Nied

It looks like it never even touched the deck so the hook never slipped off so much as it never caught in the first place. I imagine if it had caught you be looking at a bunch of blown tires, likely a collapsed landing gear and maybe even enough structural damage to the plane to make it a write off.

I wish I were that good! This came from the Secretprojects forum where I occasionally lurk. I'm hosting it because of the way they handle attachments, but you can find a smaller version at Aviation Week's site. And yes it appears to be legitimate.

T-50 finally got a paint job. Looks like that rendering Saturn released all those years ago was pretty accurate after all. What bugs me about that is he discounts body lift on the F-35 to make that comparison, while wanking the F-22 and T-50 both of which derive a ton lift from their bodies. I guess it only counts when you like the plane you're looking at. Deeper but narrower You could probably carry 2 2,000 lb JDAMs in there instead of the Raptor's 1,000 pounders, but there'd be no room to carry the 2 AMRAAMs along side them without turning on the no clipping cheat I talked about.

And that right there is one of the big reasons the F-23 lost to the F-22: What happens when the bottom AMRAAM in the stack fails to fire? Answer: You lost half your missiles kid, but hey your plane is real pretty! Don't even get me started on those "geometrically possible" loadouts, apparently we're supposed to believe bombs will just drop through the AMRAAMs as though they turned on a no-clipping cheat (though I guess that answers what happens if you get a hung missile, the pilot just punches idspispopd into the weapons MFD).

I've recently switched over to Chrome as my primary browser, and I'm noticing slowdowns with it that I don't see via Firefox. Literally I can load two pages side by side and Chrome will hang where Firefox doesn't. I don't know if it's related or just an issue with Chrome.

David I'm surprised you of all people don't know about the C-32. Although the all white paint scheme on that particular aircraft does in fact scream black ops. ::Edit:: Upon further research this appears to be a C-32B which the State department uses to fly people in and out of foreign disaster areas.

There's also the fact that the sheer size of the A380 means you were probably a lot further away from the engines then you are used to, that can make a big difference. One of the quietest flights I was ever on was when I was able to snag a last minute upgrade to business class on a 717. I ended up in the very front row, the only way I could have been further from the engines would be to sit in the cockpit. It was near dead silent.

LOL active stealth! Haven't heard that one in a while. And the engines can be changed, but changing the nacelles they fit in is re-designing the fuselage.

How about the big round engine nacelles? Or all the exposed pop-rivets (notice that those are always covered over with filler on American VLO aircraft and are invisible once painted), or the moving LERXs (innovative though they are the, they wreak merry hell on any attempt at edge alignment)? The PAK-FA is a great aircraft but to pretend it's somehow going to be some nigh invisible uber-weapon is to engage the same kind of fact-free wanking people were doing over the Su-27 ten years ago. Also how awesome is it that that guy falls for APA's ridiculous India fear mongering? Christ the IAF just finished participated in Red Flag right along side Australia and there's a very good chance they're going to buy the exact same airplanes as the RAAF, but they're going to turn around and attack a mutual friend and trading partner? Give me a break.

747-8F had it's first flight today.

Another one just now for a good hour. I just left MW loading in one tab while browsing elsewhere, and you can go a good long time without getting any kind of timeout error. Though at one point I did get an IPS driver error. They're like slow storms, you just have to wait for them to blow over and then everything is nice again

While a clean F-16 and a clean F-35 might have the same performance, the clean F-35 is two bombs or six AAMs away from flying a combat mission, while the F-16 needs to have all the crap in the pic above strapped to it to do the same thing. So yeah an F-16 is a great performer when it's not carrying anything, but strap enough ordinance to it to do something useful and give it enough fuel to carry it further than five feet, and it turns into a dog. The F-35 will be able to perform the clean F-16's airshow routine carrying all the extra weight of the dirty one. Also you forgot Poland!

This is what a F-35 will look like going to war, and here's an F-16 with the same warload. You tell me which looks sexier.

No you shouldn't. In a stealthy config a JSF can carry 4-6 AAMs internally (again roughly equivalent to what a F-16 or Baby Hornet actually carry in a conflict) so any nation using it in an air superiority role isn't losing anything there. People seem to get hung up on the fact that the F-35 only matches a clean F-16 in performance, but the fact of the matter is when an F-16 actually goes to war it can't match it's own clean performance. An F-16 on a mission is going to have several thousand pounds of fuel taking up a quarter of it's pylons it's going to have all sorts of ordinance hanging off the rest making it tough to pull more than a handful of Gs or get much past the sound barrier. A F-35 will be able to reach it's top speed with a full warload (mach 1.6, which just happens to be the top speed of an F-16 with only a pair of sidewinders and single droptank). It'll be able to pull 9Gs with the equivalent of the F-16's three droptanks of gas inside. Add stealth, a radar that does triple duty as a jammer and ELINT gear, an IRST array that allows the pilot to look through the floor of his/her cockpit, and low speed handling on par with the Super Hornet, and I'm having trouble seeing how it's not better than an F-16.

