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Many people are negative towards military issues.  However, the world consists of a lot of dangerous snakes that have to be contained.  And militaries are used for this purpose.  The technological research of militaries lead to many advances.  The aircraft developed have their own provocative aesthetic that is very alluring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Navy’s High-Flying Spy Drone Completes Its First Flight

Danger Room

 

 

This is some month for the Navy’s next-generation drones. First it launched an autonomous robot off the deck of an aircraft carrier. Now its very high-flying new spy drone has completed its first test flight.

The MQ-4C Triton took off today for the first time from a Palmdale, California airfield, a major step in the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program. Northrop Grumman, which manufactured the 130.9-foot-wingspan drone, said the maiden voyage lasted an hour and a half. The Navy even announced it via Twitter.

“First flight represents a critical step in maturing Triton’s systems before operationally supporting the Navy’s maritime surveillance mission around the world,” Capt. James Hoke, Triton’s program manager, said in a statement.

If the Triton looks familiar, it should. It’s a souped-up version of the Air Force’s old reliable spy drone, Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk. The Navy’s made some modifications to the airframe and the sensors it carries to ensure it can spy on vast swaths of ocean, from great height. (It’s unarmed, if you were wondering.)

The idea is for the Triton to achieve altitudes of nearly 53,000 feet — that’s 10 miles up — where it will scan 2,000 nautical miles at a single robotic blink. (Notice that wingspan is bigger than a 737′s.) Its sensors, Northrop boasts, will “detect and automatically classify” ships, giving captains a much broader view of what’s on the water than radar, sonar and manned aircraft provide. Not only that, Triton is a flying communications relay station, bouncing “airborne communications and information sharing capabilities” between ships. And it can fly about 11,500 miles without refueling.

 

The Navy wants 68 of these aircraft. But the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Program hasn’t all been shining successes. Almost a year ago, a Global Hawk that the Air Force loaned the Navy to experiment with at Pax River Air Station went down in Maryland. Northrop says it’ll put the Triton through additional flight tests before sending it to Pax River later this year.

While most of the military has said it’s got enough drones, thanks, the Navy is moving forward with at least two advanced drone programs. Aside from the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, there is a plan to launch and land autonomous armed drones from aircraft carriers. The demonstrator vehicle for that program, the X-47B, took its first flight from a carrier deck at sea last week, and is scheduled to make its first arrested carrier landing by the end of the summer. (It even did some touch-and-goes from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush, too.)

Like the X-47B, the Triton is different from the Air Force’s drones: it’s autonomous. Its flight operations are a matter of executing a flight pattern thanks to lines of software code and GPS, rather than a pilot in a remote air-conditioned box holding a throttle.

“Replacing our aging surveillance aircraft with a system like Triton,” Hoke noted, “will allow us to monitor ocean areas significantly larger with greater persistence.” And with humans relatively removed from its operations, even by drone standards.

 

General characteristics

• Crew: Unmanned, 4 per ground station
• Length: 47.6 ft in (14.5 m)
• Wingspan: 130.9 ft in (39.9 m)
• Height: 15.3 ft in (4.7 m)
• Gross weight: 32,250 lb (14,628.4 kg)
• Powerplant: 1 × Rolls-Royce AE 3007 turbofan, 6,495-8,917 lbf (28.9-39.7 kN)

Performance

• Maximum speed: 357 mph (575 km/h)
• Endurance: 30 hours
• Service ceiling: 60,000 ft (18,288 m)

 

A great looking airliner that had a great history.  A few still in service.

 

The Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, commonly referred to as the L-1011 (pronounced “L-ten-eleven”) or TriStar, is a medium-to-long range, widebody trijet airliner. It was the third widebody airliner to enter commercial operations, after the Boeing 747 and the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The aircraft has a seating capacity of up to 400 passengers and a range of over 4,000 nautical miles (7,410 km). Its trijet configuration places one Rolls-Royce RB211 engine under each wing, with a third, center-mounted RB211 engine with an S-duct air inlet embedded in the tail and the upper fuselage. The aircraft has an autoland capability, an automated descent control system, and available lower deck galley and lounge facilities.

