Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 “Stealth” Advanced Cruise Missile

 aircraft, drawings, history, models, nukes, photography, secrets, weapons  4 Responses »
Oct 142012
 

Literally years in the making, I’ve put together two versions of a photo essay of several surviving examples of the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile. Available free for the downloading is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Abridged Edition as a 13 page PDF booklet. This contains photos of the AGM-129s on display at Hill Aerospace Museum in Utah, the USAF Museum in Dayton and the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska, ready to print.

Also available is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Full Edition. This 34-page edition includes more photos of these missiles, along with the missile at the San Diego Aerospace Museum restoration facility, a rare General Dynamics display model, official USAF photos of the AGM-129 in test and in service and drawings of the missile, including 1/32 scale layout diagrams. This is available through MagCloud, either as a downloadable PDF ($5.75) or as a professionally printed and bound edition ($11.80).

Don’t forget to check out my other MagCloud publications, including Justo Miranda’s Reichdreams Dossiers, Aerospace Projects Review, Historical Documents, and Photographing Stuff.

And don’t forget to check out Stagger Around #1, F-104A Starfighter, and Stagger Around #2, Starship Enterprise.

NOTE:

If you liked this and want to see more like it… feel free to toss fifty cents, a buck, a hundred bucks, whatever, my way. Think of it as a donation to a worthy cause. Or a bribe. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.

 Posted by at 12:58 pm

Scramjet artwork

 aircraft, art, history, models, projects, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Oct 132012
 

A piece of NASA-Langley artwork describing the future of aeropropulsion… the scramjet engine. The provenance on the art is hazy at best… found in the uncatalogued collection of a former Langley engineer, it probably dates to the mid 1960’s. The aircraft illustrated here has been seen from the early 1960s up into the late 1980s, so that at best brackets the art. The aircraft has been used as a hypersonic transport and as the first stage of a space launch system. As shown here, the model used was *probably* a wind tunnel model repainted and repurposed as a display model… none of the diagrams I’ve seen of it have included the “hump” on the underside of the aft expansion ramp. Most likely that’s the connection point for the support “sting” for tunnel use. Alternatively, it *could* represent a fairing for a rather sizable rocket engine, though that seems unlikely… during scramjet operation the hump would not only mess with exhaust flowfields, it would also be subjected toa whole lot of thermal unpleasantness.

 Posted by at 10:27 pm

Abandoned, now destroyed

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, I'm from the government, news  6 Responses »
Oct 122012
 

The Khodynka aviation museum in Moscow had been left to rot after the fall of the USSR. That was bad. But it now seems that that situation has been dealt with… by sending heavy construction equipment onto the grounds to convert the aircraft to scrap metal. Feh.

Here’s a video of the state of the place in 2009:


Abandoned military aircraft museum by cxpiter

And here’s a Russian-language article from today providing photos of the destruction in process… tellingly, this was done under the cover of darkness.

На Ходынском поле уничтожают экспонаты музея авиации

An English translation of the article, almost readable, can be had via Google Translate:

At Khodynka destroy artifacts Aviation Museum

And the inevitable YouTube video:

[youtube ufnTwtpkBnU]

 Posted by at 9:44 am

NACA/NASA Langley hypersonic wind tunnel

 aircraft, art, blather, science  5 Responses »
Oct 112012
 

A question was asked how to get Mach five air flow through a wind tunnel. Getting supersonic airflow through a tunnel is conceptually straightforward. If you have a high pressure (typically 1.4 times the outside pressure, or higher) gas source, such as a gas cylinder, and you simply poke a hole in it, the air flowing from the high pressure to the low pressure will flow right at the speed of sound. If you mount a nozzle downstream of the hole (the “throat”), the gas will accelerate, trading thermal energy for kinetic (the gas can get cryogenically cold and even begin to liquify if the difference between upstream and downstream pressures is high enough).

By adding upstream heaters, you can make the gas *very* hot at the throat. The hotter the gas, the higher the speed of sound, and thus the higher the velocity. Additionally, the hotter the gas, the longer it takes to cool down to cryogenic temperatures, thus the faster you can accelerate the gas. This is the basic process used at the NACA-Langley “Hypersonic Continuous Flow Facility.” This facility also adds a whole lot of compressor power, which allows the system to run essentially non-stop. Smaller facilities would use a compressor to pump up tanks; when the tanks blow down, the test is over.

 Posted by at 5:19 pm

1947 SST

 aircraft, art, blather, projects  2 Responses »
Oct 112012
 

HAs anyone every seen anything more on this 1947 supersonic transport concept, published in Life magazine? Many years ago I saw either the same painting, or a very similar one, reproduced in a NACA report that basically just *mentioned* the aircraft and gave the impression that it was one of their ideas, but I’ve never seen anything firm about who designed it. NACA? Lockheed? Boeing? Life magazine itself? Some university?

Any pointers appreciated.

 Posted by at 5:04 pm

Bell D314F armed tiltrotor

 aircraft, models, projects  4 Responses »
Oct 062012
 

A Bell Helicopter concept in model form of an armed derivative of the XV-15 tiltrotor. This dated from the early/mid 1980’s and represented a ground attack aircraft… largely what the US Army was looking for in what became the LHX/RAH-66 Comanche program, just in tiltrotor form. As a tiltrotor, it would have had a much faster and more fuel efficient cruise, but a less efficient hover, than a helicopter. The Army turned out to not want tiltrotors for this application, and made sure that they were effectively excluded from the LHX competition.

 

Note the hand-written notation that missiles would only be fired in hover… otherwise, they would pass through the proprotor disk. However, it seems likely that missiles could be fired while the rotors were tiltedless than fully upwards, meaning that the craft could fire and move at a fair rate at the same time, just not at full speed.

 Posted by at 9:16 pm

Small Diameter Bomb

 aircraft, awesomeness, photography, weapons  5 Responses »
Oct 052012
 

Shockwaves are awesome. The Small Diameter Bomb delivers.


A GBU-39/B small diameter bomb strikes a BM-21 rocket launcher during a test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in 2005. SDB was integrated on the F-15E Strike Eagle first, and is being delivered to combat units for use in the war on terrorism.

A small diameter bomb hits an A-7 parked inside a concrete aircraft shelter during a test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. SDB is an autonomous, 250 pound class weapon that can be used in adverse weather and has a standoff range of more than 50 nautical miles.

 Posted by at 1:22 pm

Looking for…

 aircraft, blather, models, science fiction, ships  6 Responses »
Oct 022012
 

1) Schematics and whatnot of the “Quinjet” from the “Avengers” movie. I’m discussing building a CAD model of this for Fantastic Plastic, but diagrams are unavailable. Screenshots galore will be available, but I could really use accurate diagrams.

2) The same for the “Avengers” helicarrier.

———–

3) Either a scan of this, or at least pointers to when and where it was published (apparently sometime prior to October, 1944):

——-

4) Better/more detailed diagrams & illustrations – and original source documentation – of this early 1980’s concept by Martin Marietta for a “Phase II” restoration of the Iowa class battleships into battlecarriers by replacing the aft turret with a hangar, ski-jumps for Harriers and VLS missiles, for a conversion kit:

 Posted by at 8:41 pm
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