If you like weapons this China Lake Ranges 2018 video is for you.

Located in California’s Mojave Desert, China Lake is home to NAVAIR’s Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD).

NAWCWD is responsible for supporting NAVAIR programs by:

• Performing research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E), logistics, and in-service support for guided missiles, free-fall weapons, targets, support equipment, crew systems and electronic warfare
• Integrating weapons and avionics on tactical aircraft
• Operating the Navy’s western land and Sea Range test and evaluation complex
• Developing and applying new technology to ensure battle space dominance

Among the services NAWCWD provides, there is also Missiles and Free-Fall Weapons Research and Development. This means that China Lake develops explosives and propellants, and conducts basic and applied research in science and technology of weaponry.

Weapon systems regularly developed at China Lake include Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), High-Speed Antiradiation Missile (HARM), Hellfire, Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW), Penguin, Phoenix, Sidewinder, SeaSparrow, Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM), SLAM-ER, Standard Missile, Tomahawk and Vertical Launch Anti-submarine Rocket (VLA).

Actually, China Lake, emcompassing more than 1.1 million acres, 17,000 square miles of restricted airspace over land, more than 2,000 buildings and all kinds of possible targets, also supports operational testing activities carried out by partner nations. For instance, earlier this year, an Italian contingent made of four Tornado ECR (EA-200B in accordance with the Italian MoD Mission Design Series), belonging to the 6° Stormo (Wing) from Ghedi; four Eurofighter Typhoon jets (F-2000A), belonging to the 4°, 36° and 37° Stormo respectively from Grosseto, Gioia del Colle and Trapani; and one C-27J Spartan with the 46^ Brigata Aerea (Air Brigate) from Pisa, deployed there to take part in an operation dubbed “Blazing Shield” whose main goal was the the Operational Test & Evaluation (OT&E) of the Tornado ECR (a variant specialized in Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses missions) with the new AGM-88E AARGM (Advanced Anti Radiation Guided Missile) the a follow-on variant of the HARM (High Speed Anti Radiation Missile), the missile used for SEAD missions, developed under a US and Italian joint acquisition programme led by the US Navy.

China Lake complex has just celebrated its 75th anniversary. Here you can find an interesting video that was played at the event that celebrated the achievement on Nov. 8. However, even more interesting is the video below with tests conducted between 2017 and 2018 that includes plenty of slow motion clips, including Spike, Hellfire, MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense Systems), GBU-54, GBU-31 “bunker buster” bombs, rockets, Tomahawks and much more. There is also a scene with a Eurofighter Typhoon dropping a LGB (Laser Guided Bomb) as seen through IR (Infra Red) vision.

Enjoy.

H/T Guido Olimpio for the heads-up!

The final operational chapter of the Prowler career has just been written by the U.S. Marine Corps “Death Jesters” and their six EA-6Bs jets.

Marine Corps Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron-2 (VMAQ-2) “Death Jesters”, the last of four Marine Prowler squadrons, has just completed its final deployment in Qatar, with the last six EA-6B in the U.S. military inventory.

Four aircraft, using radio callsign “Trend 01-04” landed at Lajes, Azores, on their way back to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, from Al Udeid, Qatar, on Nov. 12, 2018. The remaining two aircraft would follow in a couple of days (they were left behind due to technical issues).

The first pair (“Trend 01-02”) was supported by “Blue 52”, an Air Force Reserve KC-135R operated by the 916 Aerospace Refuelling Wing at Seymour Johnson AFB, North Carolina, that also landed at Lajes.

Interestingly, one of the aircraft, 163047/CY-05, sported “Agent 007” markings inside the split trailing edge air brakes as the following image shows:

The EA-6B was born out of military requirements during the Vietnam War. It entered service in 1971 and 170 aircraft were produced before the production was terminated in 1991. For more than four decades, the Prowler has been “at the forefront of military electronic warfare allowing high-profile air combat missions.”

During the last deployment the aircraft have supported Operation Resolute Support and Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan as well as Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria. The primary mission of the aircraft was to support ground-attack strikes by disrupting enemy electromagnetic activity and, as a secondary mission, to gather tactical electronic intelligence within a combat zone, and, if necessary, attacking enemy radar sites with HARM missiles.

Despite their age, the EA-6Bs have been among the most important assets in the air war against Daesh: they eavesdropped “enemy” radio signals and jammed those frequencies in order to prevent terrorists from talking one another on the radio or cell phone, or use portable transmitters to trigger IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices).

