The Feathered Threat To US Air Superiority 195
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mark Thompson writes in Time Magazine that Air Force pilots flying the T-38 Talon can rest easy, knowing that their cockpit canopy can survive hitting a 4-lb. bird at 190 mph. Unfortunately, the Northrop supersonic jet trainer has a top speed of 812 mph. 'To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force fast enough to make a bird strike lethal, and with a windshield too flimsy to deflect one,' wrote one Air Force pilot. Midair collisions between birds and Air Force aircraft have destroyed 39 planes and killed 33 airmen since 1973. That's why the USAF is seeking comments to 'identify potential sources, materials, timeframe, and approximate costs to redesign, test, and produce 550 T-38 forward canopy transparencies to increase bird strike capability.' The move follows a T-38 crash on July 19 in Texas triggered by a canopy bird strike. 'The current 0.23 inch thick stretched acrylic transparency can resist a 4-pound bird impact at 165 knots which does not offer a capability to resist significant bird impacts, and has resulted in the loss of six (6) aircraft and two pilot fatalities,' the service acknowledged. 'Numerous attempts since 1970 were made to evaluate existing materials and redesign a transparency that could withstand a bird impact of 4 pounds at 400 knots.' Previous efforts have foundered because they'd require expensive cockpit modifications to the twin-engine, two-seat supersonic jet. 'Although it would increase the level of bird impact protection,' the Air Force said, 'the proposal was cancelled due to the high cost of the modification.'"
No worries (Score:2)
All of those birds will be extinct in a few decades.
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We need a higher military budget to match their numbers for airborne crafts!
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Way to wrest air superiority from those feathered commie bastards!
We need a higher military budget to match their numbers for airborne crafts!
R&D for Deflector Shields!
D-Oh! (Score:2)
I should have let that page resolve before I linked to it. I was thinking of a different system. [wikipedia.org]
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Speaking of iron domes, is there any particular reason why the cockpit needs to be transparent? A bunch of cameras and viewscreens should work just as well; for that matter, and a 3rd-person view would probably work even better. Let the computer worry about flying the plane, since it's already doing that, and free the pilot to focus entirely on tactical decisions. This would also allow such niceties as gyroscopic seats that always align the pilot for maximum g-force resistance, pre-inputting a plan to be fo
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Given that we're talking about a trainer aircraft, where the object is to provide the pilot with experience in operating a supersonic aircraft, minimizing the pilot's exposure to things like light and G-forces during turns seems counterproductive.
If you're going to make the canopy opaque, or bury the cockpit in the fuselage and minimize the G-forces, what's the advantage to having a pilot on board at all? Turn the aircraft into remotely piloted vehicles ("drones"), protect the squishy parts even further, a
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I've flown with an IFR hood on, and it was mighty nice to look out the window and see blue skies. But I ain't no fighter jock, seems doable by a pro. OTOH a little Chuck Lindberg porthole might be fit into the outer hull for fun?
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Somewhat ironically, the poster boy for bird extinction, the Dodo, would not have been affected by mid-air collisions with planes.
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'Birds have survived far more environmental catastrophes in their tens, or hundreds, of millions of years on Earth. I bet they'll be around after we're long extinct!'
Is that you, Dodo?
Re:No worries (Score:4, Funny)
they made a formal pr announcement of their next move:
"We plan to shit on you
sincerely, the birds."
-on more serious note the whole point of the trainer is that it's cheap, cheap. you could be using two seater hornets or whatever.. but they cost more.
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Birds have survived far more environmental catastrophes in their tens, or hundreds, of millions of years on Earth. I bet they'll be around after we're long extinct!
We have lawyers, and copyright, and copyright lawyers
Your move, birds
I've heard that one of the paint manufacturers brought a suit against Robin birds because the Robins were using "robin-egg blue" for their eggs without paying the appropriate licensing fees. The birds tried to claim prior art, but without any written history, they were unable to prove it, and the paint company clearly filed first. I haven't heard if the Robins are going to pay the fees or evolve a different color of egg.