 

 

 

In the 1960s, American Airlines approached Lockheed and competitor Douglas (later McDonnell Douglas) with the need for an airliner smaller than the 747 capable of carrying a large passenger load to distant locales such as London and Latin America from company hubs at Dallas/Ft Worth and New York. Lockheed had been largely absent from the civil airliner market since the late 1950s following problems with the L-188 Electra, which suffered a number of crashes early in its career. Having experienced difficulties with some of their military programs, Lockheed was eager to re-enter the civil market, and their response was the L-1011 TriStar. The aircraft was originally conceived as a “jumbo twin”, but a three-engine design was ultimately chosen to give the aircraft enough thrust to take off from existing runways.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Role	Wide-body airliner
Manufacturer	Lockheed Corporation
First flight	November 16, 1970
Introduction	April 26, 1972
Status	In limited service
Primary users	British Airways (historical) Trans World Airlines (historical) Delta Air Lines (historical) Eastern Air Lines (historical)
Produced	1968–1984
Number built	250
Variants	Lockheed TriStar (RAF) Stargazer

 

 

 

A total of eight Lockheed L-1011s were in commercial service in December 2010 with operators Privilege-Rollins Air (2), Air Charter Express (2), Elite Aviation (1), Las Vegas Sands Corp (1), Sky Capital (1), and SAM Intercontinental (1).

As of December 2012 only four are left in commercial service, Askari Aviation and Barq Aviation both operate two. The Royal Air Force operates eight L-1011 aircraft. One modified L-1011 named Stargazer is used for research and air launching Pegusus XL rockets.

 

 

 

A notable accident was the 1972 crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 in the Florida Everglades as a result of the flight crew’s failure to monitor the flight instruments during a malfunction of the landing gear position indicator system resulted in 101 fatalities (99 initial deaths, two died shortly afterwards). This incident was the subject of two TV movies, Crash and The Ghost of Flight 401. It was also broadcast on a Mayday episode.

 

 

 

 

 

The Sukhoi Su-34 (Russian: Сухой Су-34) (export designation: Su-32, NATO reporting name: Fullback) is a Russian twin-seat fighter-bomber. It is intended to replace the Sukhoi Su-24. The jet has a different look to it as it has a duck-billed nose.

 

 

 

 

Role	Fighter-bomber
Manufacturer	Sukhoi
First flight	13 April 1990
Introduction	2012 (plan)
Status	In production
Primary user	Russian Air Force
Produced	2006–present
Number built	32 of which 25 series 7 prototypes
Unit cost	US$36 million
Developed from	Sukhoi Su-27

 

 

General characteristics

• Crew: 2
• Length: 23.34 m (72 ft 2 in)
• Wingspan: 14.7 m (48 ft 3 in)
• Height: 6.09 m (19 ft 5 in)
• Loaded weight: 39,000 kg (85,980 lb)
• Useful load: 8,000 kg (17,600 lb)
• Max. takeoff weight: 45,100 kg (99,425 lb)
• Powerplant: 2 × Lyulka AL-31F1 turbofans, 13,500 kgf (132 kN, 29,762 lbf) with afterburner each

Performance

• Maximum speed:
  • High altitude: Mach 1.8 (2,200 km/h, 1,375 mph)
  • Low altitude: Mach 1.2 (1,400 km/h, 870 mph) at sea level
• Range: 1,100 km (680 mi) at low level altitude
• Ferry range: 4,000 km (2,490 mi)
• Service ceiling: 15,000 m (49,200 ft)
• Wing loading: 629 kg/m² (129 lb/ft²)
• Thrust/weight: 0.68

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The solar airplane that will attempt to fly across the country has made its final test flight, spending most of the day soaring over San Francisco Bay on a day that couldn’t have been any prettier.

Tuesday’s flight began at sunrise as pilot and Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard departed Moffett Field in Mountain View. He spent much of the day aloft, giving people from Silicon Valley to Sausalito a chance to see the gentle giant of an aircraft. The plane, which has the utterly unromantic name of HB-SIA, has a wingspan of 208 feet, just a few feet less than the 747 that transported it to the United States from its home in Switzerland. Despite the massive wingspan, it weighs just 3,527 pounds.

Piccard first headed west from Moffett Field, making his way at around 45 miles per hour up the coast from Half Moon Bay towards San Francisco. By 2 p.m. Solar Impulse was cruising around 3,500 feet over the entrance to San Francisco Bay, with multiple local icons in view, including the Golden Gate Bridge partially shrouded in fog.

HB-SIA features four brushless electric motors, each good for 10 horsepower. Flying under solar power alone, the engines provide an average of 8 horsepower, enough to keep the propellers spinning at 400 rpm and the airplane cruising at a leisurely 43 mph.

 

 

 

 

Solar Impulse is a Swiss long-range solar powered aircraft project being undertaken at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The project eventually hopes to achieve the first circumnavigation of the Earth by a piloted fixed-wing aircraft using only solar power. The project is led by Swiss psychiatrist and aeronaut Bertrand Piccard, who co-piloted the first balloon to circle the world non-stop, and Swiss businessman André Borschberg.

