Free Republic

The U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in California, America’s premier hub for advanced aerospace development work, especially highly classified military programs, has seen a wave of mysterious drone incursions in recent months. The incidents have now become serious enough to prompt the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to impose new, if temporary flight restrictions around the sprawling high-security facility. The Air Force acknowledged these incidents in response to our questions about purported sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the area which became viral on social media over the weekend and that local law enforcement appears to have received no reports...

NASA’s X-59 QueSST This artist’s concept of NASA’s QueSST jet reflects the airplane’s final configuration following years of research and design engineering. The jet is now under construction by Lockheed Martin at the company’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. Credit: Lockheed Martin NASA’s X-59 aircraft, capable of supersonic flight while reducing sonic booms to quieter ‘thumps’, has been moved for testing in California. The collected data on human reactions to supersonic noise will potentially assist in enabling commercial supersonic flight over land. The following series of images shows NASA’s X-59 as it sits on the flight line—the space between...

MYSTERY surrounds a UFO-like aircraft that was seen being towed into a top-secret US military base. According to reports, it was spotted at Lockheed Martin’s secretive Helendale radar-cross section (RCS) measurement facility in the Mojave Desert, California. The mystery craft was spotted being towed into a top-secret base in a California base The mystery craft was spotted being towed into a top-secret base in a California base A short video of the unidentified aircraft first emerged on TikTok and then the location was tracked down by internet sleuth Ruben Hofs. The footage shows what looks like an inverted stealth aircraft...

A Lockheed Martin honcho refuses to explain a video splashed on social media showing a UFO saucer-like aircraft being wheeled into a top-secret US military base. "I can't [speak about it]," said a grinning Jeff Babione, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works Vice President and General Manager when asked about the extraterrestrial tech... ..Babione was asked about security protocols at Skunk Works' facility. "We're good," Babione said, according to The Drive. Another chat between Defense One's Tara Copp and Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Q. Brown tried to get answers about the object. But Brown only said that he was...

NASA's incredible X-plane that is shaped to muffle the sound of its sonic boom has been cleared for assembly by a management review ahead of test flights in 2021. Dubbed the 'son of Concorde' after the Mach 2 airliner, the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) is NASA's first large experimental plane in three decades. The X-59 will cruise at Mach 1.42 (1,090 mph/1,754 km/h) and is designed for supersonic flight while preventing its sonic boom from being heard on the ground. If successful, the craft could one day travel from London to New York in just over three hours, while...

the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force's iconic SR-71 Blackbird ... also incorporated then-state-of-the-art features to reduce its radar cross-section. These included a combination of a stealthy overall shape and radar-evading structures, as well as the use of composites in its construction, and the incorporation of radar absorbing materials on its skin. A far less known, but still a key component of the Skunk Works plan to make the A-12 harder to spot on radar involved a cesium-laced fuel additive to dramatically reduce the radar signature of the plane's massive engine exhausts and afterburner plumes by creating an ionizing cloud...

Hypersonic technology -- weapons and interceptors able to travel at least five times the speed of sound -- are a top Pentagon priority and an area where China and Russia are perceived to be ahead of U.S. military efforts. The Defense Department has committed to spend aggressively to catch up. Based on initial contract awards, it's becoming clear that Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) is outpacing the competition in the battle to win the lion's share of those awards. Lockheed Martin earlier this month was awarded a $480 million contract to develop a hypersonic air-launched, rapid response weapon (ARRW). The award could...

Then disaster struck. On May 24, an A-12 stalled, went into an unrecoverable spin and crashed during a test flight in Utah. Fortunately, pilot Kenneth Collins ejected and survived. Even in remote Utah, it’s hard to hide a crash. A local deputy witnessed the incident and a vacationing family snapped away with a camera. The CIA promptly seized their photographs and paid $25,000 each to the deputy and the family to keep quiet, according to a 2010 story in the Seattle Times. The Blackbird wouldn’t stay officially secret for much longer. Pres. Lyndon Johnson would run for election in 1964,...

On Monday, NASA revealed a project as part of its newly-introduced New Aviation Horizons initiative that awarded Lockheed Martin a $20 million contract over the next 17 months to create a jet that uses quiet supersonic technology (QueSST). It is the first in a series of ‘X-planes’ for the initiative. NASA said it conducted studies across the country to learn more about acceptable sound levels. The finished product will fly at supersonic speeds, and create a "heartbeat" in place of the disruptive "boom" that is currently associated with supersonic flight.

