SR-71 Blackbird / Aurora

Look up some facts people... a flying triangle could be a lot of things...

It could be...
A Black Manta
The Aurora
The Thunderdart

Conventional wise
A Mirage 2000 >
Deltadarts
Thundercheifs

There are quite a few things it could be... if you've read posts made in the ARP which I can not believe people are still posting in these threads, we're explaining the entire matters of the Aurora/SR-71/75/XR-7 theories, along with PDWE/Scram/Ramjets.

But, you also mention the "Mysterious Flying Black Triangles" which could be anything, this granted.

Originally posted by WestPoint23
Too many triangle sightings at area 51 and the lack of a jet to take the place of the blackbird is also something strange. So I think Aurora is more than speculation, and all of the donut on a rope contrails too. Remember folks the F-117 wasn't made public until 10 years after it entered service
.

A triangle shape could be anything, also the donuts in a rope trail might be the result of a strange wind or some diturbence.

MooMix3
A triangle shape could be anything, also the donuts in a rope trail might be the result of a strange wind or some diturbence.

I think the only explanation for the donuts-on-a-rope, is that every poof (donut) is one boom from one cylinder of the PDE engine, and if thats the case they can #in' haul.

I think the only explanation for the donuts-on-a-rope, is that every poof (donut) is one boom from one cylinder of the PDE engine, and if thats the case they can #in' haul.

But that doesnt mean its the Aurora though, does it? It could be another plane.

[edit on 16-9-2004 by MooMix3]

This seems close do donuts on a rope. Check it out, please reply about what you think. Maybe if there was more of a contrail behind it then it would seem more like donuts on a rope.

Picture:
Contrail Pic

[edit on 16-9-2004 by MooMix3]

No, I think that picture just shows the afterburner shock cones of the Blackbirds J-58 (?) engines, I've seen the same effect on many photo's of jets with afterburners on so it can't really be the same effect.

Ok, I'm going to try to address a bunch of things in this one post, so here goes.

1. The SR-71, A-12, M-21 are all based on the same airframe, much the same way a Dodge Stealth is just a rebadged Mitsubishi 3000GT.

2. In order for an aircraft to rotate and climb absolutely vertically, the engine must be able to produce thrust equal to the weight of the aircraft plus the total aerodynamic drag of the fuselage.

3. As far as a ram jet engine being used at mach twenty, the airflow into could not be slowed down sufficiently without creating an ungodly long intake tract. Ram jet engines must have a subsonic flow within the engine in order to function, beyond that and a scram jet engine is needed.

4. Sustained flight at mach twenty would result in so much heat that no material could withstand it for any length of time. As I recall someone in the string suggested tiles like those used in the space shuttle, these would not work for a normal aircraft for several reasons. The tiles are too rough to provide good subsonic lift needed for takeoff and landing. More importantly the tiles are designed to be ablative. That is, the tiles disintegrate in the heat to disperse the energy, it takes a while but when you consider that the space shuttle only experiences the temperatures for a few minutes at a time and an aircraft flying at mach twenty would experience those temperature for (probably) hours on end.

5. To whoever said that the raptor could fly backward at 70 degrees, I say "WHAAAAAAAT?!?!?" I assume that you meant that it can climb at 70 degrees while inverted, is that what you meant?

6. The top speed of the SR-71 is limited by the fact that the mach cone must end up on the inlet spikes or the engines will "unstart" from the supersonic flow into them. using a little bit of geometry and trigonometry (and looking up the equation on the internet, email me if you want the address) the maximum speed for the SR-71 is about mach 3.8, anything beyond that and the mach cone comes to the inside of the engines and they "unstart".

7. In the picture of the SR-71 in flight the things someone was asking about (in reference to the "donuts on a rope" post) what you are seeing in the afterburner exhaust are called mach diamonds, they are present in the exhaust of all afterburners and rocket engines and have nothing to do with unusual exhaust contrails.

I hope that all of that helps with tangents of this thread. Having said that, if anyone disagrees with any of my conclusions I encourage irate responses and look forward to defending my positions.

Originally posted by VW Devotee
6. The top speed of the SR-71 is limited by the fact that the mach cone must end up on the inlet spikes or the engines will "unstart" from the supersonic flow into them. using a little bit of geometry and trigonometry (and looking up the equation on the internet, email me if you want the address) the maximum speed for the SR-71 is about mach 3.8, anything beyond that and the mach cone comes to the inside of the engines and they "unstart".

The fastest published speed of the SR is Mach 3.5. There are several factors that limit the speed of the SR. One is the shock waves generated by various parts of the plane, at around Mach 3.6-3.8 the shock wave off the nose of the aircraft narrows enough to go into the engine, while there is the inlet spike (which slows the air to subsonic before it enters the engine), the shock wave bypasses the spike and causes the engine to unstart.

