Piper Cub to Space

WORLD RECORD! 37,000 Feet in a Carbon Cub?! The Flight No One Believed Was Real!
Maximus Aviation

Via Uniberp

English Electric Canberra

English Electric Canberra

Put this jigsaw puzzle together this afternoon and realized I had put up a post about the Canberra some time ago. That post pointed to the following video:


Canberra Over Stalingrad - Penetrating Russia's Area 51
Mark Felton Productions

Map from Google Earth:

Canberra Flight to Kapustin Yar

Wikipedia page about the Canberra.

WW2 High Altitude Photo Reconnaissance

Germany's U-2 - WW2s Highest Air Combat
Mark Felton Productions

The Junkers Ju 86R could reach 52,500 feet of altitude, which is nearly 10 miles, and is higher than commercial airliners fly.

Junkers Jumo 207 D-V2 In-line 6 Diesel Engine

Chinese Balloon

Sailors recover a high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C. on Feb. 5, 2023. (Tyler Thompson/U.S. Navy via The New York Times)

My Daily Kona has a report on the Chinese balloon that explains the story a bit better:

The heat generated by the electronic systems appeared to be enough to provide a targeting lock for the imaging infrared seeker in the AIM-9X. The height of the target—60,000-65,000 ft.—still required the missile to ascend several thousand feet from a launch point at 58,000 ft., a senior defense official says.

 

MiG-25 Foxbat

This Jet Terrified the West: The MiG-25 Foxbat
Mustard

I ran a search on my blog and I found numerous posts about various MiGs, but the only post that mentioned the MiG-25 was one about the number of Iraqi aircraft the Iranians shot down. So. While I still don't have all the various MiGs straight in my head, I'm getting a better idea.

This plane, or its successor sounds like it might have the basis for the Clint Eastwood movie Firefox.

P.S. Jet aircraft - The highest current world absolute general aviation altitude record propelled aircraft is 123,520 ft set by Aleksandr Vasilyevich Fedotov in a MiG-25M on August 31, 1977.

Econo-satellite

Zephyr S taking off - Airbus

Airbus has developed an unmanned drone for surveillance and communications. As you can see from the picture the thing is big, the wingspan is 92 feet. Thanks to modern materials it only weighs 150 pounds, and 50 of those are the battery pact. Yes, it's electric powered. 

Okay, that's all very cute, but what rates a mention here on this super exclusive blog is it's capabilities. It just completed two flights of 18 days each flying over Arizona at an altitude of 76,000 feet. That's U-2 territory.

The Perlan glider also reached an altitude of 76,000 feet, but they had to go to Argentina where they could catch a lift from the winds over the Andes mountains.

This drone looks to fill the same role as the balloons in Project Loon.

Via FlightAware

Airplane of the Day - Canberra Redux

Martin WB-57

Martin WB-57

WB-57 (the weather bomber?) comes from the RB-57, the reconnaissance version, which in turn was derived from the B-57 which was a licensed copy of the English Electric Canberra. The English plane first flew in 1949, 72 years ago. 

NASA operates three WB-57's. One had been mothballed back in 1974. NASA pulled it from the boneyard in 2011 and refurbished it. It took to the air in 2013.

In the 1950's the Canberra was at the top of the heap. Flight records set by Canberras

• January 1951 – first non-stop unrefuelled transatlantic crossing by a jet.
• August 1952 – the prototype B.5 made the first double transatlantic crossing by a jet.
• May 1953 – world altitude record 63,668 ft
• October 1953 – winner of the London-Christchurch Air Race. 12,270 miles
• August 1955 – altitude record 65,889 ft
• August 1957 – altitude record 70,310 ft

Previous post about the Canberra.

Airplane of the Day - Junkers Ju 86

Germany's U-2 - WW2s Highest Air Combat
Mark Felton Productions
I was half asleep this morning and I got to wondering what 400 MPH in an airplane would be like. Intellectually it's easy, you take your distance from, say, the 2,000 miles from Portland Oregon to Brownsville Texas, divide it by 400 MPH and you've got 5 hours, which is pretty quick, but that doesn't feel like anything. Is there anyway to show that speed that would give you some visceral impact? 

The are land speed record cars that can hit 400 MPH, and daredevil pilots can make low passes that are fast and loud, but that's not quite what I want. I think what I want is some situation that you get into with an airplane at 300 knots that would not be a problem, but at 400 knots would be dangerous, or would require a different approach. Probably something that is only taught in flight school for fighter pilots. Anyway, I didn't find anything that suited. There are some single engine turbo-prop airplanes that can approach 400 knots, but the few videos I saw focused on how wonderful they are.

