What Happened With Senior Prom?

a reply to: PokeyJoe

Have Blue was a proof of concept. Both aircraft crashed during testing.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Tacit Blue or the Bird of Prey didn't get official designations as far as we know either, right?

originally posted by: anzha
a reply to: Zaphod58

Tacit Blue or the Bird of Prey didn't get official designations as far as we know either, right?

I don't believe so as the were strictly demonstrators and never ventured beyond that.

The USAF Museum is quite a bucket list item for me. Ive already seen the Tier III Minus up the MOF so a trip there would cap off my collection of publicly accessible stealth projects

a reply to: anzha

Not that I've ever heard they haven't.

a reply to: anzha

A mach 4+ long range air to air missile that had many successful tests and tons of money flowing into it is something i dont believe just really got canceled, just moved to a darker area.

we are starting to see these advanced highlighted(hypersonoic) missiles starting to come main stream, i wonder if they used some of the tech from this for that.....

HAVE DASH was for a AMRAAM replacement and everything points they were right on track to do so and than it vanished. i think parts or all of it went operational so went black.

a reply to: FredT

I want to say they've got a Darkstar in the Research hangar at the museum. If I remember right, it's on the wall behind the XB-70.

a reply to: penroc3

It was supposed to replace AMRAAM, and was tested starting in 1992 for HAVE DASH II. So 27 years later, and none of the AMRAAMs have been replaced, there's not even a hint of it going operational, or anything else hinting at its existence.

a reply to: LeviB

That's AV-2. There's one in Seattle, and one in DC.

originally posted by: anzha
a reply to: Zaphod58

Tacit Blue or the Bird of Prey didn't get official designations as far as we know either, right?

YF-117D and YF-118G

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: penroc3

It was supposed to replace AMRAAM, and was tested starting in 1992 for HAVE DASH II. So 27 years later, and none of the AMRAAMs have been replaced, there's not even a hint of it going operational, or anything else hinting at its existence.

There's this: de.scribd.com...

a reply to: mightmight

YF-117D and YF-118G

cite?

a reply to: anzha

Area 51 (Images of Aviation) by Peter Merlin (pp. 119 and 124)

a reply to: Zaphod58

right but the ram jet info as well as the material and fuel knowledge they gained didn't just get flush down the crapper

and HAVE DASH was basically ready to go, why cancel it?

look at all the new missiles coming out that have ram jets and what not and the navy with its new missile im sure was interested in its hypersonic flight modes like turning

a reply to: penroc3

The research is still useful, but a couple test flights is far from ready to go. Yes it would have been useful, and will be, but there's zero evidence it went beyond a couple tests.

a reply to: anzha

The YF-XXX series is fun to try to keep up with. There's a lot buried in there, including more than a few with nothing but program names.

originally posted by: FredT

originally posted by: anzha
a reply to: Zaphod58

Tacit Blue or the Bird of Prey didn't get official designations as far as we know either, right?

I don't believe so as the were strictly demonstrators and never ventured beyond that.

The USAF Museum is quite a bucket list item for me. Ive already seen the Tier III Minus up the MOF so a trip there would cap off my collection of publicly accessible stealth projects

You HAVE to go. I drove up from Florida in August of last year and spent two glorious days just taking it all in. Even got a selfie with me booping Tacit Blue’s nose.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: penroc3

The research is still useful, but a couple test flights is far from ready to go. Yes it would have been useful, and will be, but there's zero evidence it went beyond a couple tests.

It would be incredible easy to hide the procurement of say a couple of hundred Have Dash analogs in the 90s.
More likley though nothing happend in the post Cold War era of shrinking defense budgets.

a reply to: Zaphod58

It's amazing how crude the one in DC looks up close. It gives off the vibe of being a glorified hobby project, like a faired-in jet powered Long-EZ. It definitely reminded me more of the X-35 and the X-32 than of anything even remotely operational.

I wonder if the rumors of Darkstar being just a planform demonstrator for a larger, still-classified UAV have any merit to them.

a reply to: anzha

A Have Blue slathered in modern RAM might do the trick, if only because it was a more aggressively faceted, less aerodynamically-oriented design than the F-117.

More realistically, a Tacit Blue descendant with a pointier, shallower, less voluminous fuselage shaped more like the Bird of Prey's or an X-45's, complete with bubble canopy, would probably still be stealthy today with the right materials, but nothing I've ever read or heard of would seem to indicate that such an aircraft ever actually existed.

a reply to: Barnalby
The other one is at least as old as Senior Prom though.