Stealth for one, it wraps the same same load an F-16 or baby Hornet carries inside the fuselage. So you've got the same warload being carried by an aircraft that will be exceedingly difficult to detect. Of course if you want to ditch stealth you could get close to F-15E levels of ordinance hanging off the wings/internal bays. Then of course you have the avionics which are likely the best to ever fly on an aircraft, the Helmet mounted sight actually allows you to look through the plane!

Well and that's my point, the costs of building an "exportable" F-22 for Japan were enormous, mainly because it needed to have a new computer system with the DRM for export baked in and more open architecture to accommodate all the changes for the Japanese sea control mission. You have to figure since the F-35's systems have all that built in, the DoD based their estimates on starting with that and integrating it into the Raptor, and even then it was still ridiculously expensive. Like I said above with that in mind we're better off with a JSF swarm to overwhelm any T-50s or J-XXs they might encounter, with a handful of F-22s and later F/A-XXs working as backup.

Meh, I soured considerably on the Raptor when I found out how much it would cost to fix it's computer system for sale to Japan. We could get three F-35s for every two Raptors we upgraded with a workable on board computer (and that assuming such a thing could be retrofitted rather than requiring a newly built airframe, which would cost another 2-3 F-35s). I think we're probably better off muddling through with several thousand of F-35s (quantity has a quality all it's own) and replacing the rest of our Eagles, Strike Eagles and Raptors by having the Air Force buy the F/A-XX when it comes on line. Buying more Raptors at this point just gives us more planes with a dead end system that's nigh impossible to integrate new weapons and technology into. Do we really want to be stuck in 2020 with a fighter that has near godly kinematic performance, but that can't even mount a proper HMS or IRST?

Yeah, if I had to guess it'll be either the Typhoon or the Super Hornet that win the MRCA, because both bring a great engine they can share with the LCA. On a political level the Super Hornet might even have an advantage since it strengthens relations with the US.

The F-14. Cheney was hell bent on making sure the F-14D program was canceled, and went as far as ordering the factory jigs destroyed so that no more could be produced. It's the aircraft manufacturing equivalent of salting the earth so that nothing grows.

Honestly the sidebar reads like ass covering to maintain access to the Chinese aircraft industry by repeating the official party line. It's clear from the body of the article that it was a pretty direct rip, with concessions made to the realities of the Chinese industrial base. Do I need to pull this picture out again? My favorite part is how they had to add the odd hump back on the J-10 to maintain the area ruling that was done naturally with the canopy of the smaller Lavi.

Yeah but unless they plan on re-designing the entire fuselage, the way the engines are mounted in the plane is final and that means the engine faces will be exposed, which dramatically increases the RCS of the plane.

Actually I have the IAPR article on the J-10 and the short answer is: it totally is. The long answer is that most of the modifications to the design were done to compensate for the Chinese industrial base (China doesn't have the experience with composites that Israel has, and the only engine they had access to that was close to suitable for the design was the AL-31) rather than any originality on Chengdu's part.

Other than the nose, which has a decidedly YF-23ish look, the T-50 doesn't look much like existing designs. Compare that with say the J-10, which is nothing more than an up scaled Lavi, or their new not-a-DC-9, and you can see why the Chinese have gotten a reputation for making knock-off planes.

I don't know, I think that IRST housing alone is going to give them some issues. Look at the EOTS window on the JSF or it's predecessor on the NATF concepts, a Su-27 style fishbowl will show up huge compared to those designs. That and the exposed engine faces (I don't buy the claims that slapping some RAM on the engine faces is some great fix) give me the impression that while Sukhoi has put a lot of thought into having a stealthy aircraft, it's wasn't the priority for them. Also from what I'm reading those blisters are for short range AAMs, the analogue of the Raptor's side bays.

Wow. If nothing else it's a real sharp looking plane. I'm seeing all sorts of things that are going to cause it's radar signature to balloon beyond what you would think at first glance (there's still all kinds of small blade antennas and the IRST aperture isn't going to do them any favors). If I had to guess it would probably have a RCS somewhere between a Super Hornet and a JSF, and really that's not half bad. Props to the Russians for getting this thing airborne, I was convinced the most we'd ever see of the PAK-FA was some concept art and a promise that it'll fly "real soon" for the next 15 years.