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According to some sources, the evasive MH-X may have taken part in the raid that killed Islamic State member Abu Sayyaf.

In the night between May 15 and 16, U.S. Special Operations forces killed ISIS high level operative Abu Sayyaf, in a daring raid that took place in eastern Syria.
Little is known about the raid.

According to the CNN, the operation was conducted by U.S. Army’s Delta Force, which was carried to a residential building in Deir Ezzor, to the southeasth of Raqqa, by Army Blackhawk helicopters and Air Force CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

It’s pretty obvious many other assets were actually involved in the raid, including support assets providing electronic support to the intruding choppers and drones, as happened during
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.

What could really be a “first” is the possible involvement of the Stealth Black Hawk helicopter exposed by the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, back in 2011.
For the moment it’s just a hypothesis, but
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that the Delta Force team were transported deep into ISIS-held territory “via presumably stealth equipped Black Hawk helicopters” of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) “Night Stalkers”. : the
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.
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Okay that's interesting, lets take a few things apart.

Firstly we know there are Ghost hawks or shadow hawks or stealth hawks or whatever GI Joe character name you want to give the low observable choppers. That there is at least one. As two would have been used in Neptune Spear with one smashed, crashed and barbequed in Islamabad Pakistan.

If stealthed helicopters were used in this recent operation, it would indicate that the Army had more than the two used in Neptune Spear. Now tracking back in the period after the operation we had a number of theory regarding the origin of those birds. Some said they were cancelled projects. One off machines specially modified from conventional MH60 types others said that they were totally new designs with only some common parts between them and Blackhawk and some claimed that there was in fact two different models Stealthhawks more or less modifed prototypes with 2-4 built and then a production Ghosthawk which improves the design.

Second we have no conformation of other stealthily rotary wing assets in US services.

Aviationist has theories of stealthy little birds and Chinooks but no proof.

Stealthily little birds however do have some basis of development. In the Vietnam era the CIA operated a modified version of the OH6 LOAH dubbed "The Quiet One" because it was modified to produce almost no sound. Its small size and unique features may make such possible.

Chinook however is another matter. There have been gunship programs but no known signature reduction, also consider its large size and shape. The size of your average Greyhound bus with flat sides it seems unlikely to me that a Stealth skin would do much about it's billboard radar profile. Adding in its overall age and it seems unlikely.

IMO rather than Stealth Chinook if I was the DOD looking to buy a stealthy penetrator, I personally would favor attempting a Silent Osprey, there is some basis for this notion.

1) the Osprey program was begun under the US Army after the Desert one fiasco which left the Iranians a number of slightly used Ch53 and enough propaganda materials to last twenty years.

2) Bell Helicopter at a US Army Aviation show years ago displayed a Concept art of a Stealth Quadrotor.

Additionally consider that although V22 has a smaller cargo and passenger volume it has longer range and higher speed. That however is all conjecture.

Now why would the US DOD have the Ghosthawks in the region? After Neptune Spear some people had a problem with the Idea that the SEALs and the Stealth choppers were shipped in just for this one operation. Rather some believe that the low observable choppers were already in Afghanistan for another possible mission, that mission?

US concerns that the Pakistani Taliban could have destabilized the government and seized control of Pakistani's nuclear weapons. These Theorists say that that worry was enough to keep the stealth helicopters in Afghanistan as a proactive measure, that in the event of a coup the StealthHawks and a Socom team would have entered Pakistan and neutralized the WMD.

Okay, now if that was the case in Afghanistan could a similar situation be in place in the middle east today? Could the Ghosthawks have already been on the ground waiting for operations? Yes it seems possible. First the Iranian nuclear issue then the Syrian conflict as well as Iraq seem likely to justify the presence of US Socom and stealth penetrator assets, both manned and unmanned.

Now we come to the Grey Eagle.

Grey Eagle is a derivative of the predator drones. Its not stealth its a white program, meaning you can read about it openly. It seems to me that of your operating stealth manned assets worried about the potential for issues with air denial from both ground and air assets then you would want to support with at least some low observable unmanned platforms. This likely means stealth drones like the RQ180 as well as other still black programs were in the air. Perhaps including a stealthy equivalent to the grey eagle to support the Socom mission and deploy air to ground missiles as needed.
 
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Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Okay that's interesting, lets take a few things apart.

