Coolest planes (Page 2/5)
TheDigitalAlchemist DEC 17, 12:05 AM


Love this, its SO backwards.

[This message has been edited by TheDigitalAlchemist (edited 12-17-2021).]

randye DEC 17, 01:23 AM

quote
Originally posted by 2.5:

What planes are cool to you?




Cool to me?

The ones that I personally had a part in designing:

SR-71 Blackbird
My very first assignment as a new engineer at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Florida in 1984 was to redesign and replace much of the tooling for the J-58 engines that had been scrapped in accordance with the monstrously stupid "SALT II" agreement that the moronic Carter administration had agreed to with the Soviet communists in 1979. (Both the tooling and the plans for them had been destroyed under SALT II). The USAF had nearly run out of spare parts and was starting to cannibalize operational aircraft.
I was honored to work on an aircraft / propulsion program that began when I was just a child.

F-15 Eagle
I was a member of the nozzle and augmenter, ("afterburner"), design team for the F-100-PW-220 engine upgrade.

F-16 Falcon / Viper
I was a member of the nozzle and augmenter, (afterburner"), design team for the F-100-PW-229 engine upgrade

F-22A Lightning II / Raptor
I was a principal engineer on the vectoring nozzle team for the F-119-PW-100 engines.

I could include my work on the RL-10 rocket engine series and the Shuttle main engine turbo-pumps and a few other interesting projects but you specified "planes".

[This message has been edited by randye (edited 12-17-2021).]

2.5 DEC 17, 12:24 PM

quote
Originally posted by randye:


Cool to me?

The ones that I personally had a part in designing:

SR-71 Blackbird
My very first assignment as a new engineer at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Florida in 1984 was to redesign and replace much of the tooling for the J-58 engines that had been scrapped in accordance with the monstrously stupid "SALT II" agreement that the moronic Carter administration had agreed to with the Soviet communists in 1979. (Both the tooling and the plans for them had been destroyed under SALT II). The USAF had nearly run out of spare parts and was starting to cannibalize operational aircraft.
I was honored to work on an aircraft / propulsion program that began when I was just a child.

F-15 Eagle
I was a member of the nozzle and augmenter, ("afterburner"), design team for the F-100-PW-220 engine upgrade.

F-16 Falcon / Viper
I was a member of the nozzle and augmenter, (afterburner"), design team for the F-100-PW-229 engine upgrade

F-22A Lightning II / Raptor
I was a principal engineer on the vectoring nozzle team for the F-119-PW-100 engines.

I could include my work on the RL-10 rocket engine series and the Shuttle main engine turbo-pumps and a few other interesting projects but you specified "planes".




That is cool you were part of that
randye DEC 17, 07:33 PM

quote
Originally posted by 2.5:


That is cool you were part of that




I'm happily retired now but when I look back on my engineering career the time I spent in aerospace was some of the best and the most personally fulfilling years.
I would have stayed in aerospace and not transitioned to biomedical if it hadn't been for that rat bastard Clinton and the end of the cold war.

We had over 8,000 scientists, engineers and special technicians on campus at UTC P&W Florida until the Clinton defense cutbacks started.
I survived 14 rounds of massive layoffs until they finally gutted the entire facility.

We will probably never see another collection of the extraordinary level of talent, knowledge and skill all in one place that we had back then and we did some incredible things.

Many that are still secret.

Here is a photo of the J-58 / SR-71 engine on a test stand at night at our facility in Florida.
Yes the entire aft end of the engine always glowed bright yellow / orange like that at full military power.


This a view of a small part of the P&W Florida facility back in the day.....way out in the swamps back then.
(It was a real PITA walking to the main building from your car out in one of those massive parking lots when it was raining...and it rained a lot...and there were often gators from the lake under cars...you always had to look as you approached your car... )
We had our own airport, fire department, armed security force, power plant, water and sewage treatment, etc. It was a small city.



This the F-119-PW-100 engine that is in the F-22A Raptor.
I was a principal engineer on the 2D vectoring nozzle circled in red.


Fun years remembered fondly.

[This message has been edited by randye (edited 12-18-2021).]

Valkrie9 DEC 18, 11:28 AM

Valkyrie Mach 3
Peninsula
Avro Arrow
Cancelled
Straining toward Global Nuke War, still, to this day.
rinselberg DEC 18, 11:39 AM
It's a real bummer the Cold War kind of fizzled out like it did, in such an anticlimactic way.

Here's some consolation:

"Top [U.S. general] says China's hypersonic missile test 'went around the world'"
Chandelis Duster for CNN; November 18, 2021.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11...pons-test/index.html
Wichita DEC 18, 12:08 PM
Cessna O2 Skymaster

I have had the pleasure to fly in one, which was on my top 10 bucket list items.

MidEngineManiac DEC 18, 12:47 PM
American Imperialist Amateurs..
cvxjet DEC 18, 07:16 PM
The Avro Canada CF-105.....a really great aircraft that was cancelled so that Canada would buy US missiles and aircraft.

By the way, if you want to take the time, an interesting read is the book "Boyd; The fighter Pilot Who changed the art of War"......He was a fighter pilot in the Korean war, but after that he developed new theories of warfare, which the Marines adopted in the Gulf war. The Marines think very highly of him. He also struggled to get the Air Force to develop a smaller fighter than the F-15- which led to the F-16, small and extremely maneuverable.

The Air Force had decided that dogfights were a thing of the past- there was actually talk of using 737-size aircraft with large crews at control consoles and a rotary missile launcher- which would shoot down all of the enemy aircraft. Boyd (And others) kept pointing out that any technology we developed would be cancelled by the enemy at some point, so that air fights would degenerate down to dogfights quite often. (The same stupidity that led to NAVY F-4s not having a gun (They later carried POD guns mounted under the wings)
randye DEC 18, 08:39 PM

quote
Originally posted by rinselberg:

It's a real bummer the Cold War kind of fizzled out like it did, in such an anticlimactic way.

Here's some consolation:

"Top [U.S. general] says China's hypersonic missile test 'went around the world'"
Chandelis Duster for CNN; November 18, 2021.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11...pons-test/index.html




As usual your only "contribution" is to troll and post more cut & paste propaganda.

"Console" this:

Mach 7 in 1959

For the uneducated such as you, that's "hypersonic" over 60 YEARS AGO.

Perhaps you can "console" yourself with more breathless CNN stories of recent Chinese tests desperately attempting to catch up to where we are now.

[This message has been edited by randye (edited 12-18-2021).]