Actually, rather than the obsolescence of the onboard EW (Electronic Warfare) sensors, the main issue that has affected the Prowler fleet what has been keeping the legacy aircraft in the air.

“It’s not an easy airplane to work on. Nowadays, components tell you they need to be replaced, skilled troubleshooting doesn’t exactly exist the way that it used to and working on this plane is very much a different skill,” Lt. Col. Andrew A. Rundle, VMAQ-2 commanding officer, said in a recent release.

“You could think you know what is wrong with it and you fix what you think is wrong only to find it had nothing to do with what was wrong and it didn’t help or fix anything,” explained Gunnery Sgt. Kevin Randall, VMAQ-2 maintenance control chief. “You could troubleshoot for days in the wrong direction, but because it is an old airplane there are lots of wires and things that don’t even go to things anymore and through updates and upgrades there are things that cause problems that you never would have thought. Changes that were made 10 or 15 years ago have surfaced and reared their head.”

On the maintenance front, Randall acknowledged some challenges with those who have come to the EA-6B in recent years with the aircraft’s sunset on the horizon.

“Almost every air mission that people have heard about since the 1970s likely involved a Prowler in some way and we don’t talk about it,” said Randall. “I think that’s the cool thing we all know in the back of our heads. The public reads that bombing missions happened here or we got so and so or completed this mission and you read about the flashier airplanes such as the B-1s, the F-18s, the stealth fighters that took off from wherever, but you never read about the Prowler that had to be in the area days prior or had to be around the area to complete its mission to allow the bigger mission to happen.”

The U.S. Navy retired their Prowler fleet in 2015, shifting the EA (Electronic Attack) workload to the EA-18G Growler. The Death Jesters will retire the EA-6B Prowler in 2019, the second-to-last U.S. Prowler Squadron, the VMAQ-3 Moon Dogs, was deactivated last spring.

All images courtesy APS – Associação Portugal Spotters (Portuguese Spotters Association) unless otherwise stated.

 

There is much more in Neil Armstrong’s flight, the longest X-15 flight in the entire research program, than a movie can show.

If you haven’t done it already, I would suggest you to reserve a few hours and watch “First Man”.

The movie opens with a pretty intense scene showing Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) piloting a North American X-15 during a test flight. Although the hypersonic rocket-powered research aircraft built in three examples and capable of Mach +6 speed appears only for a few minutes at the beginning of the movie, I think most of our readers will find it interesting to know something more about the opening scene’s flight.

Beware: spoilers ahead.

The first question that came to my mind during the movie were: what was the goal of that test flight? and, did the test go exactly as depicted in the movie?

In order to find an answer to these questions I asked some help to Paul Raveling, who runs an extremely insightful website at sierrafoot.org, with a section completely dedicated to the X-15 Hypersonic History. I was already in contact with Paul, who had provided a lot of interesting information about Delamar Dry Lake and the other emergency landing sites for the X-15, so it was natural to me to ask him for additional details.

Let’s start from the very beginning. The so-called “Neil Armstrong’s reentry skip” was flight “3-4-8” on Apr. 20, 1962.

Flight “3-4-8” means these three things:

• X-15 #3 (USAF contract & tail number 56-6672)
• 4th free flight of this X-15 (#3)
• 8th flight of this X-15, counting all three types of flights: Free flights (launched), captive carries, and aborts (not launched, returned to landing by the B-52 )

“On my web page I also called it Flight 51, the 51st X-15 free flight, but 3-4-8 is the proper designation. Neil Armstrong noted that point when I exchanged email with him for his review of that flight’s page on sierrafoot.org. Being correct and precise goes with the job in engineering, and Neil was well qualified as an engineer,” says Raveling in an email.

“Flight 3-4-8, which was the first one I documented on sierrafoot.org”, he explains. “Despite plans to document at least a couple dozen “X-15 adventure” flights, I got busy with other things after doing only that one flown by Neil and the first X-15 free flight, the glide flight flown by Scott Crossfield. There’s also a PowerPoint presentation for Bob White’s FAI world altitude record flight. The center of that presentation follows the flight in real time: It took 10 minutes 20.7 seconds from launch to touchdown, covered about 315 miles horizontally and 110 miles vertically. It’s challenging to narrate that, someday soon I should record narration in the PowerPoint file.”

