My Favourite Plane
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the US clandestine weapons development program.
Perhaps it began with the yearly childhood trips to Finningley Airshow, or pouring over the acane details of the Observer’s Book Of Aircraft (1964 and 1965 editions) that resided at my Grandfather’s house. Perhaps it was just one of those subliminal societal things that boys are supposed to dig. But an interest in airplanes has stuck, while an interest in Sheffield Wednesday FC did not.
I’ve never been much interested in the pointy end, and have always struggled with, or outright avoided, the fact these things are designed to kill; but there’s so much other interesting stuff wrapped up in these shiny machines. Over the years my interest has changed. At times I have been interested in the numbers (the SR71 canopy reaches over 300°C at top speed), and sometimes the aesthetics (Boeing x32, don’t @ me), most recently I find myself interested in specialised solutions, and how they get made.
Compared to the commercial development of pretty much anything (including space travel) the creation of warplanes is glacial. Decades of work go into an operational airframe. Reams of requirements. Cutting edge technology that will inevitably be obsolete by the time it is fielded. Contractors and subcontractors. Systems and subsystems. Patents and need-to-know. Making the machines that make the machines. Maintenance training. The politics of who builds it and where. The sauntering military-industrial complex jangles small change and whistles while emaciated social services look on.
That anything gets built at all is incredible. When it does deliver, that the corrupt system — like a straining, constipated Borg cube — squeezes out monstrously expensive, overly complex, master-of-nothing machines is unsurprising. But occasionally, something strange, something pure, something wild lands in the bowl.
One such wild thing is my favourite plane…
Tacit Blue a.k.a The Whale a.k.a. The Alien School Bus a.k.a. The Northrop BSAX. This plane is a triumph of design optimised for just one job: quietly lugging around the massive Pave Mover radar. In pursuit of this goal (to be undetectable while carrying the electronic warfare equivalent of a loud-hailer) the US Government created what is arguably the ur-stealth plane. All other considerations were jettisoned, including traditional plane things like “can it fly?”. It was “The most unstable aircraft man had ever flown.” according to Northrop engineer John Cashen.
(You can see a similar singular design focus in planes like the brutish A10 Thunderbolt — a platform intended to transport a really big gun and a guy in a titanium bathtub to dangerous places, with a bunch of redundant systems to keep the plane flying even after a large proportion of it has been shot off (my favourite Thunderbolt fact is that, in order to ease maintenance, the left and right vertical stabilisers are interchangeable (it is also worth looking at Scaled Composite’s ARES, which optimised even further with an asymmetric engine.)))
Of course Tacit Blue doesn’t exist in isolation, there is a whole stealth plane family tree to consider. While less well known than the F117 Nighthawk, Tacit Blue is much more of a grandaddy to today’s low observable birds. The Nighthawk was literally a low polygon implementation of stealth, limited by what computers at the time were capable of modelling. If the Nighthawk was a MegaDrive, then Tacit Blue was at least a Playstation 1. Tacit Blue’s composite curves, chines and buried engines are features we still see on radar-shy planes today. For instance Boeing’s proposed MQ-25 looks like video game reimagining of Tacit Blue, all sexy aerodynamics and in-vogue lack-of-pilotness. This all speaks to the something bigger; Tacit Blue as an avatar for a larger, longer, and extremely clandestine process.
Tacit Blue flew for 3 years, and was retired for over a decade before it was revealed to the public. The Have Blue / Nighthawk program was flying for a decade before it was revealed (and went on to fly for a further decade). Boeing’s Quiet Bird was secret for so long that it appears Boeing lost most of the details about the plane. This doesn’t just imply so much as verify there is a bunch of weird stuff scooting around up there. Stealth helicopters, RQ180s, hovering, hiding, going hypersonic, or staying airborne for weeks at a time. You name it, it seems likely to have flown. The fresh technology, redacted failures and even more secretive successes are a heady, intriguing mix.
And that is kind of exciting. There is some mystery, but also some threads to pick at. What happened to that demonstrator, what fulfils this requirement, what predates it, why does that other thing not exist? Maybe that thing does exist… but you have to wait ten years to find out.
