Wondering about the F-102...

From: Mike Marron
Date: 2/15/2004 5:14 PM Central Standard Time
Message-id:

(B2431) wrote:
Mike Marron wrote:

Dad loved the Duece. Back in the early 70's I can distinctly remember
Dad and me standing on the ramp at Buckley ANG base where he flew
the T-29 (he was stationed at Denver's Lowry AFB but flew the T-29
out of Buckley from time to time just before his retirement).

Surely not as a pilot.

Surely you don't know what in the hell you're talking about (as
usual).

There was no reason an ADC pilot would have trained on a
T-29. It had 2 primary functions over its lifespan: navigator trainer and
cargo. The ones I worked on at Langley in the 1970s still had most of the
sextant mounts in place if memory serves.

Make ya' a deal, sarge. If you make me prove that he was indeed a
T-29 pilot then you have to shut your pie hole and log off RAM for one
year. Conversely, I will do the same if you prove me wrong.

Deal?

Tell ya what, I'll wait until someone who was there tells me otherwise. I
really don't believe a thing you say.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

(B2431) wrote:
Mike Marron wrote:

Make ya' a deal, sarge. If you make me prove that he was indeed a
T-29 pilot then you have to shut your pie hole and log off RAM for one
year. Conversely, I will do the same if you prove me wrong.

Deal?

Tell ya what, I'll wait until someone who was there tells me otherwise. I
really don't believe a thing you say.

Coward.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Peter Stickney wrote:

snip Walt's comments

Thanks, Walt. I'm the one that quoted Beamont's report.
To place it better in context, it should be pointed out that he was
here as much in mis capacity as English Electric's Chief Test Pilot as
anything else, and one of his tasks was to eveluate stuff like the
dampers in the -102, (And, for that matter, all other U.S. Supersonic
aircraft) and his high-speed test of them was well above the handbook
limit. (Somehwere around 0.95 Mach, while decelerating from a run to
Vmax.) He was, of course, very much involved with testing of the P.1B
and Lightning at that time, and so was very interested in why the
U.S. was goig to artificial stability augmentation. There was a bit
of a difference in philosphy there - The Brits really didn't like
adding such systems, and went to great lengths to avoid them.
For example, teh Yaw Damper was invented for teh B-47. The V-Bombers
spent a bunch of extra development time getting fiddled with to make
them stable enough in yaw to not need one. Whether that's because any
Sability Augmentation System that they'd be putting in would be built
by Lucas...

I've never heard an F-102 pilot say bad things about the airplane.
They all wished that it were a bit faster, though.

I do believe that would be the F-102B, aka F-106 ;-) Six pilots seem to
have liked them just as much, although it suffered from the same "one big
move, and then your energy is all gone" problem of all conventional deltas.

Guy

"B2431" wrote in message
...
From: "Kevin Brooks"
We lived over near Deer Park, and when the ambient
noise was down and the conditions were right we could hear it at the
house.

Brooks

I lived in the Deer Park Aprtments by Casey Chevy. It was quiet there.

Well, with Jefferson Avenue on one side of you and Rt. 17 on the other, your
ambient range was likely a bit different from mine (Groome Rd, about halfway
between Jefferson and Harpersville Rd). Believe me--we never heard the
KC's unless they were flying overhead, but we could indeed pick up the sound
of the high speed tunnel cutting loose when the conditions were right.

You would have been pretty close to the old Bomarc site, or at least to the
back side of it. I used to go squirrel hunting in that area; got turned
around once and ended up hiking a fair distance out of my way to get back
out. Now there is a big Omni Hotel on that site, Jefferson Avenue has six
lanes is developed all the way up past the airport (no more Yoder's
Dairey--it is the site of a huge shopping mall). Not a bad place to grow up,
but I sure would not want to live there now.

Brooks


Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

"Kevin Brooks" wrote

I lived in the Deer Park Aprtments by Casey Chevy. It was quiet there.