“Flight 3-4-8’s major lasting legacy was that it changed the plan for how to do winged reentries safely from orbit. In trying for a planned test point for G limiting by the MH-96 that didn’t work, Neil demonstrated that maneuvering vertically can very easily produce a skip off the aerodynamically usable atmosphere and loss of control at a critical time. That X-15 flight triggered changing plans for how the then-future Space Shuttle would do reentry energy management — the “skip” risk was eliminated by using roll reversals. There’s a follow-on story about how we nearly lost Columbia on STS-2, in an automated reentry. Because of the time required for a fix to go through software QA, ex-X-15 pilot Joe Engle flew that reentry manually — the only time it was done in Shuttle history. (Some web sources whose authors are unaware of that exception say incorrectly that the Shuttle never flew a manual reentry.)”

This page on Paul’s website provides tons of information and geeky details about that mission, including the pilot’s report.

First of all, it lasted 12 min. 28.7 sec: the longest X-15 flight of the entire research program. The rocket burned for 82.4 sec and the maximum speed the X-15 reached is Mach 5.31. The peak of the test flight was at 207,500 feet. Then, flight 3-4-8 was the first flight using the ball nose (“q-ball” air data sensor), and initial checkout of the MH-96 flight controller. Here’s what does this mean according to what reported at sierrafoot.org:

The MH-96 was an experimental adaptive controller on the #3 X-15. The first two X-15’s gave the pilot a right-hand sidestick and a center stick for aerodynamic flight controls, a left-hand sidestick for reaction controls outside the atmosphere, and a separate stability augmentation system. The MH-96 integrated all of these functions into one device, controlled by the right-hand sidestick.

The MH-96 noted how responsive the aircraft was to aerodynamic controls, using stabilator and rudder to control attitude, and adaptively changed control response to suit flight conditions. In dense low-altitude air it used low gains: A given stick movement produced a relatively small control surface deflection. In the thin air of high altitudes it produced larger control surface deflection for the same stick input. When the air was too thin for these controls to work it used the same sidestick to operate reaction controls, the small hydrogen peroxide thrusters located in the nose and the wings. While leaving or reentering the atmosphere it automatically balanced and blended use of the two types of controls.

The plan was called for a step up in altitude to 205,000 feet following the preceding flight’s top at 180,000 feet. The air launch occurred over Mud Dry Lake, in Nevada, from a NB-52B “mothership”. Interestingly, as many as 4 chase aircraft supported the X-15 throughout its mission: 3x F-104s and 1x F-100.

Almost everything went as planned until the X-15 started descending. Here’s an excerpt from sierrafoot.org:

As the X-15 descended through about 160,000 feet a warning light came on indicating low hydrogen peroxide supply for the #1 APU.  Armstrong initiated  transfer of residual hydrogen peroxide from the engine turbopump supply, and the warning light extinguished at about 115,000 feet.  At about 90,000 feet smoke poured into the cockpit from above the instrument panel as atmospheric reentry heating burned off paint.

Neil Armstrong did additional stability and control checks as the X-15 re-entered the atmosphere, testing roll maneuvers at high angles of attack (AOA).  He flew about 15 to 16 degrees AOA as forces built to 4 g’s.  The MH-96 has a load limiting function that should trip in the range of 4 to 4 1/2 g’s, commanding a reduction in pitch attitude to avoid excessive g forces.  In Armstrong’s own words…

“I elected to leave the angle of attack in that mode [15-16 degrees] … it wasn’t obvious that we were having any g limiting so I left it at this 4 g level for quite a long time hoping that this g limiting might show up.  It did not and apparently this where we got into the ballooning situation.“

Due to maintaining a high angle of attack the X-15 pulled up and essentially skipped off the top of the atmosphere, returning to space.  In this near-vacuum there was insufficient drag to slow it and the wings could not develop enough aerodynamic force to turn it.  Back to Neil Armstrong’s description…

“At this point I heard the second transmission from NASA 1. …I expected from my simulation work ‘you’re about 20 miles north,’ but the transmission I got was “turn hard left.“

“…With the left turn command which I followed with 60 degrees left bank angle and 15 degrees angle of attack, I did not properly appreciate the altitude I was at.  I was apparently at an altitude above that which I had expected to be and which caused me to go sailing merrily by the field.“