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T-38 being replaced anyway (Score:2)
The T-X replacement program is currently in the pre-RFP stage, but replacement is expected within the next decade, so why are they even bothering to spend money on such an upgrade?
Re:T-38 being replaced anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Because replacement isn't likely to happen. The T-38 is a highly refined aircraft, and given the guarantee that a replacement will be grossly over-budget and the certainty the program will be mismanaged it makes sense to assume the Talon will be around a very long time.
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Is "refined" the new word for "really, really old"? The newest one was built over 40 years ago. They keep reworking them, and they currently are expected to last until 2020 or so, but at some point the returns on refurbishing these things will start to diminish greatly. Perhaps they will outlast manned fighters, though.
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" They keep reworking them,"
hence, refined.
Re:T-38 being replaced anyway (Score:4, Informative)
All the Talons are getting to the end of their service life, which means you either push them through a very costly life extension program, or you replace them.
All of the Talon replacements are off-the-shelf systems, with little to no custom development required, and all are proven platforms (with one already being in USN service) so the cost for replacement is likely to be very manageable.
So don't discount the fact that they are being replaced, its going to happen.
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Never gonna happen. The resulting AC will be another camel deigned by committee. It will over-budget, over-weight and a decade late in delivery. It will also be designed for a 20th century mindset where human pilots actually flew the planes.
The only way it will get through congress is if the manufacturer can find a way to have its parts made in all 50 states.
The T38 with all its flaws is simple and effective.
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Never gonna happen. The resulting AC will be another camel deigned by committee. It will over-budget, over-weight and a decade late in delivery. It will also be designed for a 20th century mindset where human pilots actually flew the planes.
The only way it will get through congress is if the manufacturer can find a way to have its parts made in all 50 states.
The T38 with all its flaws is simple and effective.
I'd agree with you, but experience is that it only takes one pork-spreading Congressthing to foist an overpriced under-performing piece of military junk upon the nation. After all, anyone opposes it, not only do they hate Freedom, they're against people back in the home district having jobs!
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Except that the USAF is not looking for a new developed aircraft for the Talon replacement, they want off the shelf solutions and the leading contenders have all got years of service already behind them.
"It will also be designed for a 20th century mindset where human pilots actually flew the planes." - well, thats going to be the case regardless, because the USAF are looking to keep manned aircraft around for the forseeable future in the F-22 and F-35, so of course they are going to need something to act as
Who flipped the bird on the US of A? (Score:2)
Maybe the cranes from Siberia or swallows from Russia?
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Siberia is a part of Russia.
Ontopic.. it must be incredibly expensive to modify the aircraft, if it costs more to do that, than it does to buy new planes and train up new pilots each time a bird strike occurs. Just think how many millions they've lost already, and how much they're going to lose in the next decade. Though as someone said, military drones make much more sense than planes these days.
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Nothing he said indicated Siberia was not a part of Russia. He just believes that only Siberian cranes are at fault, whereas the swallows hail from all over the country. Personally, I think it was a loon.
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Maybe the (snip) swallows?
African or European?
Too costly (Score:4, Insightful)
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Probably, yeah. But whatcha gonna do?
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Probably, yeah. But whatcha gonna do?
Well, isn't that America, where cost equations can easily be skewed by class action lawsuits, an increase in cost to recruit new pilots due to advertising ("Join the pilot training programme and die") or a million likes on Facebook? ;-)
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In favor of flying radio controlled airplanes?
There is a *reason* we put pilots in aircraft... It's the same reason we still have computer programers...
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Think about it.... Why don't computers program themselves?
Well, airplanes don't fly themselves either. Drones either require pilots (and lots of infrastructure) or software that has limits. You put a pilot in the airplane to avoid the infrastructure required to put the pilot on the ground or having to write the software to do what a pilot does.
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We need all our money for an airplane that can't fly in the rain and which makes every squadron which adopts it immediately non-operational.
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Those are sunk costs and should not be considered when comparing the cost of replacing the canopies to not doing it. However, they could still be used to extrapolate *future* costs of wrecked aircraft and killed airmen.
