NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years

globalaviationresource.com

88 pointscurtis37 comments

I got to see an English Electric Canberra flying at a Temora Air Museum flight day. Very impressive machine and it boggled my mind that it was originally introduced to service back in 1951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU

Love it. I have only seen the static one at RAF Cosford, they are really nice looking planes. IIRC the one there is white and fitted out for reconnaissance.

Presumably Anti-Flash White?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white

Highly probably, since several Canberra squadrons were equipped with wither Mark-7 Thor (US) or Red Beard (UK) tactical nuclear devices.

The comments on that article are great too:

>> The ap-22s-2 Full Pressure Suits were my biggest immediate problem. The suits were ADC hand me downs, all going over age. New suits were finally procured after numerous equipment failures, but depot support managed to keep the suits going pending replacements. The suits did their job on at least seven occasions of cockpit pressurization loss at altitude and allowed the crew to return safely to base.

Is it my browser or is this website disabling right clicks? Javascript needs to die...

Not just you, it's doing it for me also.

Probably caused by:

    (function($) {
        $(document).bind('contextmenu dragstart', function(event) {
            var target = event.target || event.srcElement;
            target = $(target);
            if (target.data('ngg-protect') || target.parent('a').data('ngg-protect') || target.attr('id') == 'fancybox-img' || target.attr('id') == 'TB_Image' || target.attr('id') == 'shTopImg' || target.attr('id') == 'lightbox-image' || target.hasClass('highslide-image') || target.parents('.ngg-albumoverview').length == 1 || target.parents('.ngg-pro-album').length == 1 || photocrati_image_protection_global.enabled == '1') {
                event.preventDefault()
            }
        })
    }(jQuery));

It's extremely annoying when sites do this...

It's JS hate that needs to die. Maybe there's a name for a condition where people are so stuck up in their ways they can't accept objectively positive change (of The web platform).

As for this bs code, the people who wrote this will find other ways to discredit themselves, it's not a job of a platform's maker to babysit everyone and prevent their stupid decisions.

Be thankful that you can actually override this due to platform's (and JS's) openness, it could've been far worse, in many other cases you'd need disassembly to fix something like that.

Maybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane for doing what they're doing?

Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.

So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?

The Canberra is a lot bigger than a U-2 (crew of 2-3 instead of 1, has a large bomb bay that got repurposed for instruments/recon payloads, etc). Also, there are probably a lot more spare parts kicking around -- over a thousand were built, and it only went out of front-line service (last operator: the Indian Air Force) in 2007.

The SR-71 is monstrously expensive to operate and flies in an utterly different regime -- high supersonic/low hypersonic flight, at higher altitude. And, again, it has a smaller payload.

It's kind of amazing that an aircraft specc'ed in 1944 as an emergency wartime replacement for the de Havilland Mosquito is still flying in anything other than an air show display role.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito

U-2 is notoriously hard to fly (at altitude the difference between optimal cruise speed, tearing the wings off or stalling is 12kn).

SR71 is horrifically expensive to fly and service plus it's engineering is complex (and the jigs don't exist anymore) and expensive to maintain (lots of fancy titanium parts) and the airframe hours are better spent on doing what the SR71A was built for.

The 'nice' thing with old planes is they are comparatively simpler to maintain and where often 'over' engineered by modern standards so are more forgiving.

That's a good answer. A data visualization would be something like a 2-d graph of altitude vs airspeed and in theory something could be made to fly over every point on that plane, and NASA does aeronautical research over every point on that plane.

Unfortunately real aircraft only safely fly inside weirdly shaped polygons on that graph. And the U-2 is a really pointy narrow little shape that crosses all the Y-axis altitudes but the speed is restricted such that its shape is practically a line both above and below the plane can't fly so no data or research is possible off that narrow line. If you merely want to get to 70 Kft then its awesome, if you want to take engineering data or science experiments at exactly 352 knots not 351 or 353 knots, and 70 Kft, then unless you're very lucky you're not flying a U2 on that research mission.

That's the secret of the U2. Everyone knows back in the good old days it was developed and flown in months for no cost compared to the F-22. However the engineering criteria were staggeringly different and there's a big difference between "fly extremely high without crashing while carrying a camera" vs "outfly and outfight every tactical fighter aircraft and missile system on the entire planet, everywhere, under every circumstance" and the difference is about 19 years of development and about a trillion bucks. There is no management secret or space alien technology secret to the U2, its just a very restricted aircraft that barely flies under ideal conditions, but when it does, it can fly higher than any plane built up to when it was designed...

Add a third dimension of cost and you've got the slightly bigger polygon of the SR71 but it costs a bazillion dollars per flight hour. So the Z-axis to the graph of cost. The SR71 is like a skyscraper compared to the new plane.