X-15 approaches normally were from the north, with a 360-degree spiral to final approach starting from about 20,000 to 30,000 feet and ending with a touchdown on Rogers Dry Lake.  On this flight the X-15 cruised by with excess energy, too high and too fast to enter the approach spiral. Going south past the base at about 1 mile every 2 seconds, the flight path passed the Mojave Desert towns of Lancaster and Palmdale. Beyond Palmdale are the San Gabriel Mountains, and beyond them is the Los Angeles basin.“As I saw Palmdale going by I was in a 90 degree bank angle and essentially full deflection on the stabilizers… We were having no heading change.  The proper thing to do at that point would have been to roll to a greater bank angle [than 90 degrees, rolling somewhat inverted] and try to get that thing down to a lower altitude so I could turn faster. However, my indicated airspeed said 190 knots and that seemed from my past simulation experience to be what should have been adequate to turn the heading but it really wasn’t.  Finally I did allow the nose to drift down and picked up approximately 350 knots indicated airspeed and was able to get about 3 g at this point.“

[…]

Armstrong quickly considered and rejected the long runway at Palmdale, El Mirage Dry Lake to the east, and Rosamond Dry Lake to the West.  He settled on stretching his glide to the south lakebed at Edwards.  Two chase planes joined up as Armstrong was lining up for a straight-in approach, aiming for the middle of the south lakebed. The farther they went, the shorter it seemed the glide would be.  The X-15 finally landed successfully on the lakebed — and when one of the chase pilots was asked how much clearance there was with the Joshua trees at the edge of the lakebed his answer was “Oh, at least 100 feet … on either side”.

You can find the planned versus actual flight path on Raveling’s website: you will easily notice how flight 3-4-8 skirted Los Angeles Basin area, flew over Pasadena and the Rose Bowl, some 45 miles south of Edwards AFB and easily understand why it turned into the longest X-15 flight ever….

“In general the First Man movie got important details of Flight 3-4-8 right but did Hollywoodization of turbulence and showing Neil barely clearing the crest of the San Gabriel mountains,” Paul Raveling explains. “My offhand guess is that his crest-crossing would have been at perhaps 50,000 feet, some day I’ll work up a simulation for that. Neil actually couldn’t tell exactly where he was because downward visibility was so crummy from the X-15’s cockpit.”

Actually, the movie was also wrong about the year the “Neil Armstrong’s reentry skip” occurred: the text says 1961, but the event occurred in 1962.

Moreover, “Hollywood missed one real thing that should have been a natural: Neil reported smoke emanating from above the instrument panel at about 90,000 feet during reentry. That apparently was fairly normal due to some paint burnof, especially in the area to the nose gear well, immediately ahead of the cockpit. The nose and leading edges heated up to a peak of about 1,200 degrees on X-15 reentries from high altitudes. X-15 reentries took up to about 30 seconds, usually starting around 160,000 feet at a bit over Mach 5 and finishing around 60,000 feet.”

Indeed, we have published images that document the damaged caused to the X-15A-2 serial number 56-6671 by the Mach 6.72 mission on Oct. 3, 1967: the aerodynamic heating almost melted the airframe…

“The most important thing the First Man movie got right was Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of Neil’s character traits. The movie does note appropriately but barely that he was an engineer. It would be appropriate to say engineering was his prime passion, though that point was more evident to other engineers than it would be to most in the public. His favorite quote was “Science is about what is, engineering is about what can be”. Neil also considered science to be an integral part of engineering,” says Paul Raveling.

It’s worth mentioning that X-15-3 (56-6672) made 65 flights during the program. It reached attaining a top speed of Mach 5.65 and a maximum altitude of 354,200 feet. Out of three X-15s built by North American for the program, Ship #3 is the only X-15 that has not survived, as it was lost on Nov. 15, 1967, when it entered hypersonic spin at Mach 5 and broke apart killing USAF Test Pilot Maj. Michael J. Adams.

Top: composite image made of screenshots (credit: Universal Pictures).

The Royal Air Force has just unveiled another special-colored “Tonka” ahead of the retirement of the aircraft from active service in March 2019.

Few days after the IX(B) Sqn unveiled theirs, the 31 Sqn, also based at RAF Marham, and one of the remaining Tornado units in RAF service, rolled out the aircraft ZD716/DH with a special livery that celebrates the 34 years of operations with the multirole aircraft.