The first aircraft, bearing the Swiss aircraft registration code of HB-SIA, is a single-seater monoplane, capable of taking off under its own power, and intended to remain airborne up to 36 hours.

This aircraft first flew an entire diurnal solar cycle, including nearly nine hours of night flying, in a 26-hour flight on 7–8 July 2010. In 2012, Piccard and Borschberg conducted successful solar flights from Switzerland to Spain and Morocco. In 2013, plans call for a flight from the San Francisco Bay Area, California, starting on or about May 1, with extended stops in Phoenix, Dallas, (then either Atlanta, Nashville or St. Louis), Washington and New York.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General characteristics

• Crew: 1
• Length: 21.85 m (71.7 ft)
• Wingspan: 63.4 m (208 ft)
• Height: 6.40 m (21.0 ft)
• Wing area: 11,628 photovoltaic cells: 200 m² (2,200 sq ft)
• Loaded weight: 1,600 kg (3,500 lb)
• Max. takeoff weight: 2,000 kg (4,400 lb)
• Powerplant: 4 × electric motors, powered by lithium-ion batteries (450 kg), providing 7.5 kW (10 HP) each
• Take-off speed: 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph)

 

Solar Impulse in front of the giant Blimp hanger at Moffet Field, California.

 

 

In aerobatics, Pugachev’s Cobra (or Pugachev Cobra) is a dramatic and demanding manoeuvre in which a plane flying at a moderate speed suddenly raises the nose momentarily to the vertical position and slightly beyond, before dropping it back to normal flight. It uses potent engine thrust to maintain approximately constant altitude through the entire move. The manoeuvre has several combat uses, and is also an impressive trick to demonstrate aircraft’s pitch control authority, high angle of attack (AOA) stability and engine-versus-inlet compatibility, as well as the pilot’s skill. The manoeuvre is named after the Soviet test pilot Viktor Pugachev, who first performed the manoeuvre publicly in 1989 at the Paris Le Bourget air show.  Initially the Cobra was performed by Sukhoi’s test pilot Igor Volk while testing the new Sukhoi Su-27 fighter.

 

 

This maneuver could theoretically be useful when a combatant is being pursued closely by an opponent at a somewhat higher altitude. By executing the cobra, a pursued aircraft may suddenly slow itself to the point that the pursuer may overshoot it, allowing the previously pursued aircraft to complete the Cobra behind the other. This may give the now-pursuing aircraft an opportunity for firing its weapons, particularly if a proper pointing aspect (facing toward the former pursuer) can be maintained. Maintenance of the proper aspect can be facilitated when the aircraft employs thrust vectoring and/or canard control surfaces.

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While China conducts, and celebrates, the first jet takeoffs and landings on its new aircraft carrier Liaoning, the U.S. Navy is aiming to do even better. In a parallel series of tests, the sailing branch has taken huge steps towards deploying the first carrier-based robotic warplane.

 

 

The Navy’s future robotic air wing is taking shape. On Tuesday, the sailing branch announced that it will pay four companies to hand over the technical specs for their various designs for the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike system (UCLASS), a stealthy, jet-powered killer drone meant to operate off an aircraft  carrier and fly alongside the latest manned fighters. The move clears the way for the Navy to pick one of the four designs to form the backbone of one of the most ambitious drone efforts ever.

Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman all “have credible, existing, comprehensive, UCLASS design solutions,” the Navy said in its formal announcement. The sea service wants each company to produce a working prototype for a competitive fly-off ”to support fielding a UCLASS capability within three to six years,” likely to occur in mid-2014. The Air Force is also considering buying whichever ‘bot the Navy picks — finally giving the Pentagon the stealthy, jet-powered armed drone of its dreams.

 

X-47B

 

 

Of the four killer drone candidates, Northrop Grumman’s X-47B (pictured above) is the clear frontrunner. Since 2011, the 62-foot-wide batwing ’bot has been flying tests for the Navy under a $2 billion precursor program to UCLASS, one meant to prove that high-performance drones can function on carrier flight decks. The Navy is already familiar, even comfortable, with the X-47B. Colloquially, it calls the ‘bot the “Iron Raven,” a nod to the old Grumman Iron Works and how it seems to have a raven’s beak when viewed in profile. In the second week of May, the Navy plans to launch the X-47B from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush in the Atlantic, marking the first time a robot has ever taken flight from a carrier at sea.

