When I began to be interested in aviation, one of my favourite themes was the mysterious Tier III. Over the years I managed to find, sort and process
a lot of stuff to uncover one of the most secret and one of the most ambitious projects of the cold war together with all its competitors and
successors. My current article about it is the first one (that I produced), which gives you more answers than questions. It coveres projects and
programs like AARS, QUARTZ, Senior Pine, Boeing Condor, Tier III, Tier IV, RQ-3A DarkStar, StrikeStar, P-420 LightStar, P-175 Polecat, Frontier
Systems/Loral W570A, Arrow, Shadow, PHAE, RQ-170 Sentinel or SensorCraft.
A few hints:
- part of the AARS program was also the high speed component, managed by USAF and designed to replace the SR-71 fleet. This is what people used to
call the mythical Aurora.
- QUARTZ component of the AARS was very big superstealth autonomous ISR UAV, designed to search large Soviet territory for the mobile ICBMs and direct
the B-2 attack force to them
- TR-3 is not a Black Mantha, nor flying triangle, but the modified Grob G500 Egrett, which was low-cost alternative, that emerged short before the
termination of the AARS
- the mysterious Lockheed patent from 1996, that is for a long time used to describe Tier III, is in fact in-house effort called P-420 LightStar
- Loral and Frontier Systems flown in the mid 90s their secret high aspect ratio flying wing UAV demonstrator called Shadow
- the primary purpose of the RQ-170 is to be the communication relay in the NCCT countries and stealthy AESA search platform. It is going to be
equipped with the kinetic and non-kinetic weapons.
Note: because of the length of the text, in the case to obtain the full google English translation, you will be probably forced to press your browser
"refresh" button a few times to translate also the last paragrahs of the text.
www.hitechweb.genezis.eu...