Table of contents for December/January 2018-19 in Air & Space

LIGHTNING AT NIGHT Two F - 3 5 B Lightning IIs make the type’s first night landings aboard the HMS Queen Elizabeth. The F-35s, flown by British pilots despite their U.S. markings, landed on September 29, and later conducted a rolling takeoff from the carrier’s ramp. During the trials last September off the U.S. East Coast, pilots were expected to conduct some 500 takeoffs and landings. (Only a handful of Britain’s 48 purchased F-35Bs have been delivered; most of the delivered aircraft are being used for training at their British home-base, Royal Air Force Marham.) The Queen Elizabethand the HMS Prince ofWales, still under-construction, will be the two largest ships ever operated by the storied Royal Navy. They restore a military capability lost in 2010 when the Royal Navy and…

JONATHON KEATS has a plan to communicate with aliens. Not by beaming a signal or launching a space probe with a golden record on board. Instead, the conceptual artist and experimental philosopher has built a collection of unconventional instruments that produce music for alien “ears.” If anyone hears, he hopes it will respond. But how does one create music for unknown cosmic beings? For starters, assume they are not human. To produce sound in a range of frequencies far above what a human can hear, Keats and sculptor Amelia Pate created the ultrasonic organ. A foot pump forces air through eight whistles to produce an unverifiable alien sonata. Keats also considered the electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma ray bells exploit the radioactive decay from a radium watch dial and a uranium marble.…

How would you describe Jennifer’s strengths as a pilot? John: She’s always been humble and incredible. But she’s also been very cool under pressure. She was the chief of the mission-planning cell for a lot of the [509th Bomb] Wing’s combat sorties. When we had kids, she was able to pick up right where she left off. She has that knack of retaining all that information, and just being able to stop and start things again as a pilot, which I really respect. How often did you talk about the B-2 during your downtime? Jennifer: We probably talked about it more than we should. One of the perks of being married to another military spouse as well as them having the same profession is that we can bounce ideas off…

ON A QUIET FRIDAY AFTERNOON last July, I was giving a tour of the Hubble Space Telescope control center to a group of visitors at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. As Hubble’s Deputy Project Manager, giving the occasional tour is one of the “other duties as assigned” in my job, and it’s usually a fun one. How often do you get to discuss your work for longer than just a sentence or two to people who actually want to hear about it? I was deep into my well-rehearsed explanation of how we monitor Hubble when Mike Myslinski, one of our operations managers, walked by. Taking care not to be overheard, he whispered to me that the spacecraft had an anomaly. “Anomaly” doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophe. It could be something…

ASTRONOMERSMUSTBECREATIVE when figuring out how much stuff there is in the universe. You can’t exactly roll a galaxy onto an industrial scale (even if you could, as Isaac Newton figured out, you’d still have to factor in the influence of Earth’s gravity to get its mass). The classical way of determining the amount of matter in an object like a moon, planet, or star is to measure its gravitational interaction with other objects. These early calculations combined Newton’s law of gravity with Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion—the relationship between the planet’s orbital speed and distance from that other object. When astronomers first began applying these calculations to galaxies by measuring the orbital speeds of their stars, the results were strange. By appearances, most of a galaxy’s mass seems to…

Now That’s Customer Service “We Built This City” (Sept. 2018) mentioned Walter Beech, who formed Travel Air Manufacturing. I was reminded of a guy at the long-gone Livermore, California airport who had the hangar next to me in the 1950s. He was in the middle of restoring an old Travel Air biplane, serial number 6, that he had found in a barn in Idaho. The original Firestone tires on the airplane were rock hard after so many years, so he boxed up the broken remains and sent them off to Firestone with a tongue-in-cheek letter complaining how their tires just don’t last anymore. He had pretty much forgotten about that until a year later when he received a package from Firestone with two brand new, proper…

THE THREE-KILOMETER speed record for piston-engine aircraft had stood for 30 years when Darryl Greenamyer broke it in 1969, flying 482 mph in his Bearcat Conquest I. He reinvigorated the ambitions of race pilots for the next 50 years. Steven Hinton followed in 1979; Lyle Shelton, in 1989; and Hinton’s son Steve, just last year. Greenamyer, who died October 1, had that effect on people. His energy and vision created a forceful attraction. In 1964 he assembled a team of nonpareils from Lockheed, where he had been a test pilot on F-104s, A-12s, and SR-71s (Greenamyer was no stranger to speed), and together, they made his outsize ambitions real. With Greenamyer’s leadership and masterful piloting—and “his touch of crazy,” as his sister once described his personality—his team developed systems and…

THE U.S. AIR FORCE announced in September that Boeing will be building the service’s brand-new jet trainer, ending a fiercely fought competition (“What Replaces a Worn-out Talon?,” Dec./Jan. 2017). Under a contract worth up to $9.2 billion, Boeing’s St. Louis factory will construct at least 350 of the aircraft, designed jointly with Sweden’s Saab, to replace the worn-out Northrop T-38 Talon. Boeing will also provide training simulators. The T-38 has served as the Air Force’s primary fighter pilot trainer since 1961. Obsolete electronics aside, the T-38s are today so well-used that they are restricted from making the tight turns of today’s fighters, lest they disintegrate in midair; pilots training on the F-22 and F-35 undergo additional training in F-16s to verify that they can handle the G-forces. Boeing’s win was…