The “Goldstars” have operated the Tornado since 1984, initially from RAF Bruggen, Germany, and then from RAF Marham since August 2001. Following the retirement of the Tornado, in March next year, 31 Squadron will stand down after 35 years of Tonka operations but will in due course reform to operate the Protector RG.1, the RAF designation for the MQ-9B SkyGuardian.

During this more than three decades of operations with the Tornado, 31 Squadron has taken part in the 1991 Gulf War and the Squadron has continued to fly on regular operations over Iraq. It also specialised in the SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) role with the Air Launched Anti Radiation Missile ALARM Anti Radiation Missile. Then, in 1999, during Allied Force operation over Serbia and Kosovo, the Sqn operated from Solenzara airbase, in Corsica. After moving to RAF Marham in 2001, the squadron took part in Operation Resinate South and Operation Telic over Iraq. In 2005, the Squadron became the lead RAF Tornado GR4 unit to accept the Brimstone missiles into service, a weapon that was widely used by the RAF Tornado in combat beginning in 2011, during the Libya Air War, and later in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As already explained in a previous post, “Tonka” is an unofficial nickname of the British GR1 and GR4 aircraft, earned by the aircraft in the early days of service (beginning of the 1980s).

Top image: Crown Copyright/RAF

Trump cancels visit to US cemetery in France because of bad weather.

On Saturday Nov. 10, 2018, President Trump was scheduled to travel to Belleau Wood, 55 miles northeast of Paris, as part of the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI.

Belleau Wood is where the US troops had their breakthrough battle by stopping a German push for Paris shortly after entering the war in 1917.

“The battle of Belleau Wood proved America’s mettle to allies and foes alike, and by the time the war ended U.S. forces were at least an equal to any of the other major armies, which were exhausted and depleted. The Aisne-Marne American Cemetery at Belleau contains the graves of 2,289 servicemen and commemorates 1,060 others who fell at Bealleau Wood,” Metro reported.

Although it had been planned for months, the trip was canceled because, according to the White House, bad weather “grounded” his helicopter, “considered ill-equipped to make the short journey because of the clouds and drizzle”.

The cancellation drew much criticism: someone said the VH-3 and VH-60 flown by the U.S. Marine Corps HMX-1 (Marine Helicopter Squadron One) should be able to fly in rain and moderate bad weather; others say the president should have had a back-up plan that foresaw a different way to travel to Aisne-Marne regardless of the weather.

According to the Washington Post, the Secret Service determines when it’s safe to fly “Marine One“: when President of the U.S. travels aboard the VH-3D or any other chopper operated by HMX-1, the helicopter uses the radio callsign “Marine One” by which the aircraft is known). Paris was covered in clouds with drizzling rain through most of Saturday.

President Trump was probably supposed to travel in one of the “White Tops” (VH-3Ds and VH-60Ns) that fly the President and accompanying VIPs at home and abroad as part of the Executive Flight Detachment. Usually, at least two or three “Green Tops” Ospreys accompany “Marine One”. The tilt-rotor aircraft fly also the Secret Service agents that follow “Marine One” and take care of its valuable passengers in case the helicopter goes down due to a failure.

The helicopters, based at Quantico, Virginia, south of Washington DC but often operating out of an alert facility at Naval Support Facility Anacostia, in DC, much closer to the White House than Quantico, are transferred to the place where POTUS will stay, ahead of his visit, in C-17 cargo aircraft.

Even though some of the HMX-1 helicopters, especially the legendary VH-3Ds are quite old, they have been regularly upgraded and they are equipped with cutting edge avionics, communication system and self-defenses. We don’t know at what time the White House and Secret Services staff canceled the trip so we can’t be sure of the real (and forecasted) weather conditions along the route. Surely, regardless to whether the aircraft is carrying the POTUS, a VIP or someone else, weather conditions including fog, rain, low ceiling and wind, along with the terrain characteristics, airspaces, etc. must be taken into proper consideration when planning a low altitude trip. And they may lead to cancellations.

Here below you can find an interesting thread that provides some insights into the way POTUS trips are planned. Indeed, there should always be a backup plan for the world’s most important Head of State.

. @brhodes said there is “always” a backup plan for Potus bad weather travel. I just spoke with someone familiar with GWBush’s travel. He agreed with Ben. Quick thread to shed a bit more light on typical WH protocols. 1/ https://t.co/nIC1kq4XJt

— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) November 10, 2018

H/T to our close friend @CivMilAir for the heads up!