Ask, and ye shall receive.

ZW







"Bob" wrote in message
news
On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:09:07 GMT, "Zomby Woof"
wrote:

Great pics. Lousy looking airplane.
I guess in times of war they have eliminated the paint budget!

About the only visible change to the plane since I last worked on them
in 1982 is a large bulge, antenna?, on the sides between the rear
wheels and tail. I didn't see a pic of that area.

Dept. of misc information.
Back in 1982 the bulge at the very top of the nose dome was an antenna
fed by a large and long in length pressurized waveguide from a
transmitter that sat up in an area just behind the crew door. That
is/was a a fairly large compartment below the main floor that housed
some ECM transmitters. Heavy 225+ lbs boxs taken out and put in by two
people.

Use to be a fiberglass dome behind the steps that you would drop to
get access. Around 1980 they changed it so the transmitters were
accessed from outside the same area by small doors on the left side.
About half of the upper part of the nose dome was filled with ECM
transmitters and antennas you can't see. The bottom part of the nose
dome has the large bomb/nav antenna inside.

The brown squares on the aircraft front and rear near antenna domes
are radar absorbent material to cut down reflections to/from the
antennas of ECM systems.

The large bulge on the upper part of the tail was put in around 1980
for an ECM system. Before that access to anything on the upper part
of the tail for maintenace on the flightline was usually done by
cherry picker, but because of the weight of the system they built a
huge maintenance stand for ECM to work back there. We got the stand
in shortly before I retired in 1982 and I climbed up about 3/4 of the
way to check the stand out. That was far enough up for me!

The two larger radomes at the very rear were for the gun radar.
All the other smaller antennas were ECM...

No cameras on the flightline so I don't have one picture.
During open house too many people and anyway why would anyone go and
look at an airplane they work on every day? Oh, well....

Attached Thumbnails