Firstly we know there are Ghost hawks or shadow hawks or stealth hawks or whatever GI Joe character name you want to give the low observable choppers. That there is at least one. As two would have been used in Neptune Spear with one smashed, crashed and barbequed in Islamabad Pakistan.

If stealthed helicopters were used in this recent operation, it would indicate that the Army had more than the two used in Neptune Spear. Now tracking back in the period after the operation we had a number of theory regarding the origin of those birds. Some said they were cancelled projects. One off machines specially modified from conventional MH60 types others said that they were totally new designs with only some common parts between them and Blackhawk and some claimed that there was in fact two different models Stealthhawks more or less modifed prototypes with 2-4 built and then a production Ghosthawk which improves the design..
I believe:

1) There are a number of Stealth Black Hawks out there...probably 2-3 remaining prototypes, and perhaps several production birds.

2) I believe it very likely that such an asset would be used for such a mission as this.

The aircraft worked amazingly well getting bin Laden. Yes, we lost one...but they got the guys in there...into very hot, contested, sensitive ("touchy") space in Pakistan.

I believe that SpecOps, based on that mission alone, would have wanted more...and that they probably have gotten hem.

Clearly, the wreck on the ground and (even after demolition) what remained of it opened this up for discussion...otherwise, we would most likely not know anything about the program specifically to this day.
 

Bernard

Junior Member
USS Constitution Enters Dry Dock for Three Years of Repairs
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May 19, 2015 6:35 AM
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USS Constitution prepares to enter dry dock on Monday. US Navy Photo

The U.S. Navy’s oldest commissioned warship is now in dry dock for three-year renovation, the service said on Tuesday.

USS Constitution — commissioned in 1798 — entered Dry Dock 1 at the Charlestown Navy Yard early Tuesday where the ship will be renovated for a scheduled maintenance availability originally scheduled in March but delayed due to the severe winter weather on the Northeast in the earlier part of the year.

“We couldn’t have asked for better weather or better support from the dedicated team of professionals who helped with the docking,” said Cmdr. Sean Kearns, USS Constitution’s 73rd commanding officer in a statement.
“We’re now positioned to carry out the restoration work which will return Constitution to the water preserving her for the next generation of Americans to enjoy and learn about our nation’s great naval heritage.”

The $12 to 15 million restoration will preserve and repair the 2,286 ton ship from the upper masts to the waterline and is scheduled to be completed by 2018.

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USS Constitution passes by downtown Boston during the ship’s Independence Day underway. US Navy Photo

“The ship was made famous in the War of 1812 following several engagements with the Royal Navy earning Constitution the nickname ‘Old Ironsides’,”
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.
“Since then the ship has remained in commission undergoing several renovations and crewed by about 50 active duty U.S. Navy sailors.”

The work to be conducted on the ship, according to the Navy includes, includes:

* replacing lower hull planking and caulking,

* removing the 1995 copper sheathing and replacing it with 3,400 sheets of new copper that will protect the ship’s hull below the waterline,

* replacement of select deck beams,

* on-going preservation and repair of the ship’s rigging, upper masts, and yards.

Visitors will be able to visit the ship while in dry dock starting in June.
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It's a historic piece! Not as old as England's, but still really cool.
 

Bernard

Junior Member
Laser Fighters: 100 kW Weapons By 2022

By
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on May 18, 2015 at 4:00 AM
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Air Force artwork of a future dogfight with lasers.

PENTAGON: Star Wars fans, calm down. The US Air Force wants to fire a 100-plus-kilowatt
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from a small plane. And not just any airplane,
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officials. The last laser on an airplane — the megawatt
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, which filled a converted 747 and cancelled in 2011 — the 2022 demonstration will be fired from a
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.

But this isn’t a real-world X-Wing. It probably won’t even be an
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because that’s a
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that carries its weapons inside to give it a smaller radar cross section. Instead, the 2022 weapon will be built into an external weapons pod.

It’s a crawl-walk-run approach, said
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, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s chief technology officer. Modern electrically powered, solid-state laser technology is “orders of magnitude” simpler and more compact than the vats of toxic chemicals that powered the cancelled Airborne Laser, Stone told reporters at Thursday’s “DoD Lab Day” in the Pentagon courtyard. But technological advances still don’t make putting lasers on airplanes simple. So, he said, “before we start getting into really what we consider a lot of risk with internal carriage integration, we’re going to look at external integration via a pod.”