But the X-47B, a descendent of an earlier killer drone with its roots in the late 1990s, is possibly the least stealthy of the competitors, owing to Northrop’s decision to build the drone big, thick and tough. Those qualities help it survive forceful carrier landings, but also make it a big target for enemy radars. Navy Capt. Jamie Engdahl, manager of the drone test program, described it as “low-observable relevant,” a careful choice of words copping to the X-47B’s relative lack of stealth.

 

Phantom Ray

 

 

A decade ago, Boeing’s X-45A drone battled Northrop Grumman’s X-47A, a smaller version of the X-47B, in a competition to provide the Navy and Air Force with new killer drones. But the Air Force unexpectedly backed out. The Navy rescued the X-47 for the UCLASS precursor test program, but the X-45 was left without a sponsor — a shocking move to many drone developers, who praised the X-45′s superior software.

Undeterred, Boeing quietly used its own funds to redesign, enlarge and improve the X-45. The resulting Phantom Ray, 50 feet from wingtip to wingtip, flew for the first time two years ago, showing off a thinner and potentially stealthier shape than its Northrop rival. (Some in the Navy have cheekily taken to calling the Phantom Ray the ‘X-45C.’) Boeing has declined to comment on the Phantom Ray’s software-based control system, but if it’s at all based on the X-45A’s cutting-edge code, the new drone’s real strengths could be under the skin.

 

Sea Avenger

 

 

General Atomics cut its teeth manufacturing the mainstay Predator and Reaper drones for the Air Force and CIA. The jet-powered Avenger, unveiled in 2009, was intended to be a faster, stealthier follow-on. But the Air Force acquired just a handful of Avengers for testing, seemingly leaving the new drone in development limbo until the Navy’s UCLASS initiative offered a way forward.

The 66-foot-wingspan Sea Avenger, as the carrier-compatible version is called, doesn’t have the long lineage of the Northrop and Boeing drones, but it does boast one big advantage. General Atomics is planning to fit the new ‘bot with advanced sensors, including a compact, ground-scanning radar and the same high-resolution cameras carried by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

 

 

Sea Ghost

 

 

Lockheed Martin’s entry into the UCLASS competition is the most mysterious. True to its name, the Sea Ghost has been glimpsed only in concept art posted to the company’s website last summer. The new drone appears to share the flying-wing shape of the Pegasus and Phantom Ray — and is probably in the same size class with a wingspan of 50-60 feet.

But there’s no doubt Lockheed can build a stealth drone. The only jet-powered, radar-evading unmanned aerial vehicle in frontline service anywhere in the world — that we know of — is Lockeed’s unarmed, roughly 2003-vintage RQ-170 Sentinel. It’s a safe bet that Lockheed’s drone-building skills have improved considerably in the decade since the Sentinel first took flight.

 

If you can send an unmanned aircraft on a strike mission deep inside enemy territory, it cuts out the risk of losing a pilot to enemy ground fire.

Drone undergoing tests on board the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Most of the aircraft below are Aggressor Jets. Aggressors are used as training opposition aircraft and thus painted in the colour schemes of potential enemy air forces. The Jets are painted in Russian, North Korean and mainland Chinese schemes.

 

 

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (航空自衛隊, Kōkū Jieitai), or JASDF, is the aviation branch of the Japan Self-Defense Forces responsible for the defense of Japanese airspace and other aerospace operations.  The JASDF carries out combat air patrols around Japan, while also maintaining an extensive network of ground and air early warning radar systems. The branch also has an aerobatic team known as Blue Impulse and has recently been involved in providing air transport in several UN peacekeeping missions.

The JASDF had an estimated 45,000 personnel in 2005, and as of 2013 operates 791 aircraft.  Of those 791 aircraft in service approximately 350 are fighter aircraft.

 

J-1, Japanese variant of the American F-16 Falcon

 

 

 

F-15 Eagle Aggressors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a country that is run by crazed and deranged fanatics, it is only fitting that an airline is named after the derriere orifice.

 

Iran Aseman Airlines (Persian: هواپیمایی آسمان‎ pronounced assman) is an airline based in Tehran, Iran, operating scheduled domestic and regional flights within the Persian Gulf area, as well as charter and air taxi services.

 

 

Iran Aseman Airlines Fleet

Aircraft	In Fleet	Passengers	Notes
Airbus A340-300	1	300
ATR 72-200	4	70
ATR 72-500	2	70
Boeing 727-200	4	175	1 stored at THR
Boeing 727-200F	2	-	Cargo
Falcon 20	1	-	Air Ambulance
Fokker 100	20	109
Total	34