This video doesn't give me what I was looking for, but it tackles the high altitude problem which I always enjoy. Eight miles high in an unpressurized, unheated airplane with only an electrically heated flightsuit and an oxygen mask - that's like Star Wars in 1940.

Wikipedia Ju-86 page

Perlan 2

The Airbus Perlan glider soars above the peaks of the Andes in Argentina. - Airbus

Riding the wind above the Andes Mountains, an experimental glider has set a world record for high-altitude flight.

On Sept. 2, the sleek Perlan 2 glider carried two pilots to 76,100 feet, or more than 14 miles, over the El Calafate region in southern Argentina. That’s the highest altitude ever reached by humans aboard an unpowered fixed-wing aircraft, and one of the highest altitudes reached by an aircraft of any description. Only spy planes and specialized balloons have flown higher. - Tom Metcalfe

The Perlan glider was built in Portland. It has appeared in this blog before.
Via FlightAware

Perlan Project

 

Pressurized (!) Perlan Glider. 65 foot wingspan.

Some crazy people are going to try and fly a glider to an altitude of 100,000 feet over the North Pole.

Mother of Pearl Cloud by Luke Harrison

Evidently in the Polar regions there are some exceptional atmospheric conditions, especially where there are mountains nearby, which might make this stunt feasible.

On Aug. 29, 2006, Einar Enevoldson (left) and Steve Fossett set a new world glider altitude record. They wore NASA spacesuits to ward off the cold inside their glider's unpressurized tandem cockpit. The record was set in El Calafate, Argentina, in Perlan, a high performance research glider based on a German-built DG-505. Fossett and Enevoldson made the first glider flight into the earth’s stratosphere, reaching a height of 50,671 feet (15,447 m). They broke the previous record, set in 1986 in California, by 1,662 feet (507 m).

If the name Steve Fossett rings a bell, it's because he has been involved in a number of aerial adventures. He died in a small plane crash in California back in 2007. Einar Enevoldson is a former NASA research pilot.

Other altitude records:

• Amateur rocket reaches 121,000 ft 
• Helicopter Altitude Record
• Focke Wulf Fw 61 - luftwaffe test pilot Hanna Reitsch
• B-58 Hustler
• Pic of the Day
• Felix Baumgartner - Space Man
• Caproni Ca. 161bis

P.S. From Wikipedia's article: "A sailplane at 90,000 feet altitude flies in approximately the same aerodynamic regime--Mach and Reynolds numbers--to be experienced by a moderate size aircraft flying near the surface of Mars." 

Focke Wulf Fw 61 - luftwaffe test pilot Hanna Reitsch

In February 1938 Hanna Reitsch demonstrated the world's first practical helicopter by flying it indoors at the international auto show in Berlin, Germany. It subsequently set several records for altitude, speed and flight duration culminating, in June 1938, with an altitude record of 11,243 feet and a straight line flight record of 143 miles.
    This makes the third post about twin rotor helicopters in three days.

B-58 Hustler

Maj. Fitzhugh "Fitz" Fulton sits in a cockpit of a test aircraft. On Sept. 8, 1962, Major Fulton piloted a B-58, carrying an 11,023-pound payload to an altitude of 85,360 feet -- a record for this category that still stands. He was a long-time test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., first for the Air Force, and later for NASA, for a total of 35 years. (Courtesy photo)

Pic of the Day

Cockpit of the latest version of the Russian MiG-31 Interceptor.

Test pilot Alexander Fedotov set the world maximum record with an altitude of 123,524 feet in 1977 with a prototype of this aircraft (MiG Ye-266). X-15 doesn't count because it didn't take off from the ground under its own power. Besides, it was more of a rocketship than an airplane.

Helicopter Altitude Record

SE 3150-001 F-ZWVB in altitude record configuration with a mini fuel tank and aluminum door panel.

