An artists impression of one of the fairly vast number of SST designs put forward by Boeing under the designation “733,” which predated the “2707″ designation. This one features angular delta wings and delta canards… and apparently no passenger windows. Dates from the early 1960′s.
A higher rez of this is available HERE.
A Bell Aircraft illustration of the D188A VTOL strike fighter. This design was described in detail in Article 34, available for both download and printed.
You can download a 5.5 megabyte version of this diagram HERE.
A reproduction of admittedly dismal quality of a Martin Co. painting of their December 1958 Dyna Soar configuration at launch. This configuration, the product of a team-up of Martin and Bell, competed against Boeing (and other companies) and lost; what must have been grating for the Martin-Bell folks was that the Boeing design that won looked nothing like the final Dyna Soar design… which actually looked a whole lot like this vehicle.
The Dyna Soar is here being shown launched by a modified Titan I ICBM. This booster would have fallen far short of orbiting the Dyna Soar; instead it would have simply tossed it on a long hypersonic suborbital trajectory. This would have been a purely experimental aircraft, the natural follow-on to the X-15.
Today I set out for the post office to mail the last of the cyanotype prints that had been ordered. That trip to the PO led by several steps, each of which seemed reasonable at the time, the to Spiral Jetty at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, approximately at the intersection of No and Where. If you’ve never been there… it stinks. Like sulfur and sewage. Bleah. The water itself was distinctly *red,* which was a bit disturbing.
Relevant to this post. while I was there I noticed the sound of a very big, very distant engine of some type, like a large aircraft on the other side of the lake. Try as I might, I never could find the source of it. But in looking for the source of the engine noise, I noticed a tiny speck in the sky. I tried to take photos of it with my telephoto lens, but it was so distant and lost in the haze that focus was virtually impossible. From the first photo I took of it to last was about 40 minutes; it more or less hovered in one spot. Ever now and then in glinted, so I could tell that it was changing aspect, but with neither the naked eye nor through the camera could I make out what it was.
I’ve obviously returned home and downloaded the images. While nowhere near as clear as I’d’ve liked, I think I can now make out what it was: a blimp of some kind.
A collage:
With some fade correction:
I *think* this is one of those barrage-balloon type blimps often strung up over car dealerships and the like to advertise stuff. But the location seems odd… looking more or less due south from the Spiral Jetty, the blimp would seem to be roughly over the Stansbury Bay area, about fifty miles to the south of the Spiral Jetty. Doesn’t seem like there’d be much there apart from I-80, and it seems like it’s *really* high up to advertise stuff.
The “gondola” underneath it seems odd if it is an advertising blimp. In those 40 minutes it doesn’t seem to have moved much at all, arguing that it is actually tethered to the ground, not free-flying. Might it be an observation platform of some kind? Some sorta ecological something-or-other?
UPDATE: Blog reader/religious dissident B Lewis suggests that this is a Lockheed Martin 420K aerostat. Looks reasonable:
The question: what is it watching? well, here we go:
It is apparently tethered at Dugway Proving Grounds… more than 70 miles south of the Spiral Jetty. No wonder this is the first time I’ve seen it.
Some illustrations from a 1979 McDonnell-DouglasF-15 armament handbook illustrating the pointy end of the F-15: the M-61 20mm Vulcan Gatling gun.
The M-61 could send several different rounds downrange, including target rounds, armor piercing and high explosive incendiary.
This plane flew over today:
This is the best of a bad lot of photos. It sounded like a WWII bomber, but it’s clearly single engined. It seemed to be heading towards Brigham City.
Two very large format (one was 36X120 inches) blueprints of the Boeing 2707-300 SST were up on eBay. I bid, and lost badly. So, I won’t be scanning them and making them available, sadly.
So, in lieu of high rez scans, here’s what you get: a coupla photos.
See, this is what happens when you don’t tithe a donation to me on a regular basis: I don’t have the funds to go nuts on the buying of neato aerospace stuff. So my assumption here is that these blueprints have been sold back to Boeing, who will store them in a deep dark place never to see the light of day again until they are fed into a shredder.
Sadly, I’m only kinda kidding.
A three-view of the April 1962 configuration of General Dynamics’ TFX entry. This is very clearly the F-111, but with a few minor differences. The most obvious are the different inlets and the tail “cone.” Here, it appears that at least for the USAF version, the tail cone was meant to angle downwards… presumably forming a ventral fin to aid in stability (or perhaps aid in maneuverability).
Other design features that would change include the profiles of the dorsal and horizontal stabilizers.
A look inside the nose and cockpit of the B-1B, taken from a B-1B system familiarization manual:
Interesting to ponder how many of those important-looking electronic boxes could be replaced with Iphones…