Even an external pod on a fighter, however, is a much tighter and more challenging fit for a laser weapon than, say, the massive weapons bay on an AC-130 gunship.
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but “what we’re doing is taking the most challenging case, and that’s on a fighter,” said AFRL director
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. “As technology advances, it can be spun right off into a larger platform like the AC-130.”

By way of comparison, the only forward-deployed laser weapon in the US military today is
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installed on the broad decks of the USS Ponce, a converted amphibious assault ship
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. Lasers fired from a ship face some unique problems that an airplane doesn’t. Sea air is full of moisture, which can weaken and distort the laser beam. Higher altitude air is clearer, but airborne lasers still require sophisticated corrective optics to stay focused on their target. While the atmospherics are arguably easier for an airborne laser than a shipborne one, ships are a lot bigger than a fighter.

“Air applications actually can be the most challenging,” said AFRL laser guru
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. (His formal title is “Director, Directed Energy Directorate” — yes, really, he says with an apologetic smile). “On a ship, I’m probably going to have more SWAP [Size Weight And Power] than I’m going to have on an aircraft,” Hardy said. What’s more, he went on, “aircraft tend to shake more than a ship does: A ship rolls but it doesn’t vibrate as much.” Vibration is hard on any complex machinery, but it’s especially problematic for a laser, which has to hold its beam steady enough to burn through a single spot on the target.

“A laser is basically a heating device,” Hardy said. “It heats up something. It melts holes in it. That’s what we do.” But it takes a lot of technology to get that hot spot on target, especially when fired from a flying platform. While the military has abandoned the bulky chemical lasers used on the Airborne Laser program, the experience of building ABL taught valuable lessons that still apply to the more compact electrically powered lasers of today, Hardy told me. “Making ABL work was not just fitting the laser in: It was building the beam control system, it was building the pointing system, it was building the targeting,” Hardy said. “We learned a lot from that.”

Another crucial evolutionary step is the General Atomics
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laser, which will soon shift from a DARPA experiment to a DARPA-Air Force Research Lab joint venture. “That was a major investment on the part of DARPA,” Hardy said. “It’s the first time anybody’s shown you can make a 150-kW-class electric laser.”(The exact power output of HELLADS isn’t published, and many details are classified). The whole point of HELLADS was to build a high-power laser weapon small enough that it could fit on an aircraft, although it’s never actually been installed in one. So while HELLADS is technically a ground-based weapon, it generates a lot of power in a compact package, making it “the existence proof that we can really make these electric lasers work in the greater-than-100-kw regime, in a reasonable SWAP [Size Weight And Power].”

“We believe [that] in the next decade we’ll have systems that routinely deliver over 100 kw,” Hardy told me. “Exactly
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we don’t know.”



AFRL-800px-Military_laser_experiment-300x195.jpg

A laser experiment at the Air Force Research Laboratory

Future Firepower

What can 100-plus kilowatts kill? Hardy was cagey about specific targets, but
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suggests that it could destroy enemy cruise missiles, drones, and even manned aircraft at significant ranges.

“A 150-200 kW laser could be capable against surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles,” said CSBA’s
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, the report’s author. And against manned aircraft? “Quite probably,” he said, “especially at altitude where the air is thinner.”

{....}

A typical modern fighter like the F-16 can carry at most
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. Shoot six times, hit or miss, and it’s back to base to re-arm. By contrast, said Gunzinger, a laser-armed aircraft could just head back to the tanker. “Instead of landing to reload, air refueling would ‘reload’ [laser]-equipped aircraft in flight,” he said. They could keep fighting until the pilot couldn’t take it any more — or, if unmanned, for longer than any human could endure.

“There are several developmental lasers, including HELLADS, that are making great progress” towards making a weapon compact enough for an aircraft, Gunzinger told me. “Aircraft-based laser weapons could be a near-term reality.”

One of the Air Force’s leading futurists,
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, was even more enthusiastic about the possibilities for airborne lasers — and, someday, spaceborne ones. In the near term, he told me, the place to start is probably short-ranged defensive systems: Instead of trying to overcome the power, focus, and atmospheric distortion problems required to strike targets far away, he said,
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. But laser’s long term
potential lies at long range, and aerospace platforms are the way to get there.

