Original F-117 Sketch

(robert arndt) wrote in
om:

FYI, the Arrow was the greatest interceptor of the time and one of
the greatest aircraft of all time.

It was certainly a pretty airplane. But every time I look up
potential specifications on it, it seems to be a bit faster and a
bit higher-flying than the F-4 that was going into first-flight
around the same time. And, I'd hazard a guess, without the extension
to multirole capability that the F-4 had.

A couple of years later, the Brits introduced the Lightning, which
seems to do everything the Arrow would have done, but maybe better.
And a few years after that, out came the MiG-25.

It seems a nice enough airplane, but not untypical of interceptors
making their first flights around then, if a year or two ahead of the
curve.

But I am but an egg.

--
Jim Battista
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

"Thomas Schoene" wrote in message link.net...
robert arndt wrote:
the "Hopeless Diamond" version:

http://www.f-117a.com/images/XST/hdiamond1.gif

Looks much different from the designs the Germans came up with for
their MBB Lampyridae (Firefly)... independently, of course.

Lampyridae reportedly began development in 1981. Have Blue flew in the
1970s. Who was copying whom?
No, the US team that discovered the Lampyridae did so in 1981 after the scale model was being tested. The design studies and construction of the model began years before and was in no way connected to the XST.

The German
design was much better at radar defraction and was from the onset
designed as an armed interceptor.

It might have occurred to them that a LO aircraft with conventional active
radar (State fo the art for the 1980s) was a fairly pointless undertaking.
Ther'es a good reaosn the F-117 does not have radar.

But US pressure cancelled the program just like the Canadian
CF-105 Arrow.

Ah, the eternal lament of would-be super-plane builders everywhere. Easier
to blame the US than their own governments, I guess.

The Arrow wasn't a would be at all- it WAS the greatest interceptor in
the world at the time-far beyond what the US had and equal to the
CIA's U-2 ceiling.


p.s. However, it is not quite confirmed that the Germans actually
stopped with their stealth program. Reports of Firefly II stealth
aircraft being tested in South Africa have persisted for years just as
the now-confirmed German-assisted firing of an Israeli cruise missile
off South Africa's coast on one of the Dolphin subs.

Confirmed? Sez who? I've seen viogorous denials of these alleged cruise
missile tests, but no evidence that they actually happened.

Israeli reports of those tests have been available for the last 2
years. Sightings of the German Firefly II have occured numerous times
over the Overberg Test Range.


Rob

"Ford Prefect" wrote in message
...


B2431 wrote:
From: (robert arndt)


At least you didn't try to claim the F-117 was drived from "lampyridae."

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired



But it was derived from Soviet research done years before....

That happens to be true. The inspiration for the initial F-117 design
(faceting) was indeed derived from a Soviet text on electrostatic
engineering. However the Soviets had no idea what to do with this book, and
never even bothered to make it a classified material. It was obtained pretty
much by chance by one of our engineers, passed around in the right circles,
and a few years later we had the F117.

Mind you, this book was not a blueprint for a steath aircraft, it just had
some interesting theories and mathmatical formulas, and was never more that
a piece of a very large puzzle. It took an enormous amount of innovation,
imagination, money and engineering genius to create the F117. Fortunately,
these are qualities that the Soviets sorely lacked, and Americans have in
spades.

robert arndt wrote:
"Thomas Schoene" wrote in message
link.net...

Easier
to blame the US than their own governments, I guess.

The Arrow wasn't a would be at all- it WAS the greatest interceptor in
the world at the time-far beyond what the US had and equal to the
CIA's U-2 ceiling.

In the limited testing it completed, the CF-105 made just under Mach 2 and
50,000 feet. Could it have done better? Probably. But I don't see what
the U-2 has to do with it.

There were plenty of reasons the plane was cancelled and laying all the
blame on the US is grossly oversimplifying things. I think this site does a
good job laying out the issues:

http://www.vectorsite.net/avarrow.html

US policy was contradictory; some liked Arrow, others didn't. But what
ultimately did it in was not US policy but it's exceptional cost and the
rise of ICBMs, which made intercepting manned bombers rather pointless.

Confirmed? Sez who? I've seen viogorous denials of these alleged
cruise
missile tests, but no evidence that they actually happened.

Israeli reports of those tests have been available for the last 2
years.

But no actual evidence to confirm the reports. The same assertion repeated
many times does not make a fact.

Sightings of the German Firefly II have occured numerous times
over the Overberg Test Range.

I asked specifically about the curiuse missile tests.
--
Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
"If brave men and women never died, there would be nothing
special about bravery." -- Andy Rooney (attributed)