The plane in the linked article is pretty cheap. It can fly in the part of the 3-d graph where the U2 can't and at maybe a hundredth the cost of the SR71. Also if can fly at speeds much slower than the SR71 at altitude. Its a pretty cool research tool.

A really bad car analogy is NASA already has the worlds most expensive, fastest pneumatic torque wrench in the world AND also has the longest Phillips blade screwdriver in the world. However they've just obtained a pretty high end adjustable crescent wrench. Superficially, "aren't they all just tools?" "Is there any difference between those tools?" "can't they save money by having only one tool that tightens things?" but in practice that doesn't really work and having a new tool in the toolbox is going to help quite a bit for some of their jobs.

These old spy planes are perfect examples of what you can do when you build something for a single purpose.

Planes like the F35 are designed by someone who read a bunch of blogs about the perfect way to design a plane. You don't design a plane, you design a plane framework on which you can add whatever feature the customer asks for.

A lot like SW design these days. We all know this doesn't work well and yet...

Designed by W.E.W. Petter. His previous designs, Westland Whirlwind and Welkin had narrow wings, which caused problems, hence the broad wings for the Canberra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.E.W._Petter

And also, of those two, only the U2 is still in service. All SR-71s have been sent to museums now, sadly. This includes NASA's which were the last in service, operated until the mid nineties.

Interestingly, NASA _does_ operate a variant of the U2 currently, as the ER-2 [1] high-altitude earth-resources observatory.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-046...

So the key quality here is high-altitude performance? Like higher than the service ceilings of current civilian planes or military transports?

I believe this is correct. The service ceiling for a very modern Boeing 787 is ~13,000 m whereas in 1957 a Canberra achieved the then-record altitude of 21,430 m: http://www.fai.org/fai-record-file/?recordId=9843

There's some discussion that it's for flying either the 'BACN' comms system or 'HALOE' lidar system.

https://warisboring.com/what-in-the-world-is-nasas-research-...

https://www.wired.com/2012/09/air-force-universal-translator... (caution anti-adblock)

Like the B-52, it's far cheaper to use an old plane that fits the role perfectly than it is to try to build a new one.

That plane is oddly attractive.

Beautifully functional.

Here's another purely functional ship, the Wilga, formed by its mission: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images

> Oddly attractive.

Pretty much sums up all british jet aircraft from the 40's to the 60's.

Such a cool looking plane. Great to see it has a new purpose in life.

As a child raised on Gerry Anderson's designs, this is how aircraft should look!

The inevitable link to a pic of a TSR2 - which is what the future really looked like in the 1960s:

http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC-TSR-2/0979919/L/

Article is from 2013. Is anyone familiar enough with flight trackers to see if it is still in use? The tail number is N927NA.

Looks like it flew yesterday https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01

That's a strange flight pattern, any insight into it? Erratically gain altitude, make a long run and then a tight spiral back down before returning to land?

There's a pretty strong weather system in that area, and that looks like a flight pattern to try to figure out what sort of risk the storm has in generating tornadoes. Head out in case there's another area that could use a little extra info, and then come back home.

> The tail number is N927NA.

As a European, the phrase 'tail number' was unfamiliar so I did a few searches.

It seems to have derived ( in the USA ) from original airline fleet-numbering practice, where the aircraft would have an arbitrary and unhelpful state- or even city-issued registration and a separate self-assigned fleet number painted on the tail, which was easier to handle for scheduling purposes.

Once national N-numbering for registrations was introduced this became less common because the FAA permitted reservation of blocks of sequential registrations, but some large airlines continue to use a parallel fleet numbering scheme. And the phrase 'tail number' stuck in parlance instead of 'registration'.

In Europe it is common to use to the last two or three letters of registrations repeated on the tail or nose-wheel doors as the fleet airframe identifier and 'tail number' is unknown.

There is a nice video of it flying in formation in December : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmVTzN8exQ

Does anyone know why the ends of the wings are missing in some of the photos?

Runway clearance - the wing droop at the tips is low enough to possibly hit the runway lights (usually below 18" high). They remove them for high speed taxi tests, and for the actual flights they temporarily replace the "high" lights with mid-height ones and install the wingtips.

I got the restoration but I didn't get what this plane is actually to be used for. Why do they need this plane? How will it help open up the first tourist hotels on Mars? Seems going backwards to space exploration.

NASA does much much more than just space exploration.

Aeronautical research. The Aeronautics part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration isn't just a bygone relic. Their most visible projects are their space side, but they do a fuckton of research into making planes fly better/faster/safer. They do research on new control methods of planes, new geometries, how weather phenomena affect planes, etc.

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