Aircraft are so weird. People go to a great deal of trouble to build them and then when the engines have run for a magic amount of time, they throw them away. Okay, not always. There are some old timers who keep rebuilding old engines and keep flying old planes, but these guys are mostly hobbyists. I suppose there might be a few jet aircraft that get re-engined, but often by the time the engines have run out of time, the rest of the aircraft is obsolete and they get set out to bake in the desert sun. On one hand I can understand that. I mean you have a perfectly good aircraft that could probably fly another zillion hours. On the other hand you could buy a whole new aircraft for what it would cost to install new engines in the old one. You might as well scrap it, no one is going to do anything with the old hulks. I think there must be some kind of accounting sleight-of-hand going on here, otherwise they would have been scrapped.

Jean Boulet (1920–2011)

    A few days ago I put up a picture of some guys climbing up the last leg on the way to the peak of Mount Everest. I thought it was a cool picture, probably taken by someone in an airplane, because helicopters can't go that high. 20,000 feet is the practical limit for most helicopters. Then Stu makes a comment and I do some checking and I find that Jean Boulet flew a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest and landed there back in 1972. That was weird because a few years ago I saw a blurb from HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) that claimed they had flown over Mount Everest. I called bullshit because I had never heard of such a thing and checking on the internet revealed no such event ever occurring. I complained to the rep, and they never corrected me, so I assumed it was just typical Indian over-enthusiasm. (If you ever read any of the press from India you will know what I am talking about. Never say in one word what you can spend a paragraph on.)

Fred North on his record setting flight.

    Now I do some more checking and I discover that a new altitude record was set by Fred North in 2002 in South Africa. In both M. Boulet's flight in 1972 and Mr. North's flight in 2002 the turbine engine flamed out on the way down. M. Boulet set a second world record for longest auto-rotation. He coasted all the way to the ground. Mr. North employed auto-rotation until he had dropped to 12,000 feet where he was able to restart his engine.

Fred & gang celebrate successful flight.

Amateur rocket reaches 121,000 ft

On September 30, 2011 at 11:08am, Derek Deville's Qu8k (pronounced "Quake") launched from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to an altitude of 121,000' before returning safely to earth. Above 99% of the atmosphere the sky turns black in the middle of the day and the curvature of the earth is clearly visible.

This happened back in the fall of 2011. Since then we had Felix jump from a balloon that reached  an altitude just a little higher than this rocket at 124,000 feet. The balloon took two hours to reach that altitude, the rocket took a minute and a half.
    This is a dumb rocket, it has no provisions for steering or course correction. All the electronics in the nose cone are simply recording instruments. You point it in the direction you want it to go, light the fuse, and get away.
    Since they were going for high altitude, and they were using a metal rocket, they must of had a special dispensation from the Pope, otherwise I suspect DoD would have been down on them like a ton of bricks.

Qu8k at Altitude

Original website with a bunch of photographs. From Scott.

Update December 2025 replaced dead link, replaced flash slide show with single image.

Felix Baumgartner - Space Man

Since Roberta X and Tam alerted me to this event this morning, I was able to watch it live along with 7 million of my closest friends. I wonder if this set some kind of YouTube record. I mean, that's more than one person out of a thousand on the entire planet. Red Bull, the energy (?) drink maker sponsored this event. Giant balloon made out of old sandwich bags which they had somehow split into five layers and then seamless glued them all together, filled with gas near Roswell, New Mexico, and then let go. It reached an altitude of 128,000 feet (24 miles) whereupon they began the step-off-edge checklist. First order of business was to depressurize the capsule. Don't do it all at once, want to make sure your pressure suit is holding before you give away all your air. By the time they got the door open, the balloon had dropped down to 127,000 and something. Felix sat there for a minute after he got the door open. The ground controller is telling him to step outside, but Felix isn't moving. I think he was taking in the view. I think I would have spent a couple of hours looking at the view. A few seconds later though, Felix stepped outside and then stepped off into nothing. 2 hours plus to go up, five minutes to come back down. Preliminary estimates of his speed exceed 700 MPH. He was tumbling pretty good for a while, not spinning, but definitely tumbling, but eventually he got down to where there was some air and he straightened out.

Caproni Ca. 161bis

I'm out wandering around on the internet and I stumble across a page of aviation trivia and one of the items listed is the "highest flying propeller driven airplane", and I wonder what it is, imagining some WWII experimental job, or a Burt Rutan outer space special. So imagine my surprise when I find this:

An Italian biplane flown by one Mario Pezzi in 1938, encased in his own personal pressure chamber:

The 750 HP radial engine has two superchargers. I wonder whether they were operating in tandem or in parallel. I mean there isn't much air up at 56,000 feet. The blades on the prop look they were made for a paddle boat.