Striker's Aviation Thread

[josehl]

Visit airliners.net for all things aviation. Their forums are even more violent than these. (I'm not able to post links yet, BTW)

Greetings from Chicago.

[mr.brownfella]

P-51 Mustang

North American Aviation built 15,575 of these single engine fighters during the 1940s. The P-51 Mustang had aerodynamics that gave it an advantage in combat. The Tuskegee Airmen, the famed World War II squadron composed entirely of African-American pilots, flew Mustangs. It was the only Army Air Force fighter group never to lose a bomber to enemy planes.

[mr.brownfella]

[McHookerino]

654 in Hondo, look closely and you'll see me in the door

This is still a Boeing promo shot for the hooker

[mr.brownfella]

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Awesome, man just awesome.

[strommsarnac]

I met one of the lead engineers of the P-51. He also made a "role playing" miniatures game called Mustang and Messerschmidts. If you ever look closely at P-51's, you'll notice two seemingly minor changes to the design which had a major impact on the performance. The facts behind the changes were still classified Top Secret until 1991. The changes were...

1. The most noticeable was the "pass through" oil-cooler scoop on the bottom of the plane. This wasn't added until the P-51B model. The design change was simply intended to increase the cooling of the oil. The surprise wasn't accepted until a few months later when many P-51 pilots kept reporting that the enemy were suddenly slower. It turned out that the new scoop design actually acts like a mini-ramjet and give the plane a top-speed boost of up to 25 knots. That is HUGE for a prop-driven fighter. All for no extra fuel.

2. Later, they modified the exhaust ports on the side of the plane (up near the nose). The change was from port openings flush with the side panels to tubes angling back towards the rear. At full throttle, this "little" bit of exhaust provides up to 5 knots boost, again at no extra fuel cost.

The Germans never learned why their ME-109 was always a bit slower than the P-51 even though all aerodynamic and performance test said it should have been a bit faster. The US kept the secret closely guarded while other countries continued to use P-51s even into the 1980s.

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[strommsarnac]

This is one of my favorite Aviation images.

The helicopter is a Keystone CH-47 Chinook, piloted by Larry Murphy, an EMS chopper pilot and National Guardsman from Allentown, Pennsylvania. The amazing landing was not part of a rescue mission, however, but rather a pick-up of "Persons Under Control" (prisoners) captured by U.S. soldiers during Operation Mountain Resolve in the Nuristan province of Afghanistan in 2003.

[mr.brownfella]

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I did not know that..thanks that is great to know...I love these old WWII places.

[Striker]

This is a video of a 747 making an approach and landing on runway 13 at Hong Kong International Airport. This airport closed in 1998 and moved to a new one 30km to the west. Here's the what Wikipedia says about runway 13 approach.

The landing approach using runway 13 at Kai Tak was spectacular and world-famous. To land on runway 13, an aircraft first took a descent heading northeast. The aircraft would pass over the crowded harbour, and then the very densely populated areas of Western Kowloon. This leg of the approach was guided by an IGS (Instrument Guidance System, a modified ILS) after 1974.

Upon reaching a small hill marked with a checkerboard in red and white, used as a visual reference point on the final approach (in addition to the middle marker on the Instrument Guidance System), the pilot needed to make a 47 degree visual right turn to line up with the runway and complete the final leg. The aircraft would be just two nautical miles (3.7 km) from touchdown, at a height of less than 1,000 feet (300 m) when the turn was made. Typically the plane would enter the final right turn at a height of about 650 feet (200 m) and exit it at a height of 140 feet (43 m) to line up with the runway. This maneuver has become widely known in the piloting community as the "Hong Kong Turn" or "Checkerboard Turn".

Landing the runway 13 approach was already difficult with normal crosswinds since even if the wind direction was constant, it was changing relative to the airplane during the 47 degree visual right turn. The landing would become even more challenging when crosswinds from the northeast were strong and gusty during typhoons. The mountain range northeast of the airport also makes wind vary greatly in both speed and direction, thus varying the lift of the airplane. From a spectator's point of view, watching large Boeing 747s banking at low altitudes and taking big crab angles during their final approaches was quite thrilling. Despite the difficulty, the runway 13 approach was nonetheless used most of the time due to the prevailing wind direction in Hong Kong.

Due to the turn in final approach, ILS was not available for runway 13 and landings had to follow a visual approach. This made the runway unusable in low visibility conditions.


This video was shot from the 'checkerboard'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtnL4KYVtDE

^^^Fuck that.

I love watching airplanes in action, but I hate flying. Cuz I'm a big pussy in that way.