Maybe replace with (Score:5, Informative)
Transparent Aluminium
http://phys.org/news167925273.html [phys.org]
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Saphires are made off aluminum oxides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire [wikipedia.org] and they are already used in helicopter windows.
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"Hello Computer!"
Re:Maybe replace with (Score:5, Interesting)
Why transparent?
Put some goddamn cameras and project the image in the cockpit.
But then ... Why have the pilot inside the plane? Project the images in a screen at the HQ and have the pilot sit comfortably while he sips his coffee.
But then... Why have pilots at all? Send drones for intel and missiles for action.
But then... Why go flying? Invest in better optics, put a satellite over the location and act upon your enemies by sending... ninja.
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Bingo! Lose the humans in the craft and you can reclaim all that mass required for life support and either run lighter or with more fuel / payload and less restrictions on G-forces. The metal can take more punishment than the meat.
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Put some goddamn cameras and project the image in the cockpit.
Pilots look anywhere and everywhere when they fly, especially for close air support when the targets are on the ground. This is an advantage they have over Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV), fast response to threats and quick updates to situational awareness. Projectors do not come anywhere close to replacing window capability and the USAF views windows as infeasible for that reason.
But then ... Why have the pilot inside the plane? Project the images in a screen at the HQ and have the pilot sit comfortably while he sips his coffee.
You hit the reason that the USAF is moving towards UAVs. They have quick response time and can direct the AV in a more stable man
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and the USAF views windows as infeasible for that reason.
I meant projectors are infeasible for that reason.
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Technology isn't anywhere near advanced as a human pilot in the seat. Won't be for a while.
Wrong. Ask a pilot how good the AI bogies are. Then add that machines don't pass out in a tight turn. Lose the human pilot and just have a better combat aircraft. All you need is target authority if your twitchy about a machine having kill rights. But then machines are hardly going to worse that pilots. Especially ones that haven't slept and are on LSD.
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But then... Why go flying?
Sigh ... beam and other pure energy weapons are currently many years off. The energy requirements for these devices are ridiculous compared to our power supplies currently. Perhaps that will change and they'll become more efficient, or some new (fusion?) extremely high density/light weight power storage system will be found. These weapons won't matter until someone overcomes the power density of the high energy explosives currently used. Realistically, I don't think they'll ever really make it, the physics of it just don't work out without our learning something completely unexpected, which is also likely given how little we know about the universe at the moment
Don't discount satellite based kinetic energy weapons. (Although those probably won't do much for air superiority.) One kg of TNT contains (arbitrarily defined for purposes of explosive yields) 4.184 MJ of energy - one kg of dumb mass will have the 4.184 MJ of kinetic energy when traveling at 2892 m/s - about Mach 8.5. LEO satellites orbit at about 8,000 m/s, so it's doable. Consider the 20,000 kg Albert Einstein resupply craft launched in June - given the proper reentry configuration, at, say, 5000 m/s
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"Don't discount satellite based kinetic energy weapons"
don't discount physics.
So you have an object orbiting the planet at 17,000+ MPH. And you want to fire a kinetic weapon*. So you need to be able to compensate for your existing momentum, and continually accelerate through the atmosphere and hit a precise target? do you realize how much fuel that would take? You are assuming that the target would always by in the direction of the satellite. What if the target is 30 degrees north? 60?
*for the sake of easy,
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"Latency"
Not enough to matter with modern craft. Meaning innate programmed response systems are faster and or accurate them humans. This mitigate latency.
"Technology isn't anywhere near advanced as a human pilot in the seat."
False. We have aircraft that can fly in formation, to attack location, take in far more data, and out maneuver any pilot.
He wasn't talking about any beam weapon. He was talking about target acquisition and then sending in a specific small military group, or a ninja.