Second, the heat generated by the plane moving through the atmosphere. Even titanium has it's limits, and the heat generated by the SR brings the fuselage to the brink. It was discovered during a Lockheed Skunk Works study to see how much money and development it would take to get the SR to go faster than it's designed top speed (mach 3.2-3.5) that the metal divider between the windshield was heating up so much above mach 3.5 that it was affecting the integrity of the windshield, and at that point they had stretched the glass technology to the maximum.
www.neworegontrail.com...

Originally posted by waynos
No, I think that picture just shows the afterburner shock cones of the Blackbirds J-58 (?) engines, I've seen the same effect on many photo's of jets with afterburners on so it can't really be the same effect.

7. In the picture of the SR-71 in flight the things someone was asking about (in reference to the "donuts on a rope" post) what you are seeing in the afterburner exhaust are called mach diamonds, they are present in the exhaust of all afterburners and rocket engines and have nothing to do with unusual exhaust contrails.

Correct term is shock diamonds.

www.wvi.com...



Something running hot?

Here's bigger image for those who want nice dekstop background image:
www.mobiledyne.com...

Originally posted by MooMix3
This seems close do donuts on a rope. Check it out, please reply about what you think. Maybe if there was more of a contrail behind it then it would seem more like donuts on a rope.
Picture:
Contrail Pic

Like it has been already said, those are just afterburners.


This is what contrails means:


Or more like this:





www.polarimage.fi...

Correct term is shock diamonds.

Correct term is shock cones in Britain, so ner!

There are simply too many unexplained things to just dismiss the Aurora hypersonic planes as a myth or that it cant be done.

Wow, E_T nice pic, dont get behind this!
www.mobiledyne.com...

Correct term is shock diamonds.

Or Mach Diamonds, or shock cones, or shock cones, it all depends on where you're from, and/or who you learned the term from, and where they are from/how they learned it. It is a lot like the difference between "the United States" and "die Vereinigten Staaten", two phrases meaning the same thing.

[edit on 30-9-2004 by VW Devotee]

However fast the SR-71 is, my father is convinced that he saw one as a young man. He told me about a day he was out mowing his parents lawn, he was a senior in highschool, so that puts the year at 1979, he said he looked up and noticed an airplane leaving a contrail, moving at a very high rate of speed. He said it was just coming past one horizon, heading his direction. He said it was very very high in the sky. He ran inside and told my grandmother to come outside and look, which he says took no longer than a minute. In the time it took him to run inside and get grandma, and run back out side, he said the contrail spanned the entire sky, and the airplane was disspearing over the opposite horizon.

He says it definitely wasn't a UFO because he could make out the faint shape of an airplane, but the speed at which it covered horizon to horizon was a mere minute or two.

Does this sound like the speed of an SR71?

This thread is still on the forums!

Originally posted by MooMix3

Originally posted by ghost
I think the Aurora and the Blackbird would have been most effective as complementry systems, similar to the way they use the F-15 and F-16 together.

So are you saying they should be a team? I do agree the Blackbird should not have retired.

[edit on 15-7-2004 by MooMix3]

Yes, I think they would make a good team.

Tim
ATS Director of Counter-Ignorance

Then lets team em' up! Yes, Area51? We think you should have the Aurora and Blackbird team up. Area51: "Who told you about the Aurora?!" Uhhh, noone. I mean, you did....

originally posted by: TURBINE50
The Aurora is 100% speculation. Just like everything else, we'll find out what came after the Blackbird in 10-20 years or so.

The true replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird that is being fielded by the US Air Force is the Northrop Grumman RQ-180 unmanned flying wing. The CIA back in the mid-1960s launched the super-secret Isinglass program for a successor to the Archangel-12 that could be launched from a larger aircraft and overfly the USSR at speeds greater than Mach 4 while taking pictures of Soviet territory. However, the Isinglass program was too costly to be greenlighted for full-scale development by the CIA or USAF, and was cancelled in the late 1960s. In the mid-1980s, the USAF, CIA, and NRO gave Lockheed and Boeing contracts for design studies of long-range unmanned reconnaissance aircraft able to photograph Soviet mobile ICBMs under codename Quartz (aka AARS), and the resulting proposals for the Quartz program manifested themselves in the form of large flying wings similar to the B-2. Lockheed had conducted design studies for a potential SR-71 replacement with turboramjet propulsion and a speed of Mach4 or more back in early 1979, but Lockheed felt that a subsonic UAV would be more cost-effective than a hypersonic vehicle. The Quartz program, however, cost 1 billion dollars per unit, and was canceled after the fall of the USSR due to high costs in 1992 without any aircraft being built. The Tier III would have followed the requirements envisioned for the Quartz in the 1980s, but it too was super-expensive and eventually split into the high-altitude, non-stealthy Tier II+ and stealthy, medium-altitude Tier III-, which led to development of the RQ-4 Global Hawk and RQ-3 Dark Star respectively.

Links:
www.secretprojects.co.uk...
aviationtrivia.blogspot.com...