Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Besides the MiG-31 and the JAS-37 Viggen, there are persistent stories about the gun camera footage from a Royal Air Force English Electric Lightning that bounced the SR-71 that set the trans-Atlantic speed record on its way into the Farnborough Air Show in 1974. (The RAF knew its flight plan in advance, so they sent a particularly "hot" Lightning F.3 out over the Atlantic: it tanked up, climbed on a ballistic trajectory, and bounced the SR-71 from above and behind. Much sniggering allegedly ensued, behind closed doors.)

The Lightning was a world speed record holder in its day, and had a ridiculous climb rate and service ceiling -- the RAF admitted to "over 60,000 feet" in the 1960s: they made intercepts on U-2s on a regular basis, and are confirmed to have hit 88,000 feet on ballistic profiles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning#Clim...

(It's only with the introduction of the Eurofighter Typhoon II into service that the RAF has fielded another aircraft with the high speed performance of the Lightning, after a gap of more than 20 years.)

The MiG-31 and Viggen stories have a lot of shaky details, like whether their AAMs could have even reached the SR-71 with 20K vertical feet left to cover, etc. Radar lock notwithstanding.

Now the story of the ballistic climb with the Lightning seems cut from the same cloth, with even the current Wikipedia reading "88,000" yet "trading speed for altitude." What does it really matter, when a mach 2.0 craft like the lightning reaches 88K feet, yet is trading speed for altitude?

The comments on the article are enlightening; for example: "The multi-component surveillance mission never, ever, reported any "lock-on" by any aircraft, from any nation"

Hmm...

Now the story of the ballistic climb with the Lightning seems cut from the same cloth, with even the current Wikipedia reading "88,000" yet "trading speed for altitude." What does it really matter, when a mach 2.0 craft like the lightning reaches 88K feet, yet is trading speed for altitude?

In the case of the Lightning, it supposedly could have gotten itself up to 87K in the path of an SR-71, and gotten a missile lock, had the Lightning been capable of firing radar guided missiles, but from what I've read, this was not the case. (Also, maneuvering to orient the plane for missile launch would've been dubious at best.)

"...trading speed for altitude" Sounds to me like it trades using power to attain speed for using power to counter gravity. IOW, when it goes (near) vertical, it loses lots of speed but can gain a tremendous altitude.

What does "bounced" mean?

  A Lightning flying at optimum climb profile would reach 
  36,000 ft in under three minutes.

((36000 / 5280) / 3) * 60 = ~136 Miles per Hour

...well that's not very fast at all!</sarcasm>

Optimum != Maximum

NB: 36,000 feet in 3 minutes is 12,000 feet/min. Max climb rate for the Lightning was 50,000 feet/min, but it got there by basically pumping fuel into the afterburners with a fire hose.

(The Lightning had two main defects as an air defense interceptor: insane fuel burn rate at max thrust, and limited armament. The longest ever recorded sortie without in-flight refueling was 1h56m, but it was common for them to be running low on gas and need to tank up 20 minutes after a hot scramble.)

Small correction: I believe it was a JA-37, not JAS.

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