Nov 212010
A painting rendered in sadly horrible quality of a Lockheed concept from the mid/late 1960’s. As memory serves, it was published in an Italian magazine or newspaper, with no meaningful description of the vehicle. It’s clearly a design for the US Navy (the “NAVY” sorta gives that away), so it has to be small enough to fit on an aircraft carrier. Faint lines seem to indicate swing-wings, which would fit with Naval aircraft designs of the period. It appears to be a strike-fighter, or dedicated attack aircraft, meant for high speed and – probably – low radar cross section.
All I have is what you see here. Any pointers would be appreciated.
7 Responses to “Lockheed Mystery Project”
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Perhaps it was an early drawing of the Navy’s Fleet Air Defense Fighter concept shortly before it was sucked into the TFX procurement. Although the low-level bombing run would seem to counter that.
Strange project, it looks like high-supersonic high altitude bomber/penetrator more than a low-low altitude bomber.
It also shows a very poor (at least unaceptable) visibility for a carrier aircraft (perhaps during landing it shold have a sort of swing-nose “a la Concorde”….).
The artwork shows one in the background apparently climbing steeply to altitude so maybe the idea is to come in very fast and high, descend to low altitude for the bombing run itself, and then immediately climb back up high for the flight back to the carrier.
It looks familiar, but I went through my books and did some web searching for it yesterday with no luck, although I did find four web pages that have some really wild aircraft designs, one of which makes it look like one of the aircraft we discussed here as possibly being related to the classified ISINGLASS reconnaissance program might indeed be a contestant design for that aircraft, as the performance is about right.
Here’s the web pages:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?165252-Artists-Conceptions-and-Drawings
…and the ISINGLASS thingy:
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/6256/10212004125745pm.jpg
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/9780/10212004125244pm.jpg
One wonders if the “X-24C” design is RHEINBERRY related.
Some more info on that drawing. It was published in Italian magazine Alata in December 1969. Originated from a visit of the editor-in-chief to Burbank. He was showed some designs from a few previous years (see various posts by myself on SPF). So the design cannot be later than November 1969. The caption says it is AMSA related, but I doubt. My guess it is from 1966 at the earliest. Scenary seems tropical (rain falling). No trace in the CALAC files, but I dont think it is GALAC. Maybe Skunk Works. I doubt it is Rheinberry-related, also. The reproduction is poor, but the general arrangement, apart for the dorsal intake, isn’t so exotic, and surely not so “hypersoneque”, in my opinion (look at the big tail, lot of drag)
A few things:
1) AMSA is unlikely, what with the “Navy” painted on the side (AMSA, Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft, was a USAF competition that led to the B-1)
2) My first thought would be to doubt hypersonicness, given the dorsal inlet. Pressure recovery would be terrible. But it would not be the only time Lockheed would at least paint a pictue of a hypersonic vehicle with a dorsal inlet. There’s a vaguely similar vehicle here: http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=4767
3) TFX seems most likely to me. Boeing had a number of dorsal-inletted TFX designs, including some stealthy ones, and some that looked really Flash Gordon… looked like they were going Mach 4 when they were standing still. But they had top speeds of Mach 2 or less… the aerodynamical sweeptitude being an effort to reduce supersonic drag to allow supercruising with the engines of the day, as well as reduce RCS.
4) Compared to the “mystery missile,” the “mystery aircraft” has a *huge* vertical tail. Not so useful at high speed, but kinda necessary to maintain control at high alpha and low speed… like when you’re trying to land on an aircraft carrier.
The dorsal intakes reminded me of the “mystery missile” also.
Considering how poor the airflow would be into them during a low speed landing as the angle of attack increased, the only reason you would put them on the top would be for radar stealth.
The “mystery missile” probably uses active exhaust vectoring to achieve yaw stability, and is powered all the way down to impact.
Another possibility is that the wing control surfaces split open like the Northrop “flaperons” to serve as drag brakes to keep the nose going in the right direction.
So that’s where POTA got the ICARUS…