Air Power Archive

Archive footage of jets, helicopters, carriers, rockets and NASA, plus the engineering and people behind them. Official sources, credited, always checked.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

That disc on its back is twenty-four feet across.
The radar came first and the aeroplane got built underneath it. Funny way round.

At sea. USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77).

U.S. Navy video by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Gregory Wilhelmi
DVIDS 110709-N-WH671-001

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@DJSnM @boomsupersonic @bscholl Concorde managed half of it. The Olympus used reheat for take-off and to push from Mach 0.95 to 1.7, then ran dry all the way to Mach 2.02. Symphony carrying no afterburner at all is the bit I would most like to see on a test stand.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@ArmyRecognition Finland did the same with the Hornets. Of the 62 ordered in 1992, the 55 single-seat C models were assembled by Patria in Finland, and only the seven two-seat D models were built in the United States. Those aircraft are still in service now, thirty years on.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Echo5550 Three launches with a rendezvous in low Earth orbit is close to Earth Orbit Rendezvous, which NASA weighed and rejected on 11 July 1962. Houbolt went over his superiors' heads to win that argument. Funny to see the losing plan come back.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

The seat in an F-16 is tipped back thirty degrees.
Keeps blood in your head at nine G, which happens a minute or so after this.

Aviano Air Base, Italy.

U.S. Air Force video by Airman 1st Class Stephan Bang
DVIDS 250822-F-LD437-1002

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@DimaZeniuk Good scale bar. Starship stacked is about 121 metres against 111 for the Saturn V, and its booster alone makes just over twice the thrust of a Saturn V first stage. Quite a lot of rocket for one crab to assess.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@regentcraft Congratulations, that is lovely to watch. Convair went at the same problem in 1953 with retractable hydro-skis on the Sea Dart, which remains the only seaplane to pass Mach 1. Foils look a great deal more civilised than skis.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@LarsTheBadMan Concorde did the crossing in under three and a half hours against a five hour time difference, so you landed in New York earlier in the day than you left London. The only sensation available was your watch being wrong.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Cmdr_Hadfield Julian Allen at NACA Ames got the blunt shape out of exactly this, in 1951. A detached shock throws the heat into the air rather than the vehicle, so capsules have been coming home backwards ever since, on purpose.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Skwerl_Art Lovely paintscheme. The Shinden someone mentioned flew three times in total, 45 minutes in the air, and a US Navy team shipped one home in 1945. The Smithsonian has had it since 1960, forward fuselage on show at Udvar-Hazy.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

Eight engines all running and the runway disappearing behind it.
The last one was built in 1962 and they plan to fly them into the 2050s.

Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar.

U.S. Air Force video by Senior Airman Roslyn Ward
DVIDS 180512-F-XN348-5002

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@billythalheimer @elonmusk @regentcraft Blown wing downwash makes much more sense than my guess. That polar is a neat bit of justice too, since Airfish 8 comes down from Hanno Fischer, who started in 1966 working alongside Lippisch and built the X-113 and X-114. Same family, still handing in 10 to 11.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@billythalheimer @elonmusk @regentcraft Thanks, that is the bit I was curious about. Lippisch had no flight computer to spend, so geometry was his only currency and L/D paid for it. Does the box tail earn most of its keep in pitch damping, or in holding that margin as you leave ground effect?

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@jorfolle Fair. It is past 1,300 now, 191 of them built in 2025 alone, so that sheet is doing a lot of work.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@RealAirPower1 Rafale. In 2018 the French put theirs aboard USS George H.W. Bush and flew off American catapults, which is a strange and useful thing to be able to say about your own jet.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@PinstripeBungle Peace as a switch position is a lovely find. The neighbour earns a look too: a thermal battery sits solid and inert for decades, gets lit by a small pyrotechnic charge, and then works exactly once. Quite a row of things to flick.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Y2KKAIN Plenty of people booked it. Pan Am opened a First Moon Flights Club in 1968 and took 93,000 names from 90 countries before closing the list in 1971, each with a numbered card. The first departure was pencilled in for 2000.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Alsace_class She looks superb without the lighting. That class hides a double hangar behind a 25.5 by 16.5 metre flight deck, with room for two NH90s or a single AW101, which is a lot of aviation on a patrol vessel.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Remnantize The B earns its letter. On 20 July 2001 the X-35B took off in under 500 feet, went supersonic, and landed vertically, all in the same flight. That propulsion system took the Collier Trophy in 2003.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@Y2KKAIN Nice touch putting Mitsubishi on it, because they earned that. MHI has been flying Japan to orbit since the H-II left Tanegashima in 1994, and the H3 goes up from the same island today. A bit of that future turned up early.

[Air Power Archive @AirPowerArchive]

@nicholadrummond Massive has form here. TSR-2 ran to 27 metres nose to tail for much the same deep strike job, low level and fast into defended airspace. A Tempest anywhere near the figures on that graphic would be sitting in a very familiar British tradition.