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AREA 51 - THE TRUTH by the CIA: Official dossier blows lid off US secrets
A declassified CIA report made public this week includes copious references to the United States' mysterious Area 51 base. The Cold War-era dossier on the U-2 spy plane was published by the George Washington University's National Security Archive - and acknowledges the existence of the highly hush-hush patch of Nevada desert, …
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Friday 16th August 2013 12:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Don't forget the stealth... That I believe was responsible for most of the 'triangle' craft sightings...
And I suspect there have been many more experimental aircraft tested there, drones for one thing!
one amazing thing is that while the SR-71 is grounded now... the U2 is STILL in active service, amazing kit...
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Friday 16th August 2013 14:01 GMT Ed 13
Re: English Electric Lightning ????
Yes. Some NATO exercise in Europe in the mid eighties. I recall reading it on the EE Lighting stand at Duxford IWM.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning
"In 1984, during a major NATO exercise, Flt Lt Mike Hale intercepted a U-2 at a height which they had previously considered safe from interception (thought to be 66,000 feet). Records show that Hale also climbed to 88,000 ft (26,800 m) in his Lightning F.3"
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Friday 16th August 2013 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: English Electric Lightning ????
It was a U2, not an SR-71.
A U2 was slower than SR-71, but it flew extremely high (out of reach of most SAMs). But once the Russians managed to shoot down one of them over Russian soil, that was it.
The Lightning easily had a ceiling as high as the U2, so it is not inconceivable that the Lightning ended up above a U2 as part of an intercept.
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Friday 16th August 2013 14:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: English Electric Lightning ????
Sorry to burst your (probably British) bubble, the SR71 had an operating altitude of 80,000ft, the U-2 70,000, the Electric Lightning 65000. Although they tried and successfully tested U-2 interception around 60-65,000ft. On one occasion they managed to climb to 88,000ft, but it was just a ballistic flight, not a sustained level one.
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Friday 16th August 2013 14:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: English Electric Lightning ????
5000 ft is close enough. The U-2 is flying in a very narrow speed range at that height and would need very little to bring it down. I think the slipstream of another aircraft would probably knock it out of the sky - wouldn't even need to get the airflow off your wing under its wing (a la Tempest vs V-1)
If the 1957 hadn't knocked most all new ideas on the head, I wonder if the UK would have turned out a really high altitude and longer ranged interceptor - and would it have looked like the Vickers-Armstrong Type 559?
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Friday 16th August 2013 12:57 GMT Don Jefe
Both the U-2 and the SR-71 are excellent examples of not only aerospace design but high speed, high resolution photography and photography processes and logistical support. They were full of complicated engineering problems and keeping them flying was a constant challenge: I'm afraid the abilities to bootstrap engineering solutions on the fly is a lost art these days.
Everyone wants no risk guarantees and assurances these days, not forward thinking. Look at the F-35 for a great example of trying to design around every possible problem and coming up with a big pile of shit that can't do anything, instead of recognizing the need for in the field solutions.
Also, the aliens and their technology are kept at the Mt. Weather facility in Virginia not Area 51.
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Friday 16th August 2013 14:01 GMT Anonymous Custard
Also a lover of the old SR-71, from an aesthetic but also an engineering viewpoint.
It's the little things, like the story I heard once from one of their pilots at an airshow that they tended to leak fuel when on the ground due to the requirements of tolerance to allow for thermal expansion when they were going supersonic.
A trait (the expansion, not the leakage) it shared with that other supersonic icon, Concorde.
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Friday 16th August 2013 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Anonymous 14:01
That's correct. The planes were never fully fueled on the ground. They were fueled with enough to get to 'operating temperature' before they were fueled fully in flight.
The one problem they suffered from though were the violent unstarts, which were physically worse than on the Concorde... But they show how much of that engineering was new and how much of it is still novel now...
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Saturday 17th August 2013 11:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @Anonymous 14:01
Violent unstarts on Concorde? Really? Did any such thing ever happen to a Concorde engine after they'd finished the development work?
Sorting out the engine inlets was a big job, but from what I've read, the effort paid off and Concorde's engines were pretty much immune to such trouble once in service.
Not that I mean to diss the SR-71 designers in any way: that was a military craft designed to hit Mach 3+, not a "mere" twice the speed of sound. Concorde got by with fairly normal turbojets: Blackbird engines operated as ramjets at high speeds. The fact they got the things to work at all is a Big Win.
The engineering's not been replicated before or since AFAIK - not the clever Concorde stuff, nor the clever SR-71 stuff. Both brilliant one-offs, the like of which the world shall probably not see again, damnit!
As for Andrew Orlowski's idea that the SR-71 was the intended successor to U-2s: well, no. SR-71s were meant as an additional reconnaissance platform. After all, U-2s are a good deal easier and cheaper to operate. Then again, SR-71s were harder to shoot down (none were) and can get there quicker.
SR71s have long since been retired, but U2 descendant are still in service despite drones, satellites, and all the modern remote electronic snooping they can do.
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Friday 16th August 2013 11:35 GMT An0n C0w4rd
Other acknowledgements of Area 51 / Groom Lake
aka "Dreamland"
As part of any outage which affects 911 services, US telco's have to file a report with the FCC detailing areas affected, what happened, and what the fix was
10-15 years ago Sprint filed an outage notice with the FCC detailing a DACC (from memory) that had failed. They listed one of the affected areas as "Military Base 'Area 51'"
I may still have a copy of that outage notification somewhere. Oh, it's even on the wayback machine
http://web.archive.org/web/20011217044254/www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Filings/Network_Outage/1999/reports/99-228.pdf
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Friday 16th August 2013 12:52 GMT Electric Panda
In my experience, an awful lot of the ZOMG ALIENS about Area 51 died out a while ago. Most of the die-hard UFO community now accept Area 51 is/was just an R&D and test area for some extremely advanced airborne kit, you'd think if there was something truly dodgy and extra-terrestrial going on that the US military wouldn't keep it in the one place everyone knows about and is obsessed with.
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Friday 16th August 2013 12:52 GMT kmac499
SR71 Blackbird
For all enthusiast, there used to be a Blackbird in the USAF display Hangar at the Imperial War Musuem Duxford. sheltering under a B52's wing. (it seems tiny). Well worth the visit just to admire something designed and built a little over 50 years after the first practical aeroplanes Mach 0.1ish to Mach 3.0ish
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Friday 16th August 2013 14:05 GMT Don Jefe
Re: SR71 Blackbird
There's an SR-71 at the USAF Armament Museum at Eglin AFB in Florida. The museum is open to the public as it's just outside the base. The plane is cool, you can climb all over it, touch it, etc. Nice that they allow the public to come in contact with it. Seems to make it more real somehow.
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Friday 16th August 2013 12:52 GMT Chris G
The Truth is out there ( pa' vItna' tu'lu'). Old Klingon saying!
This is just a ruse to throw alien hunting, anal probe afficionados off the trail.
The trouble is no matter what the US Gov' now officially releases about Area 51 the conspiricists will believe it is part of a continuing cover up for what is really happening!
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