Posted: 5/25/2007 8:05:08 PM EDT
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Well on today's show he called the XB-70 ugly and a flop. I couldn't disagree more. |
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Nice looker, but it was a huge, complex jet and would have stayed broken most of the time. If you think B-1 has maintenance problems, you haven't seen anything until B-70 with 6 engines, folding wing tips and articulating landing gear. Its difficult to stand alert when your jet is boken. There was an engine start issue too with 3 engines being fed by a single inlet. After the 1st engine was started, it would draw airflow backwards through the other engines. Get 2 engines lit and the 3rd had real backwards flow issues. |
Slightly OT, but Aviation Week just recently published an interesting article on an XB-70-based "Blackstar" 2-stage earth-to-orbit project that may have been flying as late as the 1990s. |
Yea cause its such a slow airplane, being designed as a Mach 3 bomber and all  Its a beautiful aircraft. Smooth lines all round, it looks fast sitting on the ground. |
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It wan't a flop if they managed to saddle the old Soviet Union with the MiG 25 Foxbat. The MiG 25 was designed to be an interceptor and to shoot down that very plane. It was not designed to be a "fighter" aircraft per se, but an interceptor. For several years the west thought that the Mig 25 was a sort of "super fighter" until they actually got their hands on one courtesy of Victor Belenko. When he defected to the west (actually in Japan) the USAF tore the thing apart and found that while it is very fast in a straight line, it couldn't do more than 2Gs in a turn without flying apart. The book "MiG Pilot" also mentioned somthing about if you put big enough engines on anything you can get it to fly and having the aerodynamics of a falling refrigerator, all in reference to the Mig 25. Either in the same show or the one before it, he called the Armalite AR-7 a piece of junk? What are his reasons? What a bunch of crap, not only are the AR-7 I've owned NOT a piece of junk they were quite accurate too. |
They were so impressed that they built their own, but scrapped the project because it was "too complex". |
+1
Bomb bay is right behind the front landing gear, it has a reasonable capacity. One thing you don't appreciate from the photos is the scale of the aircraft... it's HUGE.
One of the mysteries of aviation is what happened to the third prototype XB70 which was almost complete when the program was cancelled. Somehow it just ceased to exist... In the last few years I've wondered how much better we might be with a fleet of B70s rather than a fleet of B52s left over from the cold war, considering the long range bombing runs that were common from Diego Garcia to various sandbox locations, and even CONUS to sandbox. Mach 3 would get ordnance to target a lot faster and allow those long range missions to become more like tactical strikes. |
Damn! The Russkies could certainly build them sexy. Copy or not . . . Disconnector |
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I think the cancelation of the B-70 program was one of the biggest mistakes the Air Force made in the second half of the 20th century (The only two bigger ones I can think of is not going ahead with the Navajho booster, we are only now starting to look at hypersonics again. The other was the X-20 DynaSoar) If we had produced the B-70, then we would have had a viable suplamental aircraft to the B-52 in the mid 70s, as such we would not have been forced to run two bomber development programs concurently in the 1980s (the B-1b and the Advanced Technology Bomber program which led to the B-2) Since one program wouldn't be dejustyifying the funds for another we wouldn't have had to cap B-1 production at 100, the ATB would have been opperational in the late 1980s and we would have had the funds to produce at least 100 bombers instead of 21. In that alternate universe we'd have a high-low mix of bomber of high altitude mach 3 B-70s and low altitude and stealthy B-2s. I think that's a better force the the Buff, Bone and Bat we have currently. |
are you serious? that thing looks like a 1950's rocket plane.... talk about shitty design idea's. I can see how it might look sexy but cmon... if you put a 1,000 monkeys at work on it, you coulda came up with better aerodynamics. |
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Here is the first of 5 videos of the program Wings on the XB-70 www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9wM4Vg3V18&mode=related&search= |
Oh so tagged |
And heres your antidote for that Aviation Week fantasy authored by one of the worst aviation writers on black projects around. Enjoy: Six blind men in a zoo: Aviation Week’s mythical Blackstar by Dwayne A. Day Monday, March 13, 2006 The pages of Aviation Week were filled with breathless prose about an amazing new aircraft. According to a reporter writing for the magazine, a top secret, highly advanced high-speed aircraft was spotted in flight by multiple observers. There was no official confirmation of its existence, but it was clearly the kind of highly advanced airplane that the government would not want anybody to know about. The article was accompanied by an artist’s illustration of a sleek, bizarre-looking craft. Maybe you didn’t read that article. It was published in Aviation Week in December 1958 (“Soviets Flight Testing Nuclear Bomber,” December 1, 1958, p. 27) and referred to the Soviet atomic-powered bomber. Aviation Week (not yet “& Space Technology”) ran both an editorial and an article about the supersecret airplane. The article itself was extremely authoritative sounding: “A nuclear-powered bomber is being flight tested in the Soviet Union. Completed about six months ago, this aircraft has been flying in the Moscow area for at least two months. It has been observed both in flight and on the ground by a wide variety of foreign observers from Communist and non-Communist countries.” The article continued: “The Soviet aircraft is a prototype of a design to perform a military mission as a continuous airborne alert warning system and missile launching platform.” But it turns out that the atomic-powered bomber never existed, and the plane was never “observed both in flight and on the ground by a wide variety of foreign observers.” It was observed by nobody at all, but that did not prevent the magazine from reporting about it. It is worth remembering that when you are reading about Aviation Week and Space Technology’s latest report of a top secret aircraft known as the “Blackstar.” According to three articles that appeared in the March 6 issue of the magazine, “Blackstar” is actually a two-stage-to-orbit system consisting of a large mothership aircraft and a small “transatmospheric vehicle” possibly capable of flying into orbit. Despite the fact that it is on the cover of a magazine, there is no reason to believe that Blackstar exists, at least not in the form that the author claims it does. Like Fox Mulder of The X-Files, the author wants to believe, even when the evidence is lacking. Admittedly, Fox Mulder was actually right. But he was also a TV character. Manta or myth? Many people might instantly assume that this story is credible because it appeared in Aviation Week, a publication that has a well-deserved reputation for obtaining insider information on aviation and space projects. But what they should realize is that Aviation Week also has a well-deserved reputation for publishing poorly-researched articles about top secret aircraft programs that do not exist, such as the 1958 claims about a Soviet nuclear-powered bomber. In fact, the same author who wrote the Blackstar articles, William Scott, has written several previous articles about top secret aircraft that never existed. It is his specialty, and he repeats the same pattern in all of them.[emphasis added] The rest is here: Six Blind Men |
X eleventy billion. That aircraft was designed during the days when people had imaginations and foritutde to make it happen, but the fortitutde(political will) to see it through didn't exist. I would like to think some form of it carried on through the results of reaserch though, even if it was kept in a super-secret squirrel black program. |
Correct me if I'm wrong but mach 3 cannot be downed by modern day SAMs. Even during the reign of the SR-71 it was virtually immune to succesful interception by Soviet SAMs. Now realizing that SAM technology hasn't taken a great leap forward in high-speed SAMs, maybe targeting and guidance have, but couopled with high tech jamming systems and mach 3+ speeds these machines are truly untouchable. |
| I've always thought that the XB-70 was an incredibly cool aircraft, but I've never really thought of it as "attractive". I can kinda see where the Gunny's coming from. I don't think that the A-10 is beautiful either, but I also have an appreciation for its functionality. |