{....}

“You can just imagine the kinds of advantages there are when you free yourself from the atmosphere,” Deptula told me. Beyond firing from high-altitude aircraft, he said, “there are some enormous opportunities here to use lasers in space or from space,” for example to shoot down enemy aircraft or ballistic missiles from above. Current international treaties prevent that, he acknowledged, and “we don’t want to
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, but guess what:
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— so we need to be prepared to operate in space and from space.”


Too long read the last few paragraphs on the website..........
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Bernard

Junior Member
Air Force Getting Closer to Testing Hypersonic Weapon, Engineers Say
by
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on May 19, 2015

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The
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is making progress in developing a hypersonic weapon based on the success of an experimental scramjet program, engineers said.

The service in 2013 conducted its fourth and longest flight of the so-called
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. After separating from a rocket launched beneath the wing of a B-52 bomber, the hypersonic vehicle built by Boeing Co. climbed to 60,000 feet, accelerated to Mach 5.1 and flew for about three and a half minutes before running out of fuel and plunging into the Pacific Ocean.

At that speed, which is equivalent to about 3,400 miles per hour, a missile could travel from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta in just several minutes — making it a potentially powerful weapon against enemy air defenses.

“We are the Air Force. What do we want to do with this technology? We want to weaponize it,” Ryan Helbach, an official with the Air Force Research Laboratory, said last week during an exhibition at the Pentagon to showcase various military research projects. “The follow-on program to this is the High Speed Strike Weapon effort. It’s taking a lot of the lessons learned and the technology and moving to a weapons acquisition.”

The hypersonic missile program comes as the U.S. faces increasing competition from China and other countries working to capitalize on the defense technology.

“Certainly, the U.S. is not the only country involved in developing hypersonic weapons,” Mica Endsley, the Air Force’s chief scientist, said in a recent interview with Military.com “They (China) are showing a lot of capability in this area. The advantage of hypersonics is not just that something goes very fast but that it can go great distances at those speeds.”

She added, “For example, currently today to get from NY to LA is a five hour flight in a commercial aircraft. With a hypersonic weapon, you could do that same thing in about 30 minutes. You can go great distances at great speeds.”

The nine-year, $300 million
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was designed to demonstrate that the military could build a scramjet capable of accelerating, ingesting hydrocarbon fuel, and actively cooling in flight, Helbach said. Unlike a traditional engine, a scramjet, or supersonic combusting ramjet, has very few moving parts and relies on an air-breathing propulsion system to travel faster than the speed of sound.

But it needs a kick, like a boost from a rocket, to get there. So the WaveRider was first propelled by a solid rocket booster, a surface-to-surface missile called the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, to about Mach 4.5, then separated and activated its scramjet engine built by Aerojet Rocketdyne. (A weaponized version of the vehicle would use another missile, not a ground system design.)

“There are no moving parts in the flow path, so that means there are no compressor blades to suck in the air, so we need something to get us up to above Mach 4 in order to get the compression into the engine,” Helbach said.

The Air Force program, which had a couple of failed tests, came several years after a similar NASA effort called the X-43, which in 2004 shattered speed records when it flew at nearly Mach 9.7, or about 6,600 miles per hour, for 10 seconds. But the engine couldn’t withstand the temperatures involved.

“The engine basically melted because it got so hot,” Helbach said. “They didn’t actively cool it. So for our program, we actively cooled the engine, which means that along the outside of the engine, we cycled the fuel around it to suck out the heat from the engine, heat up that fuel, and then inject it into the combustor for the scramjet engine.”

The X-51 was designed to start its engine using ethylene and transition to a hydrocarbon fuel called JP-7 — the same type of endothermic fuel employed by the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

“It basically means you can dump a lot of heat into that fuel,” Helbach said. “When you crack the fuel, it actually makes it more combustible. It increases the amount of combustion you can create from the fuel.”

For the follow-on weapons program, the Air Force has teamed with the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to shrink the technology into a hypersonic weapon that could fit on most of the bomber fleet, according to Kenneth Davidson, manager of the hypersonic materials development at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“If you look at the X-51, the size is slightly too big to put it on our current bombers,” he said. “It was made as a demonstrator. There’s no weapon in it. There are no sensors on board for controlling the guidance. So we’re looking at making it more durable, getting the guidance control developed so that it can become a weapon system, developing the ordnance.”

