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Comment by austinl | Hacker News Reader

I'd highly recommend the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich. It's about the engineering team at Lockheed Martin that designed the Blackbird (and the U-2, and several other amazing planes), and describes many of the engineering challenges in detail.

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My favorite part of the new Top Gun movie was the first 10-15 minutes. It features a very nice looking plane with a cool skunk logo [0]

[0] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/a...

The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 community has been going nuts over the latest Maverick release in the sim. In this, you can fly the Darkstar and take it up to around 250,000' AGL and hit Mach 10. The whole trailer is worth watching but the Darkstar scene is at the end.

https://youtu.be/wWkczb0LIgI

Words do not describe the feeling of flying this thing in VR on a high end gaming rig with a full HOTAS setup. Although truth be told the FA-18 is the more fun plane to fly with the low altitude landing challenges.

I was breathing very hard by the end of one but nailed the A rating. It was intense.

(Spoilers?)

I thought the Darkstar plane (or a copy, since it disintegrates in flight) would return at the end of the movie to save the day or as a surprise, but it didn't.

I got the feeling they recut a lot of the first act in post. A lot of effort was put into the darkstar both in production and in marketing and it was turned into a throwaway

I got the feeling that the whole Darkstar scene, and the entire movie after the helicopter gunship missed with his cannon, were added just to padded the trailer with nice footage. I absolutely loved seeing the (virtual) F-14 fly, I think that I've seen all publicly available F-14 footage on Youtube a dozen times. But the actual story was bookmarked between Maverick getting sent to Mirimar (or North Shore, whatever) and looking down the barrels of the Mil MI.

Spoilers:

Maverick died during that crash and the whole movie is just his last DMT hit before brain death. (Not my theory, lifted from the internets)

That theory actually makes it a better movie for me

(Spoilers?)

I don't think disintegrating at mach 10 would be survivable. You're basically a meteorite at that point burning up in the atmosphere, not to mention the speed at which you'll hit the ground even with a parachute if the parachute could even stay intact at that speed.

Yeah that scene completely ruined my suspension of disbelief (which was already set to 7/10 because Top Gun is pure entertainment anyway).

I guess you could theorize a 'capsule' consisting of some part of the cockpit that would last long enough to decelerate the pilot to a "more survivable" speed, no idea what the engineering tradeoffs are there though.

There is a small, but not insignificant number of aircraft that ejected capsules or protected environments for high mach ejections.

The B-58 hustler is one, and the F-111 was capable of separating the entire cockpit from the airframe.

Kelly Johnson even claimed that a mach 3 ejection from the A-12/YF-12/SR-71 was survivable in just the pressure suit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_crew_capsule

Is there a large difference between being ejected at mach 3 or mach 10? The heat is probably unpleasant after a while but wouldn't be the strongest drag force be felt around mach 1? Different mechanism but imagining a kung-fu master breaking a steel bar with his pinky right now...

Pretty sure drag keeps going up the faster you go. Naively 3X speed should equate to 9X drag force and 9X heat generation.

I think the drag coefficient as a derivation of drag peaks around supersonic speed but I am not sure about it.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/79732/why-does-...

Not sure what zero lift means in this context, perhaps the drag induced by lift is neglected. It is still > 0 so drag does still increase...

I've read declassified CIA documents about ISINGLASS and RHEINBERRY, proposed very high speed recon platforms.

One "advantage" — apparently not to be emphasized to the pilot — was that there was no way for a pilot to eject and be captured in enemy territory, a la Francis Gary Powers. At the velocities the a/c would reach over the USSR, if it had a mishap the environment would be so severe the Soviets wouldn't even be able to determine from the wreckage if it was manned at all.

I could have literally been thrown together for marketing reasons. It was turned into a nice promotional event in both microsoft flight simulator and Ace Combat 7

Such a fascinating read! I particularly enjoyed the part where they are testing the radar cross section of Have Blue, the initial design for the F-117. They had put it up on the test stand, but think the radar is malfunctioning, as they don't see any returns on the scope. Finally, they get a tiny return -- a bird had landed on the test object!

The F-117 is such great plane, and defense project. Developed as complete black project, it was delivered in time and, allegedly, in budget. The latter point is hard to verify, after all they used parts from the F-15 and F-16 programms. Up to the point where congress challenegd the spare needs for those programms.

Plus, it was a beautiful plane.

The B-2 and F-117 are so bizarre and alien looking compared to everything that came before and after (in a good way). If we were picking planes for a space opera, IMO the big villain guy would fly around in a B-2, his minions would get F-117s, and probably the hero would get a Blackbird (although, with a less menacing paint job).

Analysis: True

Love that book. Sled Driver is also worth checking out. It focuses on things from the pilots perspective, but from memory the pilots had to have a fairly intimate understanding of their vehicles, so a lot of discussion of the mechanics/engineering.

Offtopic: Skunkworks, and Master's of Doom are two of my favourite non fiction books, and they both had a similar vibe. Liftoff (Eric Berger) was another. Can people recommend more books like this?

Blind Man's Bluff:

https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

I think it's on par with Skunk Works. Absolutely amazing stories about submarine espionage, stealth fighters but underwater.

Thankyou, I will check it out :-)

I 2ed this recommendation. After reading the book, I felt like I understood the fundamentals of why the Blackbird program was limited in scope and time in contrast to their cheeper to build and operate style aircraft.

I second this recommendation. I've read this book more than once. I'm amazed at how quickly they developed and shipped product, and developed their own tooling in the process.

There's an audiobook of it which was pretty well done

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