Best plane seen flying

Which is what???

Mart> My dad saw XR219 during its flight tests, he has been to Duxford and Cosford

A cancelled supersonic bomber programme.

(kim)

Getting it up in the air was no big deal. Getting it down again in one piece was the problem :o)

(kim)

Didn't Finescale do a kit review of the TSR.2 recently ? Airfix

1/72 scale I do believe. Probably a hard to find kit now that Airfix is belly up ? Would be neat to have this model in a display case. What is that ? Exotic looking. I bet when that thing was going supersonic it would take an area the size of Montana to turn around in. Must have been some serious wing-loading.

Chris

Martin said the following on 01/12/06 12:54:

I must admit it was sweet seeing Concorde appear behind us, move slowly alongside and slowly pull away as we were in a VC10 out of Brize when Concorde was doing air tests out of Fairford for a while.

Richard.

I saw the Concorde flying over Stewart here in the Hudson Valley in New York. This was some time after they completed the runway extention there. They were doing ''touch -n- go'' with the plane we had read that Stewart was going to be an emergency site for landing the Concorde.

What a truly beautiful plane it was , so sleek and with those big wide wings it was a truly awesome site.

The other egually beautiful craft that i've seen here was the B-2 Bomber. One flew overhead while one was on display on the ground. I still say they just took the best parts of the original ''Flying Wing'' and painted it black. Damn , I have to say it that is one really KewL looking Airplane..

They should really give one to Bat Man because it looks like a Big Black Bat.

... Carl ..........

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I'm a little unsure of the reception I'll get with this. I didn't see the aircraft flying, just taxying at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. It looked a bit like a larger version of the Have Blue technology demonstrator, but it was very smooth rather than faceted. The twin tails were canted inward. It was somewhat like the Italeri F-19 kit, but the wingspan seemed to be greater than the length. There appeared to be no markings of any sort. The aircraft was painted a medium grey, rather than the black that I would have expected. It was very quiet, but it *was* a jet - it didn't have some exotic science-fiction power source! Make of that what you will.

Incidentally, I first saw the F-117 a year or so before it was declassified. Two of them took part in Exercise Maple Flag at CFB Cold Lake in 1988. They were also painted medium grey. They were never sat out on the line and every time they taxied to and from their hangar they had an escort of several vehicles filled with armed troops! The jet I saw in Dhahran had no such escort.

Define "best"...

Exactly. For me, it's a tossup between a B-25 and a B-17, both of which have been to recent airshows here. Bad weather grounded the P-40 that was scheduled to be here 2 years ago. >:^(

But then, I've never seen a B-24 nor a B-29 aloft ...

-- C.R. Krieger (Been there; done that)

Let's see...on the wing and/or up close and personal in flying/fighting form I've seen -

AT-6, P-38, P-40, F3F, P-51, B-17, B-24, B-25, B-29, A-26, B-2, F-86, Mig-15, T-38, F-4, F-20, F-14, F-15, F-16, F/A-18, F-111, F-117, A-10, F/A-22, U-2, S-3, EA6B, A-6, A-7, A3D, AV8B, Hunter, Toronado, Eurofighter, Jaguar, Gemini...and that's only the ones I can recall off the top of my head...oh well, you get the picture...

...about the only thing I haven't seen flying that I want to is an SR-71. I keep missing those for some reason. But I'd still be hard pressed to call any one of them the "best". That's just not a word I use in describing aircraft anymore.

The B-2 and Nighthawk flying low over my house which is just a mile from the Air Force Academy (fly over before a Navy football game at Air Force) (:>

..and *is* an alternate site for the space shuttle.

A couple of years ago, while they were playing war games at West Point, two A-10s flew low over my house. They were ground hugging over the hills and through the valleys. I was out in my back yard and heard something coming fast. They suddenly popped up from one valley, flew about 300' high over my house, and disappeared down into another valley. I ran into the house and got my camera and waited for them to come back, but they never did.

The Convair B36 in the fifties. Cool and loud. They flew over our house at Davis Monthan AFB in Tuscon, Az. on a regular basis.

Russ Niles IPMS 4450 Sacramento Ca

Too close for missiles........switching to guns.

I have to put in a toss-up for my choices.

When I was a kid in Sausalito in the fifties we had bomb drills once a month. We walked a quarter mile to the main street where buses would pick us up in case of an actual attack. On one of those drills a flight of B-36s roared overhead. I was the only one thrilled to see these beautiful giants pass over, everyone else, including the teachers, were spooked. They thought that it meant an actual attack was taking place.

The other would be the F-104. While there are a lot of airplanes that could be described as beautiful, the F-104 is, by far, the most elegant.

Never saw one fly except n films, but the DH Albatross was another design that has to be at the top of the lst.

Tom

Count DeM> The B-2 and Nighthawk flying low over my house which is just a mile

Almost a tossup for me, but....

The F 105's that did repeated low level supersonic flights over the airfield at Rome AFB in 69 or 70 when I was a kid. The F 104's, and F 4C's, even the F 111, did a right nice job too.... But the F 105's were the most impressive for me.

We all went home a little deaf that day :)

AM

They always made the strangest noise. It was sort of a deep hollow whistle, like blowing across the top of an empty beer bottle.

Oddly enough the F-15s that fly over my house every day make a similar sound.

So do Harriers, EA6Bs and S-3s...

And TA-4s on the deck at idle.

The whistle from the Harrier is due to the bearing at the front of the engine. It produces a very high frequency noise which can easily damage hearing.

During the late '80s, ground crew on RAF Harrier squadrons were issued with slimline ear defenders that would fit under a kevlar helmet. Unfortunately those ear defenders were intended to protect against the sound of gunfire, not high frequency aircraft noise. When the problem came to light after 18 months or so, those ear defenders were hurriedly withdrawn, but the damage was done. Many ex-Harrier groundcrew from that time have hearing damage. I certainly do and I receive a "war pension" for it.