A scan of a vintage photo of the cockpit of one of the North American XB-70 bombers. It looks like it’s probably during assembly.
I have uploaded the full resolution scan (12X9.3 at 300dpi) of the photo to the 2019-07 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Put those three together and you have the start of an aviation museum. A rather slim, ragged museum, but ya gotta start somewhere…
Further continuing the panoramic documentation of the recent trip:
The “cutaway F-86.” Granted, all they did was simply remove the skin from an F-86, but it sure looks like a whole lot of extra work. That, I assume, is the modelmaker in me talking.
Another view of the YF-12.
XF-92, X-3, Goblin and XB-70:
XB-70 looming over lifting bodies
“Columbine” Presidential Conny. Shiny!
Continuing the panoramic documentation of the recent trip:
Head-on shot of the XB-70. This one involved peeking though other displays to get this angle. This is another Big Friggen Image; at 300 dpi, it’d print out at 5.4 feet wide.
B-2 on the left, SR-71 in the middle. Photography of dark *and* light aircraft in this dimly yet harshly lit environment is a bit of a challenge. I suppose I should have worked on high dynamic range proficiency before this trip, but it sadly never occurred to me.
Entrance into the Cold War gallery.
Another balcony overview of the Cold War gallery:
The X-15 and the YF-12 are sorta crammed together:
Further much-ensmallered versions of the Museum panoramas…
Apollo 15, lifting bodies, XB-70, Keyhole spy satellite.
Titan IVm XP-75, P-59, tail end of the XB-70
Two views of Bocks Car, winner of the Battle of Nagasaki
B-2 and SR-71. Not so apparent at this resolution, but at full rez you can see a whole lot of little white splotches on top of the B-2. I’m guessing bird poop, as there were a few birds flapping around inside at least Building 4 while I was there.
Selecting images from the recent trip and stitching together panoramas is an ongoing effort, and will be for a while yet. The panoramas range from the “artistic: that looks great” to the “useful for references: that looks kinda odd.” Many of them have missing sections, but so long as the panorama captured the aircraft I was after, having a corner missing is ok.
The combination of a telephoto lens with a 24 megapixel sensor has led to some *monstrous* panoramas. For example:
This “partial” panorama of the X-15 is 40,700 pixels wide. At 300 dpi (pretty much the standard for photo printing), that’s 135 inches wide. That’s 11.3 *feet* (or 3.45 meters) wide.
Another partial, this time of the XB-70. At 300 dpi, this one would be 14.75 feet long. If you look just behind the cockpit side window you can just make out some markings.
Well… this is a crop of the full-rez panorama showing just those markings:
Balcony panorama at the SAC Museum in Nebraska:
Balcony overview panorama of the Cold War gallery at the USAF Museum:
XB-70, X-15, lifting bodies, Gemini B:
Balcony overview panorama of Building 4 at the USAF museum:
The “Valkyrie cafe” at the USAF museum has a large mural painting of the XB-70. It’s several dozen feet wide and impossible to photograph straight-on (not only is there stuff in the way, it’s too huge for the space available). But there is one spot where you can get the whole thing. So, a number of photos were stitched together then “warped” to get it back into rectangular format. And the end result is pretty spiffy, and at 300 dpi it’d print out at 53 inches long. Needs some color correction.
These images have of course been scaled waaaaaay down to fit on the blog. Those who signed up for the DVD will of course get the full rez versions (though some compromises may be needed… that ginormous XB-70 panorama is over 800 megabytes).
As some knew and others may have guessed, I’ve been traveling for the past three or so weeks. This excursion included visits to:
This included putting the new Nikon D5500 through its paces, cranking out 5300+ museum photos at around 75 gigabytes. The primary goal of the exercise was to photo the bejesus out of the XB-70 in Dayton, which task has been accomplished as best as possible within the crowded confines of the museums Building 4.
A whole lot of processing is now needed, along with catching up on stuff. Stuff including picking up four undoubtedly annoyed cats from the vet and re-integrating them into a house that smells kinda… stale.
Several days ago word hit of someone with six file boxes of their fathers stuff, wondering what to do with it. Not an unusual occurrence. But in this case, the father was an important engineer at North American Aviation, worked on the XB-70, B-1 and Shuttle, and the files all related to that. In the end, the archive wound up on Craigslist, and sold shortly afterwards. It is now being shipped… to me.
I would not have been able to afford the archive – never mind the shipping costs – on my own. However, by working with the patrons on the APR Patreon , we were able to pool funds so that the total cost per person is *trivial.* When the archive gets here – all 300+ pounds of it – I will go through every single page and catalog it; the best stuff will be scanned and, barring ITAR & classification issues, all of the crowdfunders will receive the complete set of high-rez scans. And then when I’ve gleaned from it what’s worth gleaning, it will be donated to an appropriate archive… the Smithsonian, the SDASM, the National Archives, Edwards AFB, whatever seems best in the end.
The door to sign up for this crowdfunding project is now closed. It followed shortly on the heels of a similar project that scored an admittedly much smaller but definitely fascinating collection of F2Y Sea Dart documentation and diagrams, including much about operational follow-on attack aircraft meant to operate from ships and subs; and a similar archive that was crowdfunded a year or two back that scored a whole bunch of 2707 SST stuff. I’ve grown sick of seeing amazing stuff appear on ebay and then vanish into a black hole, never to be seen by anyone again; this way, aerospace history is preserved and shared.
If you’d like to be involved in this sort of thing, sign up for the APR Patreon and you’ll not only get the monthly aerospace goodies that comes with membership, but you’ll also be able to get in on these crowd funding efforts. You’ll save aerospace history, get a bunch of amazing stuff, and not have to spend a whole lot to do it.
The article is pretty lean on details, but given that all seven crew managed to escape unharmed from the plane *after* it crashed (“shortly after takeoff”), and the lone photo shows the plane on fire but not scattered across the landscape, I’d guess it had some sort of engine trouble and either flopped off the end of the runway or tried to go-around but didn’t quite make it.
Whatever the cause is, I would almost certainly be unsurprised. These planes are about twice as old as the pilots who fly them. Remember the XB-70, the Mach 3 superbomber from the early 1960’s? It was intended to *replace* the B-52.
Side-view diagram of a Boeing concept for a hydrogen-fueled supersonic bomber from 1956. This monster is shown to scale with a North American XB-70. More info and diagrams of this are in US Bomber Projects issue 9.
