An Israeli F-15 landed without a wing (2020)
taskandpurpose.com
taskandpurpose.com
And the plane was so sturdy they just stuck another wing on it and put it back in service.
Update: /u/rmason did a better summary while I was writing mine but I refuse to delete due to sunk cost fallacy—thumb pain incurred while typing
Maybe the F-15 can land vertically too.
I heard one described as "a brick with a jet engine strapped to it".
Safely landing, otoh, now that's a feat!
It may have been German mad-scientists who pioneered sending rockets to space, but I think you actually have to be more crazy to think you can bring them back down again and land them in one piece! (Not that it has stopped Musk from doing just that...)
> You may well be forgiven for thinking that rockets which take off vertically and then land again vertically were a recent development by the likes of Blue Origin and SpaceX but a quick look back the history of rocketry and you’ll see that this technique is far from new and was first used nearly 60 years ago ...
> The image of rockets landing vertically on their tail fins has been popularised in Science fiction since buck Rodgers in the early 1930’s, though it took nearly 30 years to bring the technology to a point where it could be used practically ...
> The first instance of a rocket-powered vertical take off and vertical landing was shown in 1961 with the Bell Rocket belt. ...
> But within a few years there would be a rocket-powered vertical take off and vertical landing vehicle that would be a total success and be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
> That vehicle was the Apollo lunar lander, a design that was used in the most inhospitable place man had even been to and worked without fail on six separate missions. ...
> It wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that the first true vertical take-off and vertical landing rocket was seen in the form of the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper Experimental or DC-X.
Video of the DC-X from 1995, launching and landing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o .
When I was a kid, my father attributed the phrase to a short-lived TV show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Nun
F-15 is using something called a lifting body design in which fuselage itself produces lift. That's what save this one. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body
Some airliners don't even use rudder during cruise to avoid upsetting passengers in the rear.
260 knots ~ 300 mph.
Thats 480 km/h.
Not a pilot, although I've flown propeller planes and landed a couple of times. I've driven cars just shy of 280 km/h (on a mostly clear autobahn). Those spec'ed 130 knots seem approachable (with training). But doing approach + touchdown at 480 km/h with controllable aircraft is already stretching my imagination, doing it while keeping attitude of an unbalanced brick under control is absolutely bonkers.
I'm a little disappointed that we know hardly anything about this incident except the surreal parts. What specific events lead to the collision? What happened to the Skyhawk and its pilot?[1] Was there an investigation, and if so, what were its findings? I guess I've been spoiled by publicized NTSB investigations.
[1] The pilot of the Skyhawk was automatically ejected and his aircraft disintegrated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision
1. This plane was machined out of blocks of titanium. 80% of the material is machined away. I asked the guide if it's collected and reused. He said "no". Their optimization for performance didn't really have to consider cost.
2. Seeing the "testing" was a mind-blow that I can still see in my mind 35 years later. They had an aircraft in a test harness and grabbed the tips of both wings in massive hydraulic presses, and bent that wing up and down by a couple meters. My brain was like “that’s impossible – they should snap off”.
3. “Avoid FOD” signs everywhere - "Foreign Object Damage". I learned many new acronyms that day.
If you take into account the time to market, cost of development, fighting record it's the the unicorn-sweetspot :)
a Very under rated(I couldn't bring myself to say under the radar, Im not that type of person) plane !
"In a testament to just how incredibly tough these aircraft really are, the damaged F-15 was transported to a maintenance facility in Tel Nof, where it was given a new wing and returned to service."
Am I reading this correctly? Events were something like: So you rip a wing off a plane in a mid-air collision but you can safely assume that it did not suffer fundamental structural damage, so you can just stick a wing back on it and it is good to go?
The wings on an F-16 for example are secured by two bolts all you need is to disconnect the avionics remove the bolts and the wing comes off.
You can replace a wing on an F-16 within under half an hour without skipping any steps it is like changing tires on a car.
https://www.rtsauto.com/should-you-put-anti-seize-on-your-lu...
The jig is likely to speed up the process and prevent fatigue; doing that torque 16 times per wing would get exhausting.
https://media.defense.gov/2013/Nov/27/2000892775/-1/-1/0/131...
“…each wing possesses 16 wing attach bolts.”
Source: career Naval Aviation Maintainer, QA on F/A-18's and H-60's, etc.
These things need like 15 hours of maintenance for every flight hour (and this is regular flying with no parts coming off)
I have no experience with military planes but I think in this case "easily" means more like "possible in a few months of work". I suppose when an airframe costs hundreds of millions it takes a lot to make it a write-off.
I don’t know where you are getting that they assumed anything. Most likely they carefully checked every part of the airplane.
Onwards to management! :D
Maybe we can cut down some costs and only use one wing in the future?
Car people love their cars yes, but boat people and pilots treat their vehicle like a child. No idea why.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision
Plane didn't land itself.
The title is correct, and while the pilot does deserve recognition for the impressive feat, the article is primarily about the plane, not the pilot, so changing the focus of the title from the plane to the pilot is not appropriate in this instance.
The subtitle is terrible though: it mentions "he" (the pilot), but doesn't say who "he" is. So for the subtitle to make sense, the pilot's name should be in the title. Perhaps it was originally written with the pilot's name, but was changed by an editor for the reason listed above.