Some hoaxes never die, especially if they are accompanied with good photographs and are delivered in an email from your friends. Here’s an example:
The plane in these pictures is still officially the 'Air Vehicle Number 1', a prototype, on board the USS GeorgeWashington CVN-73 for catapult fit checks. Not exactly still Top Secret but certainly not yet made public.
It will be known as the F/A-37. Although specs are classified, it is believed to be Mach 3.5 (top speed in the Mach 4 range), super-cruise stealth fighter/bomber/interceptor with approximately a 4,000nmrange. Awesome!
Check out the Navy test pilot in the cockpit of the F/A-37...LT. Kara Wade... Go girl!
Our compliments to Lt. Kara Wade, she looks so much like Jessica Biel. Well, it is Jessica Biel. The F/A-37 is the fictitious airplane from the 2005 movie “Stealth.” The US Navy allowed director Rob Cohen to film on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. Here’s a press release from the Navy, and here's the movie trailer:
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The Navy’s cooperation in the making of this film may remind you of the Top Gun effect we mentioned in a previous post. Heroic military movies have a positive effect on recruitment numbers.
We investigated a video that apparently shows an airplane successfully landing after losing a wing. The video was a hoax. A clothing company attempted a viral marketing campaign, and this video was the result.
The video was fake, but the question remains – is such a thing physically possible? We’ve all seen aerobatic planes making knife-edge passes at air shows. Is it possible for an airplane to make a knife-edge landing after losing a wing? Well, kind of.
The airplane would have to fly at a slower speed for its landing approach. Therefore, it would need much more engine thrust. Is such a thrust-to-weight ratio available in today’s aerobatic planes? I’m not sure, but I do know it exists in the world of radio-controlled aircraft. Keep in mind, some of these RC planes are one-third the scale of the planes they replicate.
We have three example videos that show one-wing landings by large-scale RC planes. All three videos are genuine, and demonstrate amazing skill. The three videos have a total of 214,000 views on YouTube as of this writing. Are you entertained?
BONUS: The discussion of the one-wing landing caught the attention of the traditional aviation media, even though the talk is still theoretical. Peter Garrison wrote about it in the March 2009 issue of Flying magazine.
Santa Claus is the most famous pilot in the world. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tracks the progress of Santa every Christmas Eve and you can follow along online if you have trouble sleeping that night.
You will see Santa’s position on a Google Map, or download Google Earth and follow him in the 3D rendition of the Earth. We tried to find a preview of what this looks like, but I guess we really do have to wait to see Santa, just like the kids.
The NORAD Santa website goes into more detail: “Canadian NORAD fighter pilots flying the CF-18 intercept and welcome Santa to North America. In the United States, American NORAD fighter pilots in either the F-15 or the F-16 get the thrill of flying alongside Santa and his famous reindeer…”
Today we examine a YouTube video that shows a race plane losing a wing in flight and miraculously making a safe landing. We believe the video does not show a real event, but instead is a conscious effort to spread the brand of the KillaThrill sports apparel company via a viral video.
A successful viral video is a bit of a holy grail for advertisers. Imagine if you could entice people to voluntarily pass along your advertisement to their friends simply because the video is interesting. Free advertising doesn’t get any better than that.
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Here are 4.5 reasons why this video probably does not show a real event…
1. The plane approaches landing in a knife-edge pass and we expect to see the right horizontal stabilizer on the tail impact the ground first. Suddenly, some mysterious force simultaneously lifts the tail and rolls the airplane upright for landing. What was this force? The flight controls are less responsive at this slow speed, and the right aileron is gone, so we can rule out super-human piloting. The right horizontal stabilizer could not have bounced off the ground because there is clearly no damage to it. Some subtle video editing, not aerodynamics, must have played a part in this landing.
2. The plane doesn’t bounce correctly on landing. The plane makes a hard landing and bounces a few feet into the air. At this time, the airspeed is low, and the tail pitches up in response to the bounce. Every tail-wheel pilot knows what should happen next. There is nothing to stop the plane from impacting the ground with its lightweight tail high in the air, and its heavy nose plowing into the ground. As the propeller digs into the ground, the plane would flip over due to the sudden stop. But the airplane in the video makes an “amazing” soft landing based on video trickery, not physics.
3. The wing falls off during a routine low speed, low-G roll, yet holds up fine moments earlier during a four-G (at least) pull-up. Seems a bit odd.
4. AirRacer89 and MrMarodeur posted the same video on YouTube within two days of one another. Both videos have similar search tags. Both user profiles are based in Germany. As of this writing, both profiles have posted only one video: the one-wing landing. Both profiles list similar videos in their favorites. Here is a theory: maybe a guy at an ad agency posted the video first as MrMarodeur on October 25, and was disappointed with the low number of initial views, so he created the AirRacer89 profile on October 27 and posted the same video in order to spread the net a little wider.
4.5 Where did the race pylons go? At the beginning of the clip, you briefly can see the race plane zooming through Red-Bull style race pylons, but later when the airplane makes it's "amazing landing" the pylons are gone. This is only .5 of a reason because we don't see enough of the surrounding airport environment to tell for sure.
Bonus: RRRRUUUUUUUNNN ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
What do you think? Real or fake? Does it matter? Do you feel like buying KillaThrill sports apparel now?
The plane in these pictures is still officially the 'Air Vehicle Number 1', a prototype, on board the USS GeorgeWashington CVN-73 for catapult fit checks. Not exactly still Top Secret but certainly not yet made public.
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