Maybe you should comp
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The problem hasn't been one with material sciences. The Air Force had wanted to preserve the "through-the-canopy" ejection option in the T-38, where the crew is shot through the canopy during the eject sequence. This makes low-level ejections faster because you don't have to wait for the canopy to separate before firing the ejection motors. However, this clearly makes it harder to make the canopy resistant to bird strikes. Other TTC systems destroy the canopy with embedded det cord but in a high-speed train
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The Air Force had wanted to preserve the "through-the-canopy" ejection option in the T-38, where the crew is shot through the canopy during the eject sequence. This makes low-level ejections faster because you don't have to wait for the canopy to separate before firing the ejection motors. However, this clearly makes it harder to make the canopy resistant to bird strikes.
I'm guessing the odds of a bird coming through the top or sides of the canopy, or the pilot ejecting out through the windshield, are quite small.
Well, unless the pilot hits a tree and doesn't have their seat-belt done up...
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the answer is simple.
The cockpit is all one pieces that you use a crane to put into the aircraft. So the pilot gets in, it's life into place.
This way you can eject the whole section.
Frozen or thawed (Score:2)
Is the 4lb bird that they designed for thawed or frozen?
Re:Frozen or thawed (Score:5, Funny)
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Best episode ever.
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It was like they were... organized... [youtube.com]
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The military doesn't have to worry about PETA. Their bird cannon uses live ammo.
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And if PETA complains, the military aims the cannon at them!
Give Anti Gravity a Chance? (Score:2)
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Great. Now the bird will smash into it, pulp the people inside, and fly off in its straight line with no driver, right into space.
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WTF to both parent and GP
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Wow! (Score:2)
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Yes. The number of airman deaths from cancer caused by hitting birds in flight is 0.0/year.
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Airmen are different from pilots, and planes are expensive.
Translated for our international readers (Score:2, Informative)
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"crash on July 19 in Texas"
We would not say that though. We would say:
"crash on the 19th [of] July, in Texas"
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Why are they flying supersonic at altitudes where birds commonly fly anyway? Take it up a mile or two before you engage the afterburners.
Stay in the bird-danger zone only for take-offs and landings, and then your 190mph-resistant-to-turkey-carcass canopy is fine.
Which was probably the reasoning the engineers used when developing the Mach-1 trainer in the first place.
Re:Translated for our international readers (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/How_Fast.html [stanford.edu]
Migrating birds in the Caribbean are mostly observed around 10,000 feet, although some are found half and some twice that high. Generally long-distance migrants seem to start out at about 5,000 feet and then progressively climb to around 20,000 feet ... Perhaps the most impressive altitude record is that of a flock of Whooper Swans which was seen on radar arriving over Northern Ireland on migration and was visually identified by an airline pilot at 29,000 feet.
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While bird strikes can happen at 10,000ft+, they occur with much much higher frequency near takeoff and landing where airspeeds are lower. Plus bird strikes can lead to disastrous consequences when the occur on other parts of the aircraft, such as engines or control surfaces, not just the canopy. Is there any evidence to suggest the track record of the T-38 is significantly worse than the rest of the Air Force fleet? There are finite resources to marshal and a great many things that could be improved in
They're doing it wrong (Score:2)
Bird Strike Statistics (Score:3)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike#Incidents [wikipedia.org]
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates the problem costs US aviation 400 million dollars annually and has resulted in over 200 worldwide deaths since 1988.[40] In the United Kingdom, the Central Science Laboratory estimates[6] that, worldwide, the cost of birdstrikes to airlines is around US$1.2 billion annually. This cost includes direct repair cost and lost revenue opportunities while the damaged aircraft is out of service. Estimating that 80% of bird strikes are unreported, there were 4,300 bird strikes listed by the United States Air Force and 5,900 by US civil aircraft in 2003.
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Neither of those planes could go above 200 knots.
Poorly written article (Score:2)
The summary was painful to read so I checked the article and found it a direct copy. As an example:
“To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force fast enough to make a bird strike lethal, and with a windshield too flimsy to deflect one,”
I know it's a direct quote from a "one-time Air Force pilot" but you need to exercise some editorial control and clean that shit up. How about:
"To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force with a windshield t
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190 MPH isn't high speed.
Talons (Score:2)
Think of it as evolution in action.