Carrying a small, conventional warhead, a hypersonic weapon could be used as a stand-off missile, so the military could strike targets at a safe distance without putting pilots and aircraft at risk.

“You could then attack defensive targets, those heavily defended or the time-critical targets in a very timely manner — if it’s a moving target, before it can move,” Davidson said. “And then ultimately, these would have a sensor so that they can track a moved target — not necessarily something that is moving, but if the target moves or it gets into the area, they can see the target and hit it very, very accurately.”

The High Speed Strike Weapon is affiliated with other demonstration projects being developed by DARPA, including the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept and the Tactical Boost Glide, both of which have test flights scheduled for 2018 or 2019.

“Our goal is to make sure the Air Force has the knowledge in 2020 or over the next five years to be able to make acquisition decisions using this technology,” Davidson said. “Our goal is to provide a capability to stand off, launch these vehicles off the aircraft to hit time-critical dependent targets … And ultimately from a manufacturing standpoint, it’s got to be affordable.”



Read more:
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Defense.org
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
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It's a historic piece! Not as old as England's, but still really cool.
I was really blessed to visit the USS Constitution in 2000. My wife and I took a three week raod trip from Idaho and drove over to Boston to visit her brother and to see the "Battle Road" US National Park from Lexington to Concord, and visit the USS Constitution historic park (among a lot of other things on the trip).

The USS Constitution was called Old ironsides because the wood used to build her hull was so strong that cannonballs of the day tended to bound off of her.

She is most famous for her actions during the War of 1812 against England when she captured numerous merchant ships and defeated five British warships. The HMS JAva, Pictou, Cyane, Levant and Guerriere. The biggest battle of those was against HMS Gurrriere, a British frigate of similar size. The fighting was intense and for some time the two ships were locked together, firing broadsides point blank at each other. When they finally pulled apart, the British ship was a dismasted, shot-up, unmanageable hulk, with close to a third of her crew wounded or killed. The British captain, seeing this...surrendered.

One of the sailors on the Constitution, having seen the British broadsides being relative ineffective against the Constitution reportedly shouted, "Huzzah! her sides must be made of iron!" That's how she got her nick name.

I did not know it until that trip, but the US Navy, at the Naval Support Center in Crane, Inidana, now maintains a 30,000 acre forest specifically set aside to support US Navy wood needs. That forest now contains all of the Live Oak, White Oak, and Douglas Fir needed to maintain the USS Constitution.

I would recommend a book that I purchased on site there. It was written by Tyrone G. Martin, the 58th commanding officer of the USS Constitution (1974-1976):


41DA2XVDN8L.jpg

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Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Six US Marine Corps F-35B aircraft are aboard the USS Wasp, LHD-1, for operational testing for the next two weeks. Six aircraft is a full squadron of US Marine strike fighters for these LHD vessels and this testing will represent full operational testing with flight operations, maintenance, logistics, repairs, etc.

And these are production, operational aircraft, not prototypes or pure test aircraft.

Here are some of the initial pictures.


2015-0519-F35B-Wasp-01.jpg

Four F-35B Lighting II Joint Strike Fighters sit secured to the deck after their arrival aboard the USS Wasp (LHD-1), May 18, 2015. Six aircraft are participating in full operational te4sting aboard the Wasp from May 18-June 1st.

2015-0519-F35B-Wasp-02.jpg

Two F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters complete vertical landings aboard the USS Wasp (LHD-1) during the opening day of the first session of operational testing, May 18, 2015. Six aircraft are participating in full operational te4sting aboard the Wasp from May 18-June 1st.

2015-0519-F35B-Wasp-03.jpg

An F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter idles on the flight deck of the USS Wasp (LHD-1) in preparation for take-off, May 18, 2015. The short take-off, vertical landing capabilities of the F-35B are crucial to the mission of the Marine Corps and necessary for operation aboard a Navy amphibious ship

2015-0519-F35B-Wasp-04.jpg

Marines and sailors aboard the USS Wasp (LHD-1) secure and refuel an F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter after its arrival for the first session of operational testing, May 18, 2015. Data and information gathered from OT-1 will lay the groundwork for F-35B deployments aboard Navy amphibious ships and the announcement of the Marine Corps' initial operating capacity of the F-35B in July.

