US Air Force Confirms New Stealth Aircraft 287
DesScorp writes "Aviation Week reports that the USAF has confirmed the existence of a new, formerly secret stealth aircraft, designated RQ-170 Sentinel, developed at Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works. Rumors of a secret new jet have been flying since 2007, with longtime aviation journalist Bill Sweetman dubbing the possible aircraft 'The Beast of Kandahar' because of the urban legend-like reports from Afghanistan. The aircraft is a UAV, a pilot-less drone that appears to have some kind of reconnaissance-only mission for the time being. It's a tailless flying wing that resembles a fighter-sized B-2 bomber."
Old news to me (Score:4, Interesting)
This craft is also capable of bombing missions, according to the Military Channel's own documentaries on experimental craft. It DOES have a bomb bay and missile mounts.
The same documentary also said that this craft is capable of completely autonomous aircraft carrier landings, and can even do so in the dark. (a milestone feat in itself, due many factors)
It's also capable of 24+ hour flight, which is awesome for scouting missions waiting for a mobile target, and is capable of mid-air refueling. (this is a living pilot no-no, and potentially keeps the craft up as long as it needs to be).
Eventually, this will be flying more than our own pilots will be, due to the fact that pilots cannot be mass-produced. Eventually, we WILL be putting arms on them, even if only because there might not be a good enough alternative.
Also, rumors about similar tanks are in the works... that are so overengineered that they tried to break it and couldn't (experimental model).
X-45 outgrowth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:top secret (Score:5, Interesting)
Afghanistan is a testing ground for the UAV. It is a fairly safe testing ground because the Afghanis do not have anything that has a realistic chance at shooting it down. The fact that it was at an international aeroport suggests that the US does not consider it to be one of their secret planes anymore. It will be interesting to see (five or ten years from now) what the real cutting edge of military aviation is in 2009.
Stealth aircraft vs. the Taliban?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Possible Reasons Why (Score:5, Interesting)
Any ideas on why they need such a secret and stealthy UAV in Afghanistan for? Obviously they weren't too worried about it if this Bill Sweetman guy was able to see it at the Kandahar International Airport.
One, Sweetman didn't discover it in the field. He was likely first alerted to it when someone sent him the grainy photos of the bird in flight. He's probably the most prominent miltary aviation journalist in the world, so people come to him when they think they've found something secret.
As to why it's in Afghanistan, that was a puzzle to me to at first, but some very good (and intriguing) theories have come up about it. For one, some note that not everyone in the Pakistani military is reliable in the Afghan war; there's a good chance some members are feeding intel to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It's been suggested that since we've become very dependent on sending Predators and Reapers to hunt the Taliban in the desert, perhaps we don't completely trust Pakistani radar operators anymore. Perhaps we think they're sending what they know to the very people we're hunting.
Another, even more intriguing possibility, is that China is right next door. And considering the luck we've had with conventional intel aircraft monitoring China [wikipedia.org], perhaps this is our way of keeping an eye on the growing Dragon. However, if we're actually penetrating Chinese airspace, then we're playing a very dangerous, Gary Powers-like game [wikipedia.org].
More like Northrop's plane (Score:3, Interesting)
From the crappy pic at AviationLeak, it looks like it may be an outgrowth of the X-45 [globalaircraft.org] development bird [globalaircraft.org].
It looks more like the Navy's X-47B [northropgrumman.com], which is also a tailless flying wing. The Navy and NG have been very open about the program, so perhaps that's another reason why USAF felt they didn't have to hide the Sentinel anymore.
Re:Old news to me (Score:2, Interesting)
This is, as far as I know, somewhat misleading. You can build an aircraft to withstand many more Gs than a human pilot can, but even today with human pilots the limiting factor isn't the human so much as the hardpoints. The F-16, at least, turns down the control sensitivity and limits maneuvering when carrying pretty much anything besides air to air missiles--air-ground stores and the hardpoints that hold them aren't rated for much more than 6.5g, well within the range of a human pilot.
IANAP, though, so I could be wrong.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also worth pointing out that many of the medical advancements we would take for granted today came from military research/endeavours... :) Not all of the money being poured into the military is being spent on building bigger and better guns.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:4, Interesting)
>American soldiers haven't had to fear death from the skies for 50 years because of America's complete superiority in the air
Except from "blue on blue" aka "friendly fire".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_fire [wikipedia.org]
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:1, Interesting)
2) Your stat is meaningless. As a percentage of GDP, US military spending is certainly high but it's not even close to the highest (which is Saudi Arabia) and is similar with other countries with a military focus (like Russia).
3) The US spends less as a percentage of GDP now than it has in many many years of its history. In fact, if you consider war era defense spending, we spend less now than we ever have in the last 100 years.
How's that for fun facts?
p.s. some of this info you can get from here: http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending [globalissues.org]
for the history information, you'll have to dig harder. I built my own spreadsheet to learn more about government spending (and what parties are responsible for it).
