Posted on 06/03/2009 7:42:27 AM PDT by decimon
The United States is planning to retire its fabled U-2 spy planes from South Korea and replace them with unmanned drones, an Air Force spokeswoman said Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsvine.com ...
These were formerly based in Japan, among other locations.
I didn’t even know they still flew those things.
We designed some amazing aircraft in the 1950s.
It's true that the U-2s can go pretty high, but they are definitely not a high speed aircraft. One of the limitations, at least in the earlier models, was what was known as the "coffin corner", the airspeed/altitude situation where the mach limit and the stall speed coincided.
There used to be one of the first series on display at the SAC museum in Omaha, and it was obviously constructed with basic glider technology of the 50s, with flaps and ailerons connected to the wings by piano hinge. The later U-2s still in operation are more sophisticated and powerful, but still have similar airframe speed limitations.
They’re just planes designed by typical white people.
The Global Hawk has more capable surveillance systems and longer loiter time. It’s potential vulnerability is its stated maximum altitude of 65,000 feet. I doubt that is its true maximum altitude, since being unmanned, it shouldn’t have human systems/life support concerns.
I got to work with this bird a little bit about 10 years ago. Amazing seeing them cracked open at just how ... simple they were. Granted, I am not an aero engineer or anything.
It does have combustion-in-an-oxygen-atmosphere issues.
Unless you are using enhanced breathing engines thats about all yoiu are going to get in terms of ceiling.
This was at the beginning of the global-warming hysteria, and the foreign-born, female instructor was a complete leftist tool. We could barely discern meaning due to her thick accent, and her near-incompetence. All of my classmates were also moronic leftist youth who accepted the pap presented to them. I was riled by the leftist soup that surrounded me, but I kept my eyes on the prize and only spoke up in clas using well thought-out comments designed to save my grade.
Long story short: NASA was using old U2s to take climate data. We got to look at them, and I even was allowed to stick my head into the cockpit. It was so old it had wooden seats!
Beautiful climbers....
The operational ceiling of the U2/TR-1 aircraft was listed at 80,000 feet, however they routinely exceeded that level during operations as did the SR-71. Those are air-breathing engines that burned JP-7, which has some blended oxidizers, but not alot. The flash point was so high that you could drop a lit match into a bucket of it and the match would go out. I’ve seen that with my own eyes.
My whole point is that if the Global Hawk ceiling truly is only 60,000 feet, most SA-7-like antiaircraft missiles could reach it, assuming the guidance radar could see the target.
RR AE3007 engine in the Hawk is the same powerplant as the Cessna Citation X according to Wiki. The models ceiling is
given as 65000ft for the prototype. Can any engine be modified to burn JP7? I have to believe that there is
added ceiling that has not been made public (these puppies
are 25 mil+ apiece and not as expendable as Preds).
Definitely not. The J-58 engine used on the SR-71 has special inlet nozzles and compression chambers. These were built both for speed and altitude. There may be some modifications that could be made to the Global Hawk that would give it the altitude capability. It may be stealthy enough to evade the radars even at lower altitude. It certainly doesn't have the speed to outrun the missiles.
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