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19 votes
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Hundreds of flying taxis to be made in Ohio, home of the Wright brothers and astronaut legends
28 votes -
Soviet flying aircraft carriers were ingenious
14 votes -
The dead man’s gambit: The crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 961
9 votes -
Tempest over Texas: The crash of Braniff International Airways flight 352
6 votes -
Controlled Pod Into Terrain episode 1: Asiana Airways 214
7 votes -
Machines can't always take the heat: How heat waves threaten everything from cars to computers
15 votes -
As Idalia hit Florida, all of NOAA’s hurricane-hunting planes were grounded
9 votes -
Cruelty of chance: The Cerritos mid-air collision and the crash of Aeroméxico flight 498
16 votes -
Antonov’s curse: The crash of Sepahan Airlines flight 5915 and the story of the An-140
8 votes -
Escaping East Germany in a DIY aircraft wasn’t enough for Ivo Zdarsky, so he invented his own way of life in a Utah desert ghost town
15 votes -
US agencies investigate close call between Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 and a Cessna Citation 560X business jet in San Diego
8 votes -
Complacency kills: The crash of Continental Airlines flight 1713
19 votes -
Critical conversations: The crash of Eastern Airlines flight 212
30 votes -
Drama in the snow: The crash of Scandinavian Airlines flight 751
17 votes -
How two brothers turned planespotting into YouTube gold
8 votes -
US requires airline lavatories to be more accessible for wheelchair users
42 votes -
Russia’s Potemkin miracle: The story of Ural Airlines flight 178
11 votes -
Wait, should I not be drinking airline coffee?
30 votes -
Wrong turn at Taipei: The crash of Singapore Airlines flight 006
20 votes -
The US's flirtation with nuclear powered jet aircraft
If everything had worked perfectly, it still would have been a bum airplane." - Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States attempted to design nuclear...
If everything had worked perfectly, it still would have been a bum airplane." - Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States attempted to design nuclear powered aircraft. This was part of a larger "nuclear craze" in the era where everything and anything was proposed to have nuclear technology applied to it. This led to all kinds of things like the Chrysler TV-8 and "peaceful" earthmoving construction projects. The only place where nuclear power or propulsion really took off was for large ocean going ships both for military navies as well as civilian tankers, cargo ships and icebreakers. Spacecraft technology was the only other "success story."
Nuclear powered aircraft, while more realistic than say nuclear cars, never quite caught on except for a few experimental engines and just one actual working aircraft. The most extensive efforts towards this during the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program were the HTRE-2 and HTRE-3 experimental nuclear reactors with heat transfer assemblies designed for nuclear powered aircraft at the Idaho National Laboratory. Rather than burning fuel, the jet turbine would use the heat from the nuclear reaction to heat air sent through a compressor which would then be expelled as exhaust for thrust.
On of the more fascinating tests were the test flights of the NB-36H which while conventionally powered, flew while carrying a working nuclear reactor to test the protective shielding of the crew. It carried an air-cooled 1 megawatt reactor. The engineers and crew worked within a specially shielded nose cabin with 12-inch-thick lead-glass windows.
The project was canceled by the Kennedy administration a few months after taking office in 1961 citing high costs, poor management, and little progress towards a flight ready reactor saying:
At the time of termination, the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program was still in the research and development stage, with primary emphasis on high performance reactors. Although a number of research and development achievements can be credited to this program, at the time of termination an airplane had never been flown on nuclear power nor had a prototype airplane been built. - Joseph Campbell, Comptroller General
and
Nearly 15 years and about $1 billion have been devoted to the attempted development of a nuclear-powered aircraft; but the possibility of achieving a militarily useful aircraft in the foreseeable future is still very remote. - John F. Kennedy, POTUS
Footnote: This post is a rework of a reddit post I made here a couple years back. It's not really meant to be a coherent or lengthy article but has some links and thoughts which I found interesting.
20 votes -
Lockheed Martin teases next generation aircraft
Recently Lockheed Martin put out a post on social media [1] where they showed a silhouette of a yet-to-be-revealed aircraft. Most people seem to believe it will be the reveal of their entry to the...
Recently Lockheed Martin put out a post on social media [1] where they showed a silhouette of a yet-to-be-revealed aircraft. Most people seem to believe it will be the reveal of their entry to the NGAD program [2] (Next Generation Air Dominance).
While not much is publically known one interesting tidbit is how much it looks like the silhouette of the Testor Corp [3] F-19 [4] model that was released back in the mid 80s. Testor said at the time that the model was based on intelligence (aka leaks) of what would eventually become the F-117.
Aviation forums in the past have said F-19 model is what they WANTED the F-117 and it does look quite a bit like the Have Blue [5] test craft they built, however, the legend is that they couldn't get the math to work for radar deflection properly at that time due to lack of computational power and ended up with the geometrically simpler F117 design we got.
[1] Lockheed Martin Teaser: https://theaviationist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/LM-NGAD-story.jpg
[2] NGAD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Dominance
[3] Testor F19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testor_Corporation#F-19
[4] Testor F19 Image: https://test803.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/img_6712-1.jpg
[5] Have Blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Have_Blue34 votes -
Near Dayton, Ohio there's a lookalike of the Wright Brothers' Model B, a 1910 aircraft with no cockpit. It's a modern plane with a very old design, and I went for a ride.
21 votes -
Dark waters of self-delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810
12 votes -
A sickness and its cure: The crash of Trans-Colorado Airlines flight 2286
12 votes -
Eighty year anniversary of a speed record build of a WW2 bomber
7 votes -
Airbus flying high as deal for twenty A330neo aircraft secured
7 votes -
Airbus unveils record deal with Indian airline IndiGo
4 votes -
Hot, high, and harebrained: The crash of Indian Airlines flight 491
14 votes -
How Indigenous kids survived forty days in Colombia's jungle after a plane crash
14 votes -
How well suited is Sweden's Saab JAS 39 Gripen and their dispersal operations in NATO's air forces?
3 votes -
Any aviators out there?
I'm a Paramotor pilot, but I'd love to get an aviation specific section going. Anyone a pilot, aviation fan, or airplane geek too?
15 votes -
Hercules farewell flypast
3 votes -
Cause of Boeing collision at London Heathrow confirmed
7 votes -
A sunny day in San Francisco: The crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214 - revisited
12 votes -
The people who live inside airplanes
11 votes -
The insane engineering of the F-35B
5 votes -
Toroidal propellers: A noise-killing game changer in air and water
8 votes -
US pilot shot down four Soviet MiGs in thirty minutes – and kept it a secret for fifty years
8 votes -
Why you wouldn’t want to fly the first Soviet jetliner
3 votes -
The REAL reason ships go missing in the Bermuda Triangle!!!
9 votes -
Two aircraft collide during Veterans Day air show in Dallas
9 votes -
US to fly supersonic bomber in show of force against North Korea
3 votes -
I'm not a pilot. Can I land a 737?
8 votes -
Sofia, the historic airplane-borne telescope, lands for the last time
5 votes -
Heart Aerospace's current project is a thirty-passenger plane designed to have a fully battery-powered range of 200 kilometres
4 votes -
What happened to flying wings?
7 votes -
When it comes to flaunting its defense industry, Stockholm is shy – and it's hurting Swedish companies and handing lucrative contracts to competitors
4 votes -
Landseaire, the crazy Catalina flying camper of the 1950s
1 vote -
What actually happened to the Concorde
5 votes