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Posted on 12/22/2012 9:46:24 AM PST by EveningStar
The B-58 Hustler was the world's first supersonic jet bomber, a delta-winged marvel of Cold War design created in the 1950s solely to deliver nuclear weapons to the U.S.S.R. And the "pilot" used to test the capsule ejection system was a live bear.
(Excerpt) Read more at io9.com ...
Please ping me to aviation and aerospace articles. Thank you.
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Please ping me to aviation and aerospace articles. Thank you.
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/johnny
Please ping me to aviation and aerospace articles. Thank you.
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...and the Soviet “Bear” was our cold war enemy’s mascot. That is pretty funny.
I remember when they had those things at Eglin.
Four engines on a plane about the size of a fighter. It really looked fearsome. Not sure why it never became more common or popular.
Ditka????
Pretty remarkable, and beautiful plane, but I think it had some major flaws:
1.) Expensive
2.) High Maintenance (as some beautiful women are)
3.) Swilled fuel like a drunk sailor
It was bleeding edge. Computers were analog, slow and expensive back then. The engines were also bleeding edge, and ate fuel at a stupid rate. It's like driving my 240-Z. Sure, it goes fast, but not for very long on a tank of gas.
Maintenance was a stone cold gritch, too, according some old ramp apes I worked with.
The lessons learned sure taught us a lot, though, and are the reason we have supercruise aircraft now.
Oh, and nuclear weapons were much larger then than they are today.
/johnny
Researchers started out testing the system on the ground, with acceleration sleds. The first subjects were people recruited from the unemployment lines,
As with so many other missed opportunities in aerospace, blame Defense Sec. McNamara. The B-58 was more expensive to buy and keep flying and less versatile than the B-52, so he killed the program.
Was also a medium range bomber, a type future planners were going away from. Only heavy long range bombers were even considered for any or more production. Along the same lines if the F-117 wasn’t also desingnated a fighter, we would have never seen them deployed.
As an example of how the plane suffered...
The power supply to the radar was under the ejection seat. To pull the power supply, you had to pull the ejection seat. (EOD qualified technician required). To apply power, the ejection seat had to be reinstalled. MTBF for the powersupply was on the order of 10 hours. The rest of the radar MTBF was also on the order of 10 hours.
There was a large weight that had to be suspended from the nose if the fuel was emptied. If you forgot that, it would rear up on its back legs.
History of the World, Part I, the King of France:
“Pull!”
Finally, the answer to that age old question
“Does a bear s**t in the woods?”
Nope, he does it in the escape pod when they eject him at Mach 2.
“But, Yogi, I don’t want to be ejected out of a plane at Mach 2.”
“That’s OK, Boo Boo. I’m sure Mister Ranger has a big net to catch us with.”
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