From: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V5 #56 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Wednesday, 6 April 1994 Volume 05 : Number 056 In this issue: [none] Contrail morphology => Aurora? Re: Appropriate topics for the mailing list Re: Contrail morphology => Aurora? Re: Contrail morphology => Aurora? See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: skunk-works-digest-owner Date: Tue, 5 Apr 94 08:49:29 -0500 Subject: [none] ***** UNDELIVERABLE MAIL sent to martens, being returned by stlsg5!martens ***** mail: Error # 8 'Invalid recipient' encountered on system stlsg5 Received: from gaia.UCS.ORST.EDU by stlsg5.mdc.com via SMTP (920330.SGI/920502.SGI.AUTO) for martens id AA00948; Tue, 5 Apr 94 08:49:10 -0500 Received: by gaia.ucs.orst.edu id AA28567 (5.67a/IDA-1.5 for skunk-works-digest-outgoing); Sun, 3 Apr 1994 00:01:04 -0800 From: skunk-works-digest-owner@gaia.ucs.orst.edu Received: by gaia.ucs.orst.edu id AA28551 (5.67a/IDA-1.5 for skunk-works-digest-send@mail.orst.edu); Sun, 3 Apr 1994 00:01:02 -0800 Date: Sun, 3 Apr 1994 00:01:02 -0800 Message-Id: <199404030801.AA28551@gaia.ucs.orst.edu> To: skunk-works-digest@gaia.ucs.orst.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V5 #53 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@gaia.ucs.orst.edu Sender: skunk-works-digest-owner@gaia.ucs.orst.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Sunday, 3 April 1994 Volume 05 : Number 053 In this issue: Kc-135q pro yikes - I made a typo on TENCAP See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: john.stone@shivasys.com Date: Sat, 02 Apr 94 17:48:46 Subject: Kc-135q pro Skunkers, After posting about KC-135Q's I saw a post from "S.K. Whiteman" about production of Q's he stated that he thought there were only 15 built. According to Robert Dorr's book on KC-135's he states that there were 56 planes converted to Q specs. Which I think is more than enough to fill 3 squadrons(please correct me if wrong, I don't know how many planes it takes to make a squadron. John Stone - ------------------------------ From: TRADER@cup.portal.com Date: Sat, 2 Apr 94 15:57:55 PST Subject: yikes - I made a typo on TENCAP Oops - I forgot to proof read my last post on the Air Force's TENCAP program - I should have said that TENCAP stands for "Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities", not Technical. Basically, this is an effort to get data from spy satellites into the hands of tactical commanders and their war fighters. Along with the programs I mentioned, interested readers may want to refer to Program Element 0207247F in the Air Force budget -- "Air Force TENCAP". Paul McGinnis / TRADER@cup.portal.com - ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V5 #53 ******************************** To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.orst.edu". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-skunk-works": subscribe skunk-works-digest local-skunk-works@your.domain.net To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address, with the command: unsubscribe skunk-works-digest in the body. Administrative requests, problems, and other non-list mail can be sent to either "skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu" or, if you don't like to type a lot, "prm@mail.orst.edu A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "skunk-works-digest" in the commands above with "skunk-works". Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from mail.orst.edu, in /pub/skunk-works/digest/vNN.nMMM (where "NN" is the volume number, and "MMM" is the issue number). ------------------------------ From: THOMSONAL@CPVA.SAIC.COM Date: Tue, 5 Apr 1994 11:55:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Contrail morphology => Aurora? From time to time (far less often than we'd prefer, but that's life), our family stays at Gwynn's Island, on the southwestern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. From there, our pourch window looks SE, and the air routes going up and down the East Coast are at elevations from 10 to 40 degrees above the horizon, stretching across our entire field of view. Consequently, when conditions aloft are right, we have a lot of opportunities to view contrails. One thing that I've noticed, (here comes the skunkish connection) is that there is a wide variety of contrail morphologies, from simple streaks to more complicated structures, and in particular periodic thickenings along the length of the trail. Last fall, around midday local time, I saw a trail which had large outbursts of puffiness along the line-like conventional contrail. It looked, to my eye, just like the pictures of doughnuts-on-a-rope contrails which have been associated with PDW engines which hypothetically power the hypothetical "Aurora." Since I doubt an Aurora would be flying in one of the most heavily traveled commercial routes on the planet at midday in sight of a significant fraction of the US population, it seems that this contrail was unlikely to have an exotic origin. I saw another interestingly periodic contrail several years ago when my airplane was following some distance behind and a bit above another airliner. The contrail of the leading aircraft had broken up into a regularly spaced series of crescents due, I speculated, to interactions with decaying wingtip vortices. (I've seen tank experiments in which sailplane vortex pairs of submarine models running out of trim break up into similar croissant shapes at late times.) All of this leads to a hopefully not too heretical question: do we really know enough about contrail dynamics and morphology to be reasonably confident that the doughnuts-on-a-rope trails are so outside the range of the ordinary as to require extraordinary explanations like aircraft driven by PDW engines? Let me note that I'm agnostic on the "Aurora": I'd love to find out that we (the USians) have done something as outrageously wonderful as the SR-71 again, but the evidence so far doesn't convince me that we have. ------------------------------ From: rschnapp@metaflow.com (Russ Schnapp) Date: Tue, 5 Apr 94 09:26:22 PDT Subject: Re: Appropriate topics for the mailing list > Couldn't agree more... > > > Jamie Unfortunately, it appears we are in the (slight) minority. I've had only one other (unpublished) response. That makes 4 to 3, so far. I guess I'll jes shaddup for awhile... ...Russ ------------------------------ From: larry@ichips.intel.com Date: Tue, 5 Apr 1994 15:45:16 -0700 Subject: Re: Contrail morphology => Aurora? THOMSONAL@CPVA.SAIC.COM writes: >... > One thing that I've noticed, (here comes the skunkish >connection) is that there is a wide variety of contrail >morphologies, from simple streaks to more complicated structures, >and in particular periodic thickenings along the length of the >trail. Quite true! > Last fall, around midday local time, I saw a trail which had >large outbursts of puffiness along the line-like conventional >contrail. It looked, to my eye, just like the pictures of >doughnuts-on-a-rope contrails which have been associated with PDW >engines which hypothetically power the hypothetical "Aurora." >Since I doubt an Aurora would be flying in one of the most heavily >traveled commercial routes on the planet at midday in sight of a >significant fraction of the US population, it seems that this >contrail was unlikely to have an exotic origin. Actually, the sighting logs do put a pulser 'probable' ABOVE a commercial air route, but it was at dusk, not midday. I'm speaking of the original sighting of the doughnuts-on-a-rope contrail by Mr. D.C. Card of Denver Colo., sometime in the first half of 1990. > I saw another interestingly periodic contrail several years >ago when my airplane was following some distance behind and a bit >above another airliner. The contrail of the leading aircraft had >broken up into a regularly spaced series of crescents ... > All of this leads to a hopefully not too heretical question: It's an excellent question. I'm glad I'm not the only one to wonder about it. >do we really know enough about contrail dynamics and morphology to be >reasonably confident that the doughnuts-on-a-rope trails are so >outside the range of the ordinary as to require extraordinary >explanations like aircraft driven by PDW engines? No, I don't think we know enough about contrail dynamics alone, to look at a contrail and say it's a pulser contrail. I sure wouldn't want to do it. You're quite correct. I've also seen commercial contrails that due to shear or whatever, change to look something similar to it. The contrails that have been published have had other attributes reportedly associated with them. For example, Mr. Card's contrail appeared at least half again as high as the 3-4 commercial contrails that were in the sky with it, and the unknown contrail was much faster. In fact it started way back in the east and overtook the commercial contrails by the time they all disappeared into the west. The impression I got from him is that it was a combination of unusual contrail (he had the other commercial contrails in the sky being laid at the same time) and the speed, that made him take notice. At this time the sky in the east was getting dark. The sun had also set at the ground level, but it was still bright at altitude overhead and in the west. In the incident in which Steve Douglass took that famous contrail photo, he heard the booms associated with the contrail. We've also had several very low altitude sightings of an unusual aircraft with a pulsed propulsion sound. Some are in the middle of the night over the Southwest (lights or contrail seen or just sound), and some are in daylight (Atlanta, GA). Glen has also mentioned on the Net here another low altitude daylight sighting of an aircraft making a pulsed sound. He hasn't published the details of that though. There are a few other low altitude sightings that have not been published or even compared with one another yet, unfortunately. > Let me note that I'm agnostic on the "Aurora": I'd love to >find out that we (the USians) have done something as outrageously >wonderful as the SR-71 again, but the evidence so far doesn't >convince me that we have. Well, that's fine. The point that I come from is that it borders on the incompetent if they haven't done this already, because the technology is there, and the need is there. Ben Rich has even said this. In fact you can't help but look at the dependence we now have on space based assets and the growing dependence on that that we have (see the post last week on the RADIANT OAK excersize for example), and not argue that we need to synergize with that, protect it, back it up or possibly be able to quickly replace it! There may be a need for several fast/high altitude airplanes there. To protect/insure a larger and larger investment that we're making. As I said, if we're not thinking of this, then somebody is not doing their job. Larry ------------------------------ From: Mary Shafer Date: Tue, 5 Apr 1994 22:24:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Contrail morphology => Aurora? I've spent a couple of months total sitting out in the desert waiting for test aircraft to come by here at lovely Edwards AFB and much of time has been spent watching contrails blow out. I've watched them from being made to vanishing completely in a variety of conditions. I've even wandered down and studied the winds aloft from the routine and special pibals. A few times I've even known which planes I was watching, since I have UHF. Frankly, it's quite amazing what shapes they can assume. My favorite is when they keep their vorticity while enlarging. It's wonderful to see the vortices and you get sort of a beads-on-a-string effect as these relax. Another pretty one is when winds aloft blow them into parallel wisps. I like watching where there are two airplanes, too. Usually one is safety chase, but once I saw cons off a tanker and a tankee. Very pretty. Now, I have a true contrail story from you--I heard this from a friend of mine, who was there when it happened. One day, on the way into work, when there were lots of contrails from the early morning flights, an FRC engineer asked his carpool, "You know, I've always wondered just how the pilots know when to turn those contrails on. How do they?" and another member of the carpool promptly answered, "The Air Force takes care of that. They set the contrail altitude and then publish it in the daily bulletin." And a third member chimed right in, saying, "Haven't you ever noticed it in the daily bulletin? They have a copy down in the pilot's office." So the questioner said, happily, "I knew there had to be some system." About three hours later, the two answerers tracked down the questioner and told him the _real_ answer. To this day, my friend thinks he preferred the first answer. Regards, Mary Mary Shafer DoD #0362 KotFR shafer@ursa-major.spdcc.com Some days it don't come easy/And some days it don't come hard Some days it don't come at all/And these are the days that never end.... ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V5 #56 ******************************** To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.orst.edu". 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