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[fluppet]

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Far be it from me to miss an off-topic conversation...

Kev/Karoline (sorry to be a bit belated - fast moving thread, appropriately): The same happens on the hills near Bath, which is an interesting thing by which to be distracted when youre trying to take the bend with a large drop behind it should it go wrong.

Mind you, its distracting enough to have a 747 coming in what Im sure was a tad low to land at Heathrow. Just what you need when youre in stop/start roadworks - a 747 appearing from behind a sun visor and filling the windscreen. Im astonished I couldnt hear it, although I guess the engines werent doing much other than being prepared for braking.

btw, does Duxford really have an SR71? Theyve got one on the poster, but it certainly wasnt there many moons ago when I last visited. You have to approve of the strategy of stealing an aircraft by letting it land and then building a motorway over the run-off zone needed to let it take off again, too. :-)

--
Fluppet

[big_nipper]

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Not as intrested in Aircraft as I used to be, the noise does get on my nerves at work. Working in Lytham, half a mile from Warton we regually get LFO (Low-flying-objects) and in a meeting you just have to wait until its gone before continuing. Having said that the first time I saw the Euro-fighter as it was called then take off it just looked like a normal take off until it was a 100 or so feet in the air and then it seemed to go to near vertical and dissapear into the clouds, that was impressive.

Fluppet, I went to Duxford a few years ago just after they opened the new building with all the American stuff in there and was quite impressed when I found out they had built it around the plane. Wasnt there for the aircraft though. I was there for the AGM for the Ford Anglia 105E club. We all parked just across the road and got free entry. During the day an AA van stopped just around the corner and asked me if I had seen an Anglia. I laughed and said its probably in the car park over there with over 100 others. He didnt even know what colour it was, he said he thought it would be easy to find!

[kaideejee]

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Ive yet to see a Eurofighter/typhoon in flight, tho Ive seen one being towed. It was at Warton that I saw the Tornado - I work for the IT company that look after BAEs IT systems so occasionally I get an excuse to spend a week or two working there.

Oh and on a related note - the Typhoon is (according to some bloke who claims to know) only the second fighter plane which can accelerate vertically upwards, the other being the Lightning. That sounds wrong to me tho, as *strictly* speaking, the Harrier can take off vertically, which is of course a vertical acceleration. Think he meant with the nose pointing upwards tho i.e. main engine thrust weight.

What sort of LEDs do they use for the port/starboard lights on fighter planes then? Are they so you know whether theyre turned on (ooer) or not?

And on another random note - the rule that allows flying robots (at the discretion of the event organiser) - how would you failsafe something like that? Some sort of passive magnetic field to make it hover in place?

-- Kev

[jamesb]

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not true. F15, F16 (block 15-20 strugled but the later block 30s and onward ahve more than enough power), to name but a few. depends on what they are carrying at the time. Think your friend is making it up to make his fave plane sound more impressive. As for the lightening being the only other plane.... there really have been better aircraft since so its a stretch to suggest we never surpassed it.

Back to LEDs, they are used on F1 cars too

[jim]

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The first time I saw a blue LED was on an F1 cars instrumentation - this was back when they were very expensive, not a barrier to many F1 teams though

[kaideejee]

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James - I bow to your knowledge - and I never said he was a friend - more a freak who I happened to be crossing Warton site with one day

-- Kev

[fluppet]

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I suspect the Lightning may have been the *first* to be able to do this (at least in the RAF). Presumably whichever Mig (Foxbat?) was designed to go after U2s (and has the temporary height record) can do it too. I keep wanting to say either Mig 29 or Mig 31, but I think one of them was the Firefox...

It wouldnt surprise me to learn that a lot of military aircraft could do it, to be honest, although I suspect the Lightning (which is, after all, an engine with wing stubs on the side) probably has a better power-to-weight than most.

Mind you, if Typhoons claim to fame is the ability to cruise supersonically without afterburners (am I right in saying that the Raptor and JSF can as well?) it might be the first aircraft to be able to point straight up without afterburners running.

Is this thread going for the record as longest thread, most off-topic thread, most dragged-off-topic-after-attempts-to-return-to-toppic thread, or all of the above?

--
Fluppet

[typhoon_driver]

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its the first aircraft that can accelerate vertically, without afterburner and go beyond mach 1.

Ive got to crawl around one of em and see the simualators where the pilots are trained, wouldve gotten a go but a typhoon was taking off in 5min time so that had to be skipped :sad:

[jamesb]

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Eh? the typhoon can accellerate to mach 1 vertically? Id be amazed if that were true!

[typhoon_driver]

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if i remember correctly it can james, and if u seen one take off u wouldnt be surprised!

[jamesb]

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eh? Sorry, I am a bit confused now. A typhoon, can accellarate vertically, to over mach 1? That is, it can exceed the 9.81m/s2 of gravity, and whats more, reach 300m/s inside 10000m? that is accellerate at an average of about 17m/s2 or in excess of 3g total, vertically? This is what the space shuttle does.

I think the information you have is flawed there, as to my knowledge there are very few aircraft that can accellerate vertically at more than about 1.2g. This is because to accelerate upwards you need more thrust than weight, and for typhhon to do what you are saying, it must have at least 3:1 power to weight, before factoring drag, lets call it 6:1. if typhoon weights, I dont know, 21,000kg, it will need 126,000 kg of thrust. This is well beyond the 9000kg of thrust per engine it produces

So much urban legend gets thrown around the forces, believe me, the figures we were quoted years ago about Tornado and Jaguar were similarly unbelievable

[shredderteam]

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You might get to see if its true at Cosford James

Since Typhoon proper couldnt come the RAF have invited their bigger brother instead.

Oops, am Im allowed to mention it!

Sam
http://www.robotcrusade.comwww.robotcrusade.com

[geeza]

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Well James Storm II does have more acceleration than the space shuttle, but obviously not the speed.

[jamesb]

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btw, sorry to Gary.... it wasnt meant as a personal arguement with you, which is how the above reads in retrospect. Just that I know how much rubbish cadets are told, and its easy to believe if the source is supposedly reliable. I once had a techy at Cosford tell me so matter of factly that the Jaguar had a lazer ragefinder for air to air combat that had a computer database on board of all aircraft and compared their wingspan to the measured one to get their range. he didnt grasp how lazer range finding worked.

Hum.... Typhoons big brother? Tsunami?

Storm 2 accelerates at over 3g? interesting. so it gets to full speed in less than 0.33 seconds?

[mark_m]

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James,
I think some of your figures are a bit wrong. assuming constant acceleration (v^2=u^s+2as), the acceleration is, on average, 4.5m/s^2 upwards.
the thrust youve quoted is roughly per engine, and the weight you used is the maximum take off weight. Mimimum weight is 98kN, max thrust 206kN (from a quick google). This gives a maximum inital vertical acceleration of 10m/s^2 or 1.06g.
I dont know what the drag is for a fighter aircraft at mach 1. The typhoons max speed is mach 2 though. This implies the drag at 600m/s is 206kN. If you assume drag is proportional to the speed squared, the typhoon should still be accelerating at 6m/s^2 just before it reachs mach 1.

I accept Ive made some gross approximations but it seams a reasonable claim to me.
Anyway, its still a very impressive aircraft however you look at it.

Mark