No prob. (Score:2)
No prob. You rarely find birds above 4,000 feet. Just put another placard in the plane "stay under xxx knots below yyyy feet in peacetime".
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Which is great for light impacts. What is really needed is thicker, very strong glass (or composite).
That's a cool video, and probably near the useful limit of the glass (within standard factors of safety), but the energy of impact was a 1.3lb (approx) ball at 11mph (4' drop accelerating at 32.2fps). A 4 lb bird strike at 811MPH has 16,500X the energy at impact. I'm not sure off the top of my head whether energy absorption is squared or cubed for a sheet (it's squared for steady state forces), but that stil
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I view this as a marketing opportunity. (Score:2)
the Sapphire glass should go out and give them a few free Canopies. That's the same outfit that is building a facility for Apple in Arizona to produce iPhone and iPad "glass" faces. Of course,it's kind of cool that it's an actual artificial gem!!!
Next, some company could "Bedazzle" the jet aircraft, seeing as how it's . I see a "Bratz Girlz tie-in" as well. If allowing private companies to advertise to kids in our schools to subsidize things is OK ... whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander at
Some test videos (Score:2)
There's a beautiful film of a high-speed bird strike test on a F16 canopy that I saw in
It's the T-38, fifty years old (Score:4, Informative)
This is the T-38 trainer. It's not a combat aircraft. The T-38 is fast and modern looking, but the first flight was in 1961. Back then, one in five fighter pilots died in accidents, without any help from the enemy. In the 1950s and 1960s, fighter pilots were viewed as expendable. It's not a career choice for the timid.
The T-38 has killed many pilots. [ejection-history.org.uk] Good ones. Four astronauts, four of the USAF Thunderbirds. Yet fighter jocks like to fly it. It's not as bad as it used to be - the original engines were unreliable.
The ejection seat has saved many T-38 pilots. The T-38 ejection seat blasts through the canopy to get the pilot out. There's a big spike on top of the seat to punch through the canopy.Here's the 1990 redesign for a canopy that will resist bird strikes. [dtic.mil] "The seat mounted cutting blade is virtually ineffective in cutting through materials which comply with Bird collision resistance." So toughening up the canopy meant a new ejection system. Fighter planes, which have tougher canopies (they're expected to be shot at) have such systems, which usually involve explosives shattering or releasing the canopy. The T-38 is just a trainer - no armor.
The T-38 later got an ejection seat upgrade with zero-zero capability (you can eject while parked on the ground, which is useful if you have a fire during engine start or a bad landing), and that seems to have a new canopy disposal system. They had to give up the tiny bit of luggage storage the T-38 had. One of the original Mercury astronauts (they were issued T-38s as personal transportation) was able to find a case that would just fit the T-38's space under the seat. But for a few weeks, he wouldn't tell the other astronauts where he got it.
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This is the T-38 trainer. It's not a combat aircraft.
there is the F-5 which is an export fighter. Northrop developed the F20 (same as F5 but with big engine), supposably this was submarined by other companies. I remember back in 1980s on ABC or NBC or CBS about debate on F20 vs. F16, couple of the panelists were getting into this argument, "they came up with the J79 engine to ram this program down the Air Force's throat..." and all this other stuff that is very esoteric to viewer unless they are involved with aviation or regularly read Aviation Week.
astronauts (they were issued T-38s as personal transportation)
Michael C
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Heh, I was also thinking Star Trek. Put some money into shielding tech that we can also use in space.
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The HUD doesn't give the pilot any information he can't already get from his other instruments. It's there so the pilot doesn't have to look down, away from whatever he's looking at through the canopy.
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Which planes might those be?
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Yea, ditch the canopy and have to bail out of the aircraft blind when the power fails. Any idea how often the power fails on one of these things? It is NOT a good idea to make all the instrumentation in the aircraft mission critical and leave the pilot without the ability to look around. No manned fighter is going to *ever* do this.
On your "leave the pilot on the ground" idea.... There are serious issues with doing this for a fighter. Actively controlling an aircraft at a distance requires bidirectional
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There is very little current AI bogies do that a pilot can not.