Well, with Jefferson Avenue on one side of you and Rt. 17 on the other,
your
ambient range was likely a bit different from mine (Groome Rd, about
halfway
between Jefferson and Harpersville Rd). Believe me--we never heard the
KC's unless they were flying overhead, but we could indeed pick up the
sound
of the high speed tunnel cutting loose when the conditions were right.

You would have been pretty close to the old Bomarc site, or at least to
the
back side of it. I used to go squirrel hunting in that area; got turned
around once and ended up hiking a fair distance out of my way to get back
out. Now there is a big Omni Hotel on that site, Jefferson Avenue has six
lanes is developed all the way up past the airport (no more Yoder's
Dairey--it is the site of a huge shopping mall). Not a bad place to grow
up,
but I sure would not want to live there now.


It's not so bad, even now. Evidently different from when you were there, but
where is that not the case?
The intersection of 17 and Jefferson is pretty much the outer edge of the
Langley traffic pattern. -15's turning into final twice a day.

When conditions are right, we can hear the cars at the Langley Raceway on
Friday and Saturday nights. Jet Blue jets leaving PatrickHenry Intl.

And of course the springtime C-130 mosquito dustings.

Pete

From: Mike Marron


(B2431) wrote:
Mike Marron wrote:

Make ya' a deal, sarge. If you make me prove that he was indeed a
T-29 pilot then you have to shut your pie hole and log off RAM for one
year. Conversely, I will do the same if you prove me wrong.

Deal?

Tell ya what, I'll wait until someone who was there tells me otherwise. I
really don't believe a thing you say.

Coward.


yawn

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

"Pete" wrote in message
...

"Kevin Brooks" wrote

I lived in the Deer Park Aprtments by Casey Chevy. It was quiet there.

Well, with Jefferson Avenue on one side of you and Rt. 17 on the other,
your
ambient range was likely a bit different from mine (Groome Rd, about
halfway
between Jefferson and Harpersville Rd). Believe me--we never heard
the
KC's unless they were flying overhead, but we could indeed pick up the
sound
of the high speed tunnel cutting loose when the conditions were right.

You would have been pretty close to the old Bomarc site, or at least to
the
back side of it. I used to go squirrel hunting in that area; got turned
around once and ended up hiking a fair distance out of my way to get
back
out. Now there is a big Omni Hotel on that site, Jefferson Avenue has
six
lanes is developed all the way up past the airport (no more Yoder's
Dairey--it is the site of a huge shopping mall). Not a bad place to grow
up,
but I sure would not want to live there now.


It's not so bad, even now. Evidently different from when you were there,
but
where is that not the case?
The intersection of 17 and Jefferson is pretty much the outer edge of the
Langley traffic pattern. -15's turning into final twice a day.

When conditions are right, we can hear the cars at the Langley Raceway on
Friday and Saturday nights. Jet Blue jets leaving PatrickHenry Intl.

LOL! Yeah, I can recall hearing those race cars off in the distance. I had
no idea that track still existed. IIRC, there used to be some industrial
site/vacant lot right next to it and some guy had an old truck with a
hydraulic lift he used get up above the fence level so he and his buddies
could watch the races without having to pay admission.


And of course the springtime C-130 mosquito dustings.

In my early years they were flown by C-123's. I mentioned this before a year
or so ago, but they were the highlight of my youth, listening to and
watching them lumber back and forth overhead (my Dad was not so enamored
with them, because it forced him to close up our beehives each time they did
their thing). At the first sound of those big radials throbbing overhead in
the morning I'd be dashing out of the house in my underpants (hey, I was
only four or five years old), shouting gleefully, "The sprayplane! The
sprayplane!" Kind of wondered if some Hollywood yahoo did not hear of it and
came up with the later infamous, "Da plane, da plane!" line from "Fantasy
island"...

Another regular I used to enjoy was that FAA DC-3/C-47 (don't know which)
with the international orange wingtips and tail that used to fly the
periodic approach calibration flights.

