By Stuart F. Brown
Sharply outlined against the sky, a pair of dull-gray, down turned fins
glide through the door of an unmarked beige hangar. A few moments later the
fins are revealed to be the wingtips of a tailless, single-seat aircraft
being pushed backward by a bright-yellow tug attached to its nose landing
gear. The spooky shape of the 47-foot-long aerial Batmobile is right out of
science fiction, and so is its name: Bird of Prey, inspired by the Klingon
spacecraft on TV's Star Trek.
Every so often the Pentagon and its contractors let slip the cloak of
secrecy and permit a peek into the black world of exotic hardware
development. It may be no coincidence that Washington okayed this
technological tease, staged at the Phantom Works, Boeing's
advanced-development group in St. Louis, on the eve of a possible
confrontation in Iraq. Though the Bird of Prey can fly, it is not a fully
fledged warplane performing secret missions somewhere, nor even a prototype
of one. Rather, the dramatically sculpted craft is a one-off aeronautical
and organizational experiment that Pentagon types refer to as a "technology
demonstrator." It cost a mere $67 million to design and build but could be
worth a whole lot more to Boeing: Its success in test flights between 1996
and 1999 put the $58-billion-a-year aerospace giant on the Pentagon's short
list of stealth aircraft suppliers.
Stealth has emerged as the big game in military aviation. Since the days of
the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, which in the early '60s was the first to
incorporate radar-cheating features, stealth has moved from the techy fringe
into the mainstream of the $22-billion-a-year military aircraft industry.
Today knowing how to build so-called low-observable features into aircraft
is essential to winning contracts to supply next-generation warbirds, be
they piloted or unpiloted planes or cruise missiles.
Historically, Boeing played only a supporting role in the stealth world,
most importantly as a subcontractor on the B-2 bomber. The hot nameplates in
stealth have been Lockheed Martin, builder of the angular F-117A medium
bomber, and Northrop Grumman, prime contractor on the batlike B-2. More than
a decade ago, executives at McDonnell Douglas (which Boeing acquired in
1997) decided that they wanted a bigger piece of the action. Stung by
hearing from Air Force officials that they lacked the stealth chops to be a
major supplier, McDonnell execs launched the advanced-development group that
came to be known as the Phantom Works. It was modeled on Lockheed's fabled
Skunk Works, which in the mid-1950s took the U-2 spy plane from an idea to a
flying aircraft in less than a year, and later built both the Blackbird and
the F-117A.
McDonnell dreamed up the Bird of Prey to strengthen its design and
prototyping muscle. It launched the program in 1992 by recruiting stealth
experts from rival aerospace companies. The design they developed was so
unorthodox that the Bird of Prey went through dozens of iterations over four
years before it was ready to fly. Nobody wants to say this on the record,
but the Bird of Prey made 38 flights during its three-year testing career in
the skies above Area 51, the mysterious base in the Nevada desert originally
established for flight-testing the U-2.
McDonnell's rivals had been down this trail: The Bird of Prey is the third
strange-looking stealth technology demonstrator the U.S. is known to have
flown over the past 25 years. Lockheed, in the late '70s, built two examples
of a demonstrator called Have Blue, a two-thirds-scale predecessor to the
F-117A. It established that a plane with a faceted shape was flyable and did
indeed have the desired radar-eluding traits. Both Have Blues ultimately
crashed, but not before yielding enough knowledge to keep the F-117A program
moving.
In the early '80s, Northrop secretly built and flew a demonstrator
code-named Tacit Blue and nicknamed "the Whale." Tacit Blue was butt-ugly;
it looked like the product of a marriage between a loaf of French bread and
a snow shovel. But it flew and, importantly, proved the viability of
compound-contour stealth shaping and materials that Northrop later
incorporated into the B-2. Like Have Blue and Tacit Blue, the Bird of Prey
will lead to actual warplanes--aspects of its design are already visible in
Boeing's X-45, a prototype attack drone now flying at Edwards Air Force Base
in California's Mojave Desert.
Eerie as the Bird of Prey looks, it isn't magic. Like any stealth plane, it
can't erase the microwaves emitted by radars searching the skies and guiding
lethal antiaircraft missiles. But it can eat up some of that microwave
energy using absorbent materials, and reflect a lot of the rest off in
directions where the radar dish that sent the signal can't pick it up. An
important stealth design trick is visible to anyone viewing the Bird of Prey
from above: The leading and trailing edges of its fuselage and wings are
parallel, which limits radar reflections to directions unlikely to be
detected.
A walk around the bird exposes other interesting features. Seams in an
aircraft's skin can create electrical "discontinuities" that translate into
hot spots visible on a hostile radar screen. Therefore, learning to make the
upper and lower skins of the Bird of Prey out of large single pieces of
carbon composite was one of the program's major goals. Its top and bottom
fit together like the halves of a clamshell. The seams that are
inevitable--such as where the canopy meets the cockpit, at the hinges of
wing flaps, and around the landing-gear doors--get special sealing
treatments.
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Steven St.Laurent
2003 Dodge Hemi 5.7 Ram Quad (15.6 sec @ 92 MPH)
2000 Dodge Dakota Hemi (Some idot hit the vehicle)
2000 Roush Ford TT-Mustang (1 of 2 beta vehicles)
1999 Chevy Astro (A.K.A. GM Junk)
1993 Geo Tracker (Amazing vehicle that keeps running)
PROJECT CAR:
1992 Suzuki Swift GT (1775lb) Intercooled Turbo - 350HP FY-03
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Future Purchases:
2004 Dodge Ram SRT-10 with a V-10 (replace the Hemi)
2004/5 Dodge Hemi Durango (again for the wife)
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