... Easter had a top-secret job offer. If Moseley accepted, he would have to commit for four years, he couldn't tell anyone about the job and he would have to accept the job before knowing what it was. "And he said, 'You've got 30 seconds and if you don't say yes, this conversation never happened.' Well, that was just too intriguing to turn down," Moseley says. "So I said, 'Absolutely.' And he'd given me a telephone number and an intersection." ...

Sponsored by: FedBiz Daily Here's why Lockheed is pulling the curtain back on Skunk Works Feb 23, 2015, 2:25pm EST Updated: Feb 23, 2015, 4:40pm EST   Enlarge Photo   The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is one program that emerged from Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Skunk Works, which has pulled back the curtain in an effort to attract talent and get credit for contributions to defense and aerospace.   15 photos Home of the DaySponsor Listing Jill R. AitoroSenior Staff Reporter- Washington Business JournalEmail  |  Twitter  |  LinkedIn Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Advanced Development Programs group, better known as Skunk Works,...

Hidden away in the secret depths of the Skunk Works, a Lockheed Martin research team has been working quietly on a nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power. Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to...

This piece of the History of the Lockheed A-12 is dedicated to the memory of Dorsey G. Kammerer. Dorsey was a part of the Lockheed SkunkWorks from its inception. He was an "inside" man on the team that built the P-38 Lightning, the P-80 Shooting Star, the F-104 Starfighter, the U-2 Angel and the A-12 Archangel and the other versions, the YF-12 and the SR-71. Dorsey that had the foresight to save the photos that help document this story. Dorsey's family found these gems and made them available for this story. This story has never really been told in much...

Aviation Week's Guy Norris has an exclusive article on the successor for the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird, the legendary spy plane that may be the favorite of every airplane nerd in the world. The hypersonic SR-72 is the first aircraft that can fit perfectly in Star Wars or Galactica, a true space age ship.

book Flying the Worlds Fastest Jet http://www.mainewomensrugby.com/cwaltham/143352475-Sled-Driver-v2.pdf This book is one man's view of what it was like to fly the world's fastest jet.

Top Secret Tombs: The Classified Stealth Aircraft Burial Grounds of Area 51 Top secret aircraft, even those that have been publicly disclosed, remain mysterious long after emerging from the black world. When – and if – secret planes are declassified, they’re treated differently from other military aircraft, and the specifics of their hardware may remain under wraps for decades. While some ultimately go to museums, others are placed into storage well away from prying eyes, awaiting a fate that may take years to arrive. One such fate that has befallen crashed, retired or failed projects over the decades is burial....

How To Fly A U-2 Spy Plane Got your eye on a sweet used '59 U-2 spy plane you saw on Craigslist? Would you go ahead and take the plunge if you just, you know, knew how to fly it? Then boy, are you in luck. That's because a couple days ago an entire flight manual for the U-2 from 1959 was declassified and released by the CIA. You can tell it's declassified because on each page where the word "secret" appears, someone has carefully drawn a line through it. We've got a copy here for you. The U-2 is,...

An SR-71 Blackbird Tail Fin Is For Sale On eBay For $1 Million A tail rudder from the fastest airplane in the world could be yours — for a cool $1 million. The seller didn't say if it was a spare part, or if it was once part of a functioning SR-71 Blackbird, which is an important distinction given the cost. When it debuted in 1964, the SR-71 Blackbird — the mean looking surveillance aircraft that cruised high above the Soviet Union at speeds of up to mach 3.5 — cost the U.S. Air Force $34 million per air frame....

How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How do you hide an airplane behind a bird? Very skillfully. Lt. Col. William B. O'Connor (ret.) flew the F-117 Nighthawk during the Bosnia Conflict, and in Stealth Fighter, he explains the history, operation, and soul America's most advanced stealth jet. While the United States had never embraced a defensive mindset and had only fielded one strategic SAM system to that point, the Nike-Hercules dating from the 1950s, and one real medium-range tactical system, the HAWK (homing all the way...

All of a sudden it was there, but then like any good stealth aircraft it vanished. Now the “Beast of Kandahar” has resurfaced in new photos, spurring aviation and defense wonks to once again speculate about the function and purpose of such a stealthy-looking unmanned aerial system. The Beast, also known as the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, first appeared in 2009 in the skies over Kandahar in Afghanistan. It was later revealed to be a product of Lockheed’s Skunk Works and property of the U.S. Air Force, but that’s about all that was revealed. What the RQ-170 is designed to...