Brooks


Pete

Cub Driver wrote:

The drift of the fallout
in a wind is something quite disturbing, even in a 15 mph wind,

And at 35,000 feet, isn't the wind more typically 100 mph--or is that
only occasional?

I pay attention only to the winds up to say 5000 feet, and even at
those levels the speed increases dramatically with every 1000 feet.

I suppose it would have been better than the alternative, but still
...

But at altitude, there is next to nothing to make fallout from, so any
kind of high airburst would be relatively clean.

"steve gallacci" wrote in message
...


Cub Driver wrote:

The drift of the fallout
in a wind is something quite disturbing, even in a 15 mph wind,

And at 35,000 feet, isn't the wind more typically 100 mph--or is that
only occasional?

I pay attention only to the winds up to say 5000 feet, and even at
those levels the speed increases dramatically with every 1000 feet.

I suppose it would have been better than the alternative, but still
...

But at altitude, there is next to nothing to make fallout from, so any
kind of high airburst would be relatively clean.

I believe that was part of the original poster's intent; his comment
regarding a "high yield nuke" creating a great deal of fallout was in
reference to what happens if the bomber gets through, versus the effects of
a very small yield nuke used to kill same said bomber at altitude.

Brooks

In article ,
R. David Steele writes:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 00:32:37 -0500, (Peter
Stickney) wrote:
|For context, here are the rates for aircraft in service at about the
|same time:
|
|F-84: 52.86
|F-86: 44.18
|F-89: 24.54
|F-100: 21.22
|F-101: 14.65
|F-104: 30.63
|F-105: 17.83
|F-105: 9.47

^ That should be F-106, of course
|
|So, as you can see, over its career, the F-102 was safer than all of
|its contemporaries, other than the F-106 that was descended from it.

Why have pilots then stated, since this flap over GWB, that the
F-102 had a bad safety record? And how did it compare to
aircraft like the F-4, which was flying at the same time?

The numbers showed that it as half as safe as an F-4, and 1/3 as safe
as the "Sacandalous" F-16 (Lawn Dart).

A few words on making these comparisons - A single number is only a
vague indication, not a true notation on how the airplane's record
stacked up over its entire career. As with all statistics, context is
everything, and ignoring the context leads to a high likelihood of
misleading yourself about the true situation.

The earlier generation of subsonic/transonic jets, the F-80 through
F-94, all had extremely high accident rates. This was due to a number
of factors, both technological and procedural.
If you examine the raw data available from the Air Force Safety
Center, you'll also find that the overall numbers are skewed by
extremely high loss rates for some airplanes in their first few years
of service. The reasons for this are that there are inevetibly
teething troubles to be sorted out, many of them serious. - The F-100s
problems with stability & control & engine / inlet issues, and the
F-104's engine problems both pushed loss rates extremely high at the
beginning of their service careers. (More than 320 Class As per
100,000 flight hours, for the F-100, and, for one year, more than 700
class As per 100,000 flight hours, in th ecase of teh F-104A.)
These high surges in loss rates will skew the statistics throughout
the airplane's entire life.

One those initial troubles were worked out, the overall safety racords
were pretty much equivalant.

There can also be spikes at the end of an airplane's career, when
there aren't many of that type around, and they aren't flying many
hours. The loss of a single airplane can give a misleadingly high
accident rate, in that case.

But, at least here in rec.aviation.military, the statements weren't
that the F-102 was much less safe than its contemporaries - it was
that flying high performance jet fighters is much less safe than any
other flying. There's no doubt about that.
Here are a few other numbers for context, here.

Aircraft: Class A/100,000 Hrs
F-102: 13.69
C-130: 0.93
C-141: 0.32
C-135: 0.64
O-2: 2.82
B-52: 1.28

So, to put it bluntly, and slightly out of context, you're about 15
times more likely to kill yourself in an F-102 as you are in a C-130,
and nearly 50 times more likely than in a C-141.


--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster