple NK-32 just the early developement version? Are all the serial engines NK-321? And what about the different Phases. Is NK-321 equivalent to NK-32-I or how is it? I went through many online newspapers articles and they all are mixing NK-32, NK-321 etc………………….
Please help or redirect me to some other sources, thanks.

As I understand, the NK-32 engine is the original one used with serial produced Tu-160, whereas the NK-321 is a modification of old NK-32 used with the TU-144LL for the first time in 1996. My source is the book “Dvigateli 1944-2000”. Of course the the NK-321 engine could have its own modifications already.
Do not worry about that, lot of people are still confusing naming of more ordinary engines like the R13F-300 with the R13-300.

Found a leaflet about the Tu-22 modernization.

RAM is much thicker than 0.03-0.04 mm by over an order of magnitude. The high metallic content of RAM can easily add 1.5 tons to a Flanker.

When talking conventional aircraft paint systems consisting of etch primer, intermediate primer and topcoat, where the total film thickness varies between 0,1-0,15mm, it adds cca. 55 kilograms of weight when painting our Mig-29 aircrafts. You can easily estimate the weight for the Su-35 which is almost twice as much surface as the Mig-29, so let say up to 100kg of additional weight. I seriously doubt that the conductive thin RAM layer applied over the primer(Akzo Nobel, PPG stealth coatings with thickness of several microns adding such a tremendeos weight as you stated before. I think the 1.5 tons is quite an overshoot, unless you are not talking RAM coatings only.

M