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Kudos again parrothead
Thanks for the great public web sites.
I'm partial to the SR because I had a small part in building the combustors some years back, and went to school (even further back) with some of the guys working on it.
It was great jogging some of the cob webs loose from the gray matter with this thread.
Thanks again!

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Elite 3K Joined: May 10, 2004 Posts: 3098 Status: Offline

ACMIguy,

Thanks for the kudos and no problemo at all Smile

! I love those jets and I feel very lucky to hang out with some of the guys who made it happen. I wonder what else they know about that they're not telling about Razz

!

The SR-71 was definitely a great airplane - really neat to sit in the cockpit of one and think of the history Cool

. If you built some of the combustors on the J-58s, then you worked on the same engine that powered the entire Blackbird family!

For some more good Blackbird (and U-2) stuff, you might want to check out http://www.blackbirds.net/u2/c_bennett/bbird-01.html Wink

.

Thanks parrothead

I have a picture of the afterburner section from a web site

http://www.enginehistory.org/p&w_j58.htm

The white area is the plasma coating. We sprayed very tiny solid ceramic pellets into a flame stream of hydrogen gas which turned them into a liquid spray. The afterburner can would turn as the sprayer coated the walls.
If you notice the cooling holes inside, some of these were cut by hand on a drill press, sometimes taking 8 hour shifts just drilling the holes.

All engines have this coating including rocket motors.

This was just one of the parts I helped build back then.

Thanks again!

Elite 3K Joined: May 10, 2004 Posts: 3098 Status: Offline

ACMIguy,

I love this stuff - thanks for giving me a reason to bring it up Very Happy

!

I hadn't heard about the plasma coating - I'll have to ask some more questions about the J-58s at the reunion on Tuesday and Wednesday Wink

. It's truly amazing what cosmic stuff was going on back in the '50s and '60s - and it's daunting to think of what's going on today as well Cool

.

Parkeran wrote:

Is the paint used on the F-22 Raptor what causes it's stealth? Because the F-22 has a similar colour of paint to the F-35 and there both said to have stealth. Just a thought but i would really like to know.

Cheers

Parkeran

Another stealth tactic of the F22 is powdered cloud. I have seen a picture on www.airliners.net and I searched for Raptor Powdered cloud. some of the pics are amazing.

Elite 1K Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1152

"Powdered cloud" you say? Are you thinking of vapor clouds? That's not stealth, that's just Bernoulli's principle in high humidity.

Parkeran2
I looked for the link but came up with nothing on the site. Are you referring to the paint color with the slight silver tent?
I've seen some Vipers painted with the same stuff, it looks like a silver metal flake was added to the color. It's very ruff to the touch and has very poor wear qualities over time. They did only a few of them so it was probably a for runner of the Raptor colors used as a test bed. But that's a guess on my part.
Maybe someone here knows more about it.

Enthusiast Joined: Nov 06, 2006 Posts: 65 Status: Offline

What I think he is referring to is the vapor contrails produced by the aircraft naturally from high performance maneuvers. On one of the pics on Airliners.net it refers to the vapor cloud as a "New Stealth Ability." stating the Raptor can create and engulf itself in a cloud. Sorry Parkeran2, that is not a real stealth technique. It is as Guysmiley stated earlier, nothing more than a vapor contrail produced by an aircraft performing a high-g maneuver in high humidity.

Parkeran2 wrote:

Parkeran wrote:

Is the paint used on the F-22 Raptor what causes it's stealth? Because the F-22 has a similar colour of paint to the F-35 and there both said to have stealth. Just a thought but i would really like to know.

Cheers

Parkeran

Another stealth tactic of the F22 is powdered cloud. I have seen a picture on www.airliners.net and I searched for Raptor Powdered cloud. some of the pics are amazing.

Here's some pics I hope you enjoy. It won't make the a/c stealthy but it is an amazing sight and sure to scare the crap out of opposing pilots Cool

Impressive yes, but let's take this into the future and just suppose we have two stealth jets going at it with each other in a knife fight. Don't you think this would be a betrayal to the 22's true direction?
Anyone remember the Canadian CF-18 with the false canopy pained under the nose just to confuse an adversary?

Enthusiast Joined: Nov 06, 2006 Posts: 65 Status: Offline

Yeah, those are cool pictures, and it looks nice at an air show, but this is not a stealth tactic. If the Raptor is that close to the advisory and with in view (i.e their 10 to 2 o'clock) something is seriously wrong. The "clouds" you see are nothing more than vapor appearing due to high humidity and the aircraft pulling a high-g turn. In a dry, arid dessert you may not even get the vapor effect you see in those pics. This has nothing to do with stealth tactics, it is purely environmental, end of story.

ACMIguy wrote:

Impressive yes, but let's take this into the future and just suppose we have two stealth jets going at it with each other in a knife fight. Don't you think this would be a betrayal to the 22's true direction?
Anyone remember the Canadian CF-18 with the false canopy pained under the nose just to confuse an adversary?

I thought precisely that too. After the initial "wow, I've never seen that", I wondered whether the designers took that into consideration, i.e. making the clouds not appear. Apparently, they chose outright maneuverbility in a knife fight instead of low visibility, as perhaps if it has degraded to such a point in the fight, the Raptor would need as much agility as possible. I'm not 100% sure but the amount of vapor all over the leading edges of the wing are a telling sign of the extreme lift the a/c can generate in a turn.

The vapor might actually make the general position of the a/c MORE visible on radar for a few milliseconds, and besides, if the F-22 is using stealth tactics it's usually far away or behind an enemy's radar cone, where maneuvering like this isn't necesarry.

Enthusiast Joined: Nov 06, 2006 Posts: 65 Status: Offline

ACMIguy wrote:

Impressive yes, but let's take this into the future and just suppose we have two stealth jets going at it with each other in a knife fight. Don't you think this would be a betrayal to the 22's true direction?
Anyone remember the Canadian CF-18 with the false canopy pained under the nose just to confuse an adversary?

I remember seeing some A-10's with the false canopy painted on them as well. These are designed to confuse an advisory WVR. As you put it, "a betrayal to the 22's true direction."

Tinito_16 wrote:

The vapor might actually make the general position of the a/c MORE visible on radar for a few milliseconds, and besides, if the F-22 is using stealth tactics it's usually far away or behind an enemy's radar cone, where maneuvering like this isn't necesarry.

I was thinking something similar. I don't know if this will increase the radar return on the Raptor, but it in no way can help it.

Elite 1K Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1152

ACMIguy wrote:

Impressive yes, but let's take this into the future and just suppose we have two stealth jets going at it with each other in a knife fight. Don't you think this would be a betrayal to the 22's true direction?
Anyone remember the Canadian CF-18 with the false canopy pained under the nose just to confuse an adversary?

The thing is, that's pure physics. You don't HAVE to yank that hard and get those massive vapor clouds, but you CAN if you need to. I've seen shots of F-16s doing the same thing while yanking and banking at low altitude.

wait wait.. i do not think the paint alone is responsible for stealth... the shape of the plane and many other things have an affect

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Stealthy paint?