MORE THAN 500,000 people watched as Apollo 17, the last crewed mission to the moon, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on December 7, 1972. When a U.S. probe returned to the moon 20 years later, hardly anyone noticed. The Clementine spacecraft, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on January 25, 1994, started as a Department of Defense project. Its miniaturized sensors had been developed for President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (known as “Star Wars”) to detect and track missiles but, with NASA participation, also proved valuable to science. The science objective of the Clementine project (so named because the probe carried just enough fuel to complete its mission before it was “lost and gone forever,” like the lyrics of the 1884 folk ballad) was to assess the moon’s…

CONCERNED BY THE PERILS of ocean splashdowns conducted by the Mercury capsules, NASA took a hard look at terrestrial landing for the Gemini program. The agency funded the development and tests of the so-called Rogallo wing, named for designer Francis Rogallo, a kite-flying enthusiast who worked at the Langley Research Center in the late 1950s. His mechanism, which resembled the triangular hang gliders used by hobbyists, was meant to pop out of the returning capsule’s fuselage, making the descent mild and maneuverable enough for a runway landing. Astronauts warmed to the idea, which promised to put them in control and end their “spam-in-a-can” status during Mercury. Moonwalker-to-be Neil Armstrong and a fellow test pilot started building their own Rogallo prototype after hours, persuading skeptical NASA superiors to invest in the…

IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT at a former Army-base auditorium in Mineral Wells, Texas, where two dozen men aged 70 and upward have stood to join in a song first performed in 1965. The chorus emerges with particular energy, as they sing the words Eric Burdon and the Animals sang that year: We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do. They don’t mean this place; they’re happy to be here. This is a reunion of the 175th Assault Helicopter Company, Vietnam edition. Over half of them are pilots, which means they started their Army rotor-craft training in the dry hills and fields around the town’s Army Aviation facility, Fort Wolters. The “place” they’re thinking of tonight is a paddy in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta,…

AFTER IT WAS TOWED to 42,000 feet, Perlan II was ready to begin its flight. Yes, begin. At the altitude higher than most airliners fly, the glider pilots sought out stratospheric mountain waves to take them to record-breaking heights (“Sailplane to the Stratosphere,” June/July 2016). The weather feature happens in only a few places in the world, and the sky over the Argentine Andes is one of them. In 2017, Perlan II broke the record for unpowered flight when it reached 52,221 feet, and last fall made a series of even more impressive flights, finally reaching 76,124 feet in September. The team’s goal is 90,000 feet, higher than even the SR-71 Blackbird has (offi cially) flown.…

MICHAEL POULIKAKOS CRAWLED THROUGH the smoke filling his hotel room and pulled open the door onto his balcony. The pilot was about to suck in a full chest of cold Kabul air when bullets spattered into the wall next to him. Slamming the door, he retreated. For 12 hours last January, small arms fire and grenade blasts filled the Intercontinental Hotel as Taliban fighters hunted down foreign and Afghan guests. All the pilot could do was hide and wait. That morning, he and another Greek pilot for Afghan airline Kam Air had returned to Kabul on a long overnight flight. The men agreed to meet for an early dinner in the restaurant of the 1970s-era hotel, newly restored in gaudy marble and chandeliers. That night, they took a table in…

FORMER ASTRONAUT NICOLE STOTT, who in 2009 became the first to paint a watercolor in space, recently reminded her artist friend Simon Kregar that this month is the 50th anniversary of “Earthrise,” the famous photograph of Earth suspended above the moon’s horizon, which was taken during the Apollo 8 mission by astronaut Bill Anders. Kregar got an idea. He emailed his fellow artists in the International Association of Astronomical Artists, Earth’s only artist’s guild devoted to space, suggesting that members commemorate the historic moment. The works you see in this gallery were part of the response. Founded in 1982, the IAAA today has 170 members in 43 countries and is currently participating in an exhibit at Space Center Houston marking NASA’s 60th anniversary, “Sixty Years of NASA Art.” The show…

CORALS AND SPONGES are growing off the body of this Vought F4U Corsair, above. Its 41-foot wingspan is braced on the sandy bottom, keeping it propped up for the last 75 years like a dart thrown into the shallow ocean. The Corsair, like so many aircraft, vehicles, and other equipment for war, was too heavy and expensive to haul back home, so it was simply pushed into the sea, along with hundreds of other airplanes all over the Pacific. One of the watery boneyards is in the Kwajalein Atoll, one of the world’s largest of these reef-formed islands, which photographer and diver Brandi Mueller visits often. Her images, along with text by military historian Alan Axelrod, are featured in a book out November 27, The Airplane Graveyard: The Forgotten WWII…