Friday, 6 February 2009
2 comments:
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I love old warbirds like this and they definitely should be kept in flyable condition.
ReplyDeleteHowever, had one of these unfortunately crash about a mile away in 1978, yards from the rail line. The wreckage was visible on the commute home. I've always had the impression that the control systems of the era weren't a good fit for a design that was almost a flying wing. Even with heavily computerized controls, we have seen the recent loss of a B2. The flying wing "like" design has many benefits, but low speed control seems touchy.
Keep em flying, but also keep the cycles low please.
I have read that the F-102s that George Bush ii used to fly, had a nasty habit of flipping over on takeoff or landing (took guts to fly!). I guess when you're talking about fighting a high-tech war, you sometimes have to rush designs out the door, because the alternative would be helplessness before your enemies---100% losses vs. .01%. For that matter, war being an inherently unsafe thing to do, "suitably safe" might mean, "it kills more of the other guys than it kills ours, and doesn't kill enough of ours for them to lose confidence in it". Navy limits for diving are empirically defined as, time/depth pairs at which no more than 5% of healthy young men got DCS.
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