2015-0519-F35B-Wasp-05.jpg

An F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter after a vertical landing aboard the USS Wasp (LHD-1) during the opening day of the first session of operational testing, May 18, 2015
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
The Air Force plans to launch its fourth X-37B mission, designated OTV-4 and codenamed AFSPC-5, aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station tomorrow, May 20, 2015. The mission will test a Hall Effect Thruster in support of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) communications satellite program, and will also carry a NASA materials mission.


635676260677974451-afspc5-av-rollout-onpad-051915.jpg
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying an Air Force's X-37B space plane rolled to its Launch Complex 41 pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 19, 2015.

x37B.jpg
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US Air Force X-37B Space craft
 

Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
Okay that's interesting, lets take a few things apart.

Firstly we know there are Ghost hawks or shadow hawks or stealth hawks or whatever GI Joe character name you want to give the low observable choppers. That there is at least one. As two would have been used in Neptune Spear with one smashed, crashed and barbequed in Islamabad Pakistan.

If stealthed helicopters were used in this recent operation, it would indicate that the Army had more than the two used in Neptune Spear. Now tracking back in the period after the operation we had a number of theory regarding the origin of those birds. Some said they were cancelled projects. One off machines specially modified from conventional MH60 types others said that they were totally new designs with only some common parts between them and Blackhawk and some claimed that there was in fact two different models Stealthhawks more or less modifed prototypes with 2-4 built and then a production Ghosthawk which improves the design.

Second we have no conformation of other stealthily rotary wing assets in US services.

Aviationist has theories of stealthy little birds and Chinooks but no proof.

Stealthily little birds however do have some basis of development. In the Vietnam era the CIA operated a modified version of the OH6 LOAH dubbed "The Quiet One" because it was modified to produce almost no sound. Its small size and unique features may make such possible.

Chinook however is another matter. There have been gunship programs but no known signature reduction, also consider its large size and shape. The size of your average Greyhound bus with flat sides it seems unlikely to me that a Stealth skin would do much about it's billboard radar profile. Adding in its overall age and it seems unlikely.

IMO rather than Stealth Chinook if I was the DOD looking to buy a stealthy penetrator, I personally would favor attempting a Silent Osprey, there is some basis for this notion.

1) the Osprey program was begun under the US Army after the Desert one fiasco which left the Iranians a number of slightly used Ch53 and enough propaganda materials to last twenty years.

2) Bell Helicopter at a US Army Aviation show years ago displayed a Concept art of a Stealth Quadrotor.

Additionally consider that although V22 has a smaller cargo and passenger volume it has longer range and higher speed. That however is all conjecture.

Now why would the US DOD have the Ghosthawks in the region? After Neptune Spear some people had a problem with the Idea that the SEALs and the Stealth choppers were shipped in just for this one operation. Rather some believe that the low observable choppers were already in Afghanistan for another possible mission, that mission?

US concerns that the Pakistani Taliban could have destabilized the government and seized control of Pakistani's nuclear weapons. These Theorists say that that worry was enough to keep the stealth helicopters in Afghanistan as a proactive measure, that in the event of a coup the StealthHawks and a Socom team would have entered Pakistan and neutralized the WMD.

Okay, now if that was the case in Afghanistan could a similar situation be in place in the middle east today? Could the Ghosthawks have already been on the ground waiting for operations? Yes it seems possible. First the Iranian nuclear issue then the Syrian conflict as well as Iraq seem likely to justify the presence of US Socom and stealth penetrator assets, both manned and unmanned.

Now we come to the Grey Eagle.

Grey Eagle is a derivative of the predator drones. Its not stealth its a white program, meaning you can read about it openly. It seems to me that of your operating stealth manned assets worried about the potential for issues with air denial from both ground and air assets then you would want to support with at least some low observable unmanned platforms. This likely means stealth drones like the RQ180 as well as other still black programs were in the air. Perhaps including a stealthy equivalent to the grey eagle to support the Socom mission and deploy air to ground missiles as needed.

now the big question, did you? drink it? smoke it? or fry up some psychedelic morels????, actually you and Bernard and Stanley Freedburg had a party didn't you??

Stealth Helos, Ospreys, Lasers on Cessna 150s, and Proton canons on C-130s??? or maybe one or both or all three of you are agents of ???? a galactic empire???
 
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