BWB (Score:4, Interesting)
The US is not so much worried about Pakistan (Score:5, Interesting)
The current conflict is a lot more dangerous then a lot of people in the west presume. They see a couple of towelheads shooting an AK-47 in the air or guarding someone with an RPG (really, what are you going to do Einstein, shoot your prisoner with an explosive grenade from 2 meters away?) and think "what danger could they be". Not much. Except in very large numbers to a country where the ordinary soldier is not all that motivated in the first place. And that is what Pakistan faces and the price is a nuclear arsenal that very few people in the world would tolerate even the risk of the Taliban getting their hands on it.
This ain't a message against the goverment of Pakistan, it is preperation for what goverment there might be in control tomorrow.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure that the F-35 is overpriced, but it is not a boondoggle. Our next fight will at some point involve an adversary who has the ability to knock out our satellite links to UAVs. At that point, you need planes with a pilot inside - and that will have to be advanced fighters of the F-35/F-22 type. We don't want to have to develop a brand new fighter at the beginning of a classical war.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:2, Interesting)
Whereas UAV pilots cower in bunkers on another continent - so very brave.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is nothing as beneficial to mankind as Pax Americana
Do you really believe that or are you being um, ironic or sarcastic or something?
I need to know because I'll mark you friend or for accordingly.
Personally, I find the prospect of a world ruled from America horrifying.
I want to be able to see breasts on television sometimes.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't follow defense technology at all and I do question the value of a number of the programs. But from what I've seen so far, the RQ-170 makes a lot of sense.
The best battle is the one you never have to fight because your enemy realizes he cannot possibly win by any method of scoring. Systems like the RQ-170 are major components of this best practices strategy.
This also suggests the primary reason for beginning to publicize the RQ-170 at this time, and for its deployment in Afghanistan. The USA is saying to the Taliban and Al Qaida that for this and all kinds of other technical reasons, they should abandon their attempts to achieve a military success and try instead to bargain for some small piece of their vision. I can think of no other reason for the story of the RQ-170 to become public right now: it is abundantly clear that sending this message to the Afghan insurgents is well worth the cost of bringing this bird out of the closet.
And as others in this thread have suggested, it should cause potential adversaries to question whether the RQ-170 program has also served as a way of hiding the development and deployment of something even more capable...
Re:Sonic booms out west... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple rule for supersonic aircraft maximum speeds is to think of a right triangle, one point at the nose, one at the wingtip and the right angle on the center line near the back (in line with the nose and the wingtip).
The aircrafts maximum speed (in Mach) is the ratio of fuselage length to wing length (minus a little bit).
The wing tip has to be behind the shock wave generated by the nose.
This plane is not even fast subsonic by the looks of things.
This doesn't work for the space shuttle as it's very nose high when at maximum speed but holds for anything up to an X-15 or SR-71.
Re:Is it really that necessary? (Score:4, Interesting)
About Iran's birds :
F-14s take a ton of maintenance and spare parts to keep them flying. I think it's somewhere on the order of 50 man hours in maintenance for every hour in the air, and those 50 man hours are generally fixing or replacing hardware. Given that Iran hasn't got a constant feed of spare parts to keep the Tomcat's in the air, I am going to bet they scavenged some planes to keep others flying, recursively, until none were still air-worthy.
The MiG 29s? They can probably buy spare parts for those, no problems.
Re:top secret (Score:5, Interesting)
It more than likely has already existed for some time [wikipedia.org]. While any comment on the technology implemented is speculation, it is more than likely that treaty negotiations between the US and USSR to stop manned surveillance flights over each others territory _dictates_ that any current technology implemented for that mission is a UAV. It is unlikely that the US military would allow a gap in mission capability.
It is more than likely that the cost over-runs of the B1 bomber program were actually the development costs of the SR-91 and that any UAV technology we see implemented now is actually a descendant of the "SR-91" program on a different airframe.
Re:Makes sense. (Score:2, Interesting)
Alternate (Score:1, Interesting)
Possibly/probably it is being used primarily over Iran, not Afghanistan. And it is made public because too many people have seen it now and the pictures exist. They did exactly the same thing with all the other past blackops planes, they eventually became too well known and too many people had knowledge of them and too many sightings to ignore.
I think it is also safe to assume that they have a further very advanced manned plane-perhaps even with hybrid engines and capable of at least brief exoatmospheric flight- that they don't admit to, in operation in small numbers.
This sort of stay two generations ahead of what they admit to having has been their standard operating procedure since...there has been an air force. I see no reason at all that nighthawk and spirit were the last secretly developed manned planes. I believe they still have just as much interest in manned flight as they do unmanned flight, for various reasons.
Re:Makes sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
Recon and close air support, though, is going to go UAV. Using an F-16 to take out a truck is not only overkill, you don't have enough fighters to do it very often.
Just a nitpick, the role you describe (taking out a truck) is not close air support. I'm guessing you mean like the videos from the Gulf War where they showed a fighter firing a missile to take out a truck in a convoy. Generally those were hits on high value targets, and as you state, unmanned vehicles are perfect for that role. For general convoy wrecking duty, or in an actual close air support role (extended loitering in an area with lots of armor, fuel, and firepower to be intimately and directly involved with combat operations on the ground, vs UAVs which typically fire off one missile from a distance then call it quits) the A-10 or Apache are the weapons of choice and neither one of those aircraft will be replaced by unmanned vehicles any time soon.