Air to air dog fights don't actually happen anymore.
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Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway. The actual physical scenery amounts to nothing more than a distraction. Ditch the canopy, stick the pilot deeper inside the plane, and present everything as a video feed.
Because the real world is in Super-Duper-Ultra-HD-X-treme (TM).
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Or, better yet, just ditch the entire pilot and give the job to a twitch gamer flying the plane from deep inside Cheyenne.
Lag.
Corning (inventors of GG) do have some other aweso (Score:2)
Corning, who make Gorilla Glass, do have some other awesome glass products awaiting the right application, including rolls of flexible glass sheets.
I hope they are looking at this application.
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..you mean bulletproof glass? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_glass [wikipedia.org]
the issue is with the cost, really, reshaping the canopy to accommodate stronger sheets I suppose(which have shape limitations). ...seriously though, it's not scratch resistance that the care about in this case so gorilla glass(tm) wouldn't do jack shit to help.
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Seriously, building a glass strong enough to withstand bird strikes is not a n issue and hasn't been.
The issue is that the glass has to be weak enough to allow the pilot to break through when he's ejecting. So strong enough for a bird at 800 mph, but weak enough for a human ejecting at maybe 10 mph.
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Seriously, building a glass strong enough to withstand bird strikes is not a n issue and hasn't been.
The issue is that the glass has to be weak enough to allow the pilot to break through when he's ejecting. So strong enough for a bird at 800 mph, but weak enough for a human ejecting at maybe 10 mph.
That shouldn't be an issue. The canopy is jettisoned before the seat is ejected. The ejection seat doesn't need to break through the canopy.
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Seriously, building a glass strong enough to withstand bird strikes is not a n issue and hasn't been.
The issue is that the glass has to be weak enough to allow the pilot to break through when he's ejecting. So strong enough for a bird at 800 mph, but weak enough for a human ejecting at maybe 10 mph.
What's funny is that you're trying to sound knowledgeable on the subject...but then make the completely ridiculous and wrong statement that pilots break through the canopy upon ejection. You have no idea what you're talking about.
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It's a dumb joke - but it does make me wonder if the F-5 has this problem and if not - why they chose to make the T-38 with this weaker canopy. The aircraft was already relatively inexpensive.
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Make them all unmanned drones. We're going that way anyway. It's expensive to keep people alive at 800mph.
Not really. Unmanned drones have their issues and some serious limitations which may not be obvious at first blush.
And it's not the 800Mph that's the issue, it's the 50,000 ft altitude that's the issue.
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The types of drone he is talking about is a specific type.
Many of his issues aren't issue for drones, they are issues for that type of drone.
Most of them go away when you are talking about an automated modern jet.
And the lag is only an issue you you have less then a few seconds to fighter; which is seldom the case for drone.
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How is that the answer?
Re:What do commercial planes have? (Score:5, Informative)
Most migrating birds fly at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet.
Nope.. Most migrating birds are flying UNDER 2,000 ft AGL which is where most bird strike incidents happen. There have been NO REPORTED strikes above 6,000 feet.
See the WikiPedia article on Bird Migration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration [wikipedia.org] and look at the second to last paragraph in the "General Patterns" section.
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or not.
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/ntsb-faa-investigate-high-altitude-bird-strikes-near-phoenix-334523/ [flightglobal.com]
According to a government-industry bird strike committee, there were 2,200 bird strikes involving civil aircraft at altitudes of more than 5,000ft above the ground between 1990 and 2008, with the highest altitude incident reported as a collision between an aircraft and a Griffon vulture at 37,000ft off the coast of Africa.
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Only when frozen... ;)
Can you say "Air Cannon"? Haven't you watched the "Pumpkin Chunkin" contest on TV? They are trowing small pumpkins nearly a mile... I don't imagine throwing a 4 lb bird is going to be a problem, thawed or frozen.
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and f5 has a single engine variant.. but usa is operating over 500 talons. the crash rate isn't that bad in that regard..