So A Friend Showed Up at a Museum.
One of my Blog Mothers went to Grissom Air Museum and posted a lot of great pics of old hardware. She had a picture of the B-58 Hustler, one of the Strategic Air Commands aircraft designed to drop nukes on the commies during the height of the Cold War. There is another one of those at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. It was Wright Patterson Air Force base back in the day.
I had to dig a photo out from 1976 of an XB-70 Valkyrie there.
Sorry for the photo quality, the Kodak 110 Instamatic did the best it could.
So I also have to present this. The visitor map for Seymour Johnson AFB from the mid seventies. It was a SAC base. Back then it was pretty straightforward. KC-135 Stratotanker's, F-4 fighters, and B-52 bombers.
It looked like this:
Oh, thanks to her for pointing out the Douglas X-3 Stiletto behind this handsome dude!
.
Nice shot of the XB-70. Thank God they've now got it indoors and out of the weather. And tell the story about "handsome dude".
ReplyDeleteHa! The "handsome dude" is a mythical construct but he knows what the rudder pedals do and smart enough to defer to the more than capable senior person in the left seat =)
ReplyDeleteI did not know they got it inside. That is fantastic! I need to go back. That was oh, 30+ years ago.
That is a great hunk of history there. They tried to do so many things at the same time.
The X-3 was pretty, but a dog of an airplane.
ReplyDeleteLike a lot of others of it's time, it was designed to use an engine that never made it into even limited production.
But it did teach some important lessons about "roll inertia coupling", which almost resulted in the loss of the aircraft.
Yes it was a dog. Looked great though! Thanks to the test pilots that figured that out.
DeleteThe Valkyrie was one 'strange' airplane... :-) And good pic considering...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the flash back memory of Seymour Johnson. I was there '81 through '85 and the map matches what I remember.
ReplyDelete