Where's My Flying Car?
from the not-here-yet dept
It's been decades since people have suggested that everyone would have a flying car or a personal jetpack. There are any number of "flying" technologies that futurists expected to be commonplace by the new millennium, and here we are a few years in and we're still pretty firmly grounded. MSNBC is looking at seven "promised" flying technologies that still haven't come home - from flying cars to personal jetpacks to regular supersonic commercial air travel (bye bye Concorde) to space tourism. Some of these may come true eventually, but they've all been talked about for years, and we don't seem that much closer.
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Homosexual Fighter Jets
We've got a generation of "stealth" aircraft painted black, but black is actually not a very good choice for stealth. Pink is in fact the best color, because on average, it blends into the sky better during various lighting conditions. However, military brass didn't like the idea of pink fighter jets flying around, so we have these unstealthy black planes that get shot down a lot.
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Re: Homosexual Fighter Jets
Dorpus, I gotta know: Just where do you *get* half the stuff you post? These facts ae absurd, like you're channelling Cliff Claven or something worse.
Stop messing with our mind.
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Re: Homosexual Fighter Jets
Yeah, well, he gets it from open sources and we all know how reliable those are...
...the next gen. night fighters are pink-red, intermixed with bule-white (and tarmac/cloud/sea-water grey-green ontop).
Of course the reality that very few anti-aircraft weapons are visually guided probably never enters into the equation, does it? Gee, I wonder what the color of radar reflecting materials and paints are... nah, that doesn't have any bearing on reality.
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Re: Homosexual Fighter Jets
How does Popular Science (May 1997) sound? This site talks about it.
"Black is one of the least stealthy colors for daytime flying at medium altitudes. In fact,the British Roval Air Force is painting its trainers black to make them more visible and reduce the risk of collisions. Black isn't much good at night either, because there is nearly always some light from the moon. That's why the latest F-117s have been seen in a more sensible gray color."
The reality is that recent downings of US military aircraft have all been done by visually guided shoulder-launched missiles. That includes the F-117 bomber shot down over Yugoslavia, and all the recent helicopters shot down in Iraq.
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Re: Homosexual Fighter Jets
Too bad stealth fighters are intended primarily for nighttime operations. It's virtually impossible to camouflage an aircraft in broad daylight so it's pointless to speculate over whether hot pink or avocado green is better for daytime stealth.
Popular Science? That's a step above getting it off a cereal box.
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Re: Homosexual Fighter Jets
Too bad stealth fighters are intended primarily for nighttime operations. It's virtually impossible to camouflage an aircraft in broad daylight so it's pointless to speculate over whether hot pink or avocado green is better for daytime stealth.
Conversely, is it possible that stealth planes are used at night only because the military is unwilling to fly pink planes? How much more operational flexibility would we have, indeed how much more flexible would the military's wrist be, if we could perform daytime stealth bombing?
Popular Science? That's a step above getting it off a cereal box.
How about this one?
Calvert, Denis J. Pumas Go Pink: The Military Build-Up in the Gulf Has Seen Many Operational Changes--The Least of Which Are Camouflage Schemes. Air Combat 19:18-22+ Feb '91.
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