| Weird
and Wonderful Aircraft at the USAF museum at Dayton |
| You're
looking at the only aircraft on this page to go into production, the F-82
Twin Mustang. It's not a plane many people are familiar with,
perhaps because it arrived a little too late for World War Two.
Despite an explicit statement on the plaque that it was a completely new
design of aircraft, its lineage with the P-51 Mustang is obvious. |
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| It was intended
for very long duration flight, with one flying non-stop from Hawaii to
New York. It had two pilots to reduce fatigue, but I'm not
sure if they split duties in a dogfight. |
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| The Twin Mustang
was the last propeller driven fighter the USAF bought in any quantity,
with 273 manufactured. At 482 mph it was certainly fast, allowing
it to shot down the first three North Korean aircraft of the Korean war.
It could also carry 4000 pounds of bombs, the same as early B-17 Flying
Fortresses. |
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| The
P-51 was the solution to America's problem of bomber escort in World War
Two, but even the F-82 couldn't handle the distances required to protect
America's strategic bombers during the Cold War. One possibility
the Air Force toyed with was the "parasitic fighter", an approach the US
navy had taken during the 1930s when they equipped their airships with
miniature hangars underneath housing biplanes attached on hooks.
The jet powered XF-85 Goblin was an updated version of this concept, intended
to be hung from the bomb bay of a giant B-36 Peacemaker bomber (visible
in the immediate background), and released using the trapeze hook you can
see at the top of the aircraft. After shooting down enemy aircraft,
the Goblin would return to the bomber, hook up, folds its wings and return
to the bomb bay. |
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| The Goblin is one
of America's earliest jets, first flying in 1948. Only 14 feet
(4.3 meters) long, it was intended to have a top speed of 650 mph and flying
time of 80 minutes. The concept didn't get too far, though,
with only two aircraft built and very few flights made. After
only a year and with just a few drops and recoveries from B-29 Superfortresses,
the program was cancelled. |
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| The Ryan X-13 Vertijet
was another innovative effort to gain a competitive edge during the Cold
War, made possible by the improved power of jet engines. The
Vertijet relied on a British Rolls-Royce Avon jet engine with a thrust
of 10000 pounds to lift its 7200 pound maximum weight vertically from the
ground. |
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First flying in
1956, the plane made the transition from vertical flight to horizontal
flight and back to a vertical landing in April of 1957.
The intention was
for the plane to take off and land with the use of the frame shown in this
photograph, but the difficulty of returning to the vertical orientation
and then slowly backing down several hundred feet was simply too difficult,
and was one reason the aircraft was rejected for production. |
| The
notion of forward-sweep wings had been thought about since the 1940s, however
until the 1970s the materials didn't exist to make the wings stiff enough
to handle the stresses involved. However, in 1982 Grumman built
the X-29 which not only had forward swept wings, but also other innovations
like the canards which you can see fitted immediately behind the engine
intakes. In 1985 the aircraft you see here became the first
plane with forward swept wings to break the sound barrier in level flight. |
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| (at the bottom left
of this photo you can see the top of a B-36 Bolo bomber, one of the America's
main heavy bombers at the start of World War Two) |
| This
ungainly creature, looking for all the world like an upside-down bathtub,
is the Northrop Tacit Blue aircraft, which was used to develop the stealth
technologies used on the B-2
Spirit bomber. |
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