Flying Magazine Photographs Evidence of Aurora Aircraft?

Who knows what cool aircraft our gubberment has underwraps... I would be more interested if someone snaps a picture of the actual aircraft than the contrails though. Sort of like when people think they found the Yetti or Bigfoot by finding its poop, "Hey look its bigger and smellier than than any other poo I've ever seen!" No thanks... just the contrails haha
 
A Life Aloft said:
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Well written and interesting. The only thing I'd like to add is this:

Years spent in the military, and particularly inside R&D, made me a little more tolerant of seemingly radical ideas. When inertial navigation was introduced there were some in the industry that thought it was ridiculous to believe that we could navigate cross-country without outside references. But there it suddenly was, and no one thought it impossible after they unveiled INS (only those who flat refused to attend the unveiling). I recall similar ridicule when the GPS concept was first discussed. Developing and demonstrating radical (at first laughable) concepts and methods is what R&D people do everyday. Projects under development are not an evil secret conspiracy in their minds, it's just their job. Those at Skunk Works type operations live everyday with the knowledge that they will someday unveil the impossible. I've demoed enough "impossible" R&D concepts to onlookers myself, and had so many of what I believed to be "impossible" stunts demoed to me, that I'm not so quick to laugh at people anymore. I'm willing to hear what they have to say first. Then I decide. But I always try to give them a genuinely fair hearing first, before I risk demonstrating my own ignorance by putting them down.

And that's my point. Why not give posters a fair chance to make their point if they are offering? If we start a UFO thread, and someone pops in to offer authoritative evidence of something new, why dismiss and poke fun at their claims without even bothering to look at their evidence, or automatically ascribe some sort of mental illness to them? I'm not saying we have to listen to undocumented claims all day. Nor am I saying we should read every insufferably long documented post if we're not really interested in the subject. I am saying however, that before we bust in to a thread to ridicule someone, it would be courteous to give their material a fair look and fact check before we start critiquing it. If we won't offer that courtesy to posters, it has a chilling effect on open dialogue.

Anyway, good post. Thanks.

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Regarding Aurora, or aircraft like it. While I can't necessarily prove it exists, I can't discount it either. Being from the F-117 community in my past life myself, one had to consider that the Have Blue prototypes were flying in 1977, while the Senior Trend/F-117 itself flew in 1981 for the first time; prior to coming "out of the black" in late 1988.

Considering the program was flying way back then in the black for 10 years, it's not too much of a stretch to wonder what we may have flying these days, that may not get revealed for a while to come.
 
MikeD said:
Regarding Aurora, or aircraft like it. While I can't necessarily prove it exists, I can't discount it either. Being from the F-117 community in my past life myself, one had to consider that the Have Blue prototypes were flying in 1977, while the Senior Trend/F-117 itself flew in 1981 for the first time; prior to coming "out of the black" in late 1988.

Considering the program was flying way back then in the black for 10 years, it's not too much of a stretch to wonder what we may have flying these days, that may not get revealed for a while to come.
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Shut it with your logic and reasoning!
 
Wait 15-20 years and you will find out. In the meantime assume everything/nothing. Like Mike D said if if the F-117 was publicly acknowledged in 88 ish which would be 10 years since its inception in 78 and considering the SR71 or oxcart as it CIA version was know as black projects remain black for long periods of time. I also agree that the program exists, or there is enough evidence that the program does not exist to make it possible that it does. Only time will tell. But the best part of black projects isn't the project itself its the stigma that comes with it and the possibility that it does exist even thought it might not. If you are an enemy the unknown is much more scary then the known.

It could even be the grays, you never know...lol
 
WacoFan said:
I can't imagine that they would retire the SR71 unless there was something to replace it with.
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There is. It's called Google Earth(obviously the military is using something different, but you get the point). We can get images now of someone literally flipping the satelight off in their front yard without sending an airplane into the sky now. The whole purpose of the SR71 was to take pictures.
 
mshunter said:
There is. It's called Google Earth(obviously the military is using something different, but you get the point). We can get images now of someone literally flipping the satelight off in their front yard without sending an airplane into the sky now. The whole purpose of the SR71 was to take pictures.
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I think there is still room for a handful of recon type birds.
 
Satelites
mshunter said:
There is. It's called Google Earth(obviously the military is using something different, but you get the point). We can get images now of someone literally flipping the satelight off in their front yard without sending an airplane into the sky now. The whole purpose of the SR71 was to take pictures.
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Satellite based surveillance systems are expensive, difficult to hide, and not exactly stealthy. Even if you had full global satellite coverage (doubtful) you'd still have gaps in coverage - and your enemy will be able to know when. Satellites aren't hideable. You need something that can zip in unannounced then haul ass out. In short spy planes are mandatory.
 
Ok...Imma go full-on Qutch here...

Let's say that the Iranians, with the help of the Chinese, Russians, and Scientologist's decide to obliterate the US and Israel and say Norway. Prior to launching something foul, perhaps there could be something like Stuxnet that would be uploaded that would destroy our ability to get info from the satellites. Maybe this virus would cause us to lose our ability to get real-time info from a drone as well...or hinder our ability to even operate a drone...or cause our drones to be overtaken by nefarious forces and flown directly into all the worlds In-N-Out and Whataburger locations, thereby depriving us of hamburger goodness. Plus all the stuff Bee said.

I think that they wouldn't have retired the SR71 unless there was something significantly more bad ass that existed. Further, 20 years ago when they retired the SR71 a lot of what we take for granted now wasn't available yet. Plus, it is simply American to have the most bad ass flying machine in the world. It's simply what we do.
 
RQ-170.jpg
 
I really hope "Aurora" exists, because if the X-51A and the HTV-2 are the furthest we've come with hypersonic aircraft development I'm going to be really disappointed. :)

It may not even be one airplane, and could instead be a family of similar designs. And it's not called "Aurora", because that budget line was actually the allocation for the Northrop vs. Lockheed stealth bomber competition which Northrop won and ultimately resulted in the B-2 stealth bomber.

In his 1994 autobiography "Skunk Works", Ben Rich wrote: "The funding for the competition came out of a secret stash in the Air Force budget. A young colonel working in the Air Force "black program" office at the Pentagon, named Buz Carpenter, arbitrarily assigned the funding the code name Aurora. Somehow this name leaked out during congressional appropriations hearings, the media picked up the Aurora item in the budget, and the rumor surfaced that it was a top secret project assigned to the Skunk Works -- to build America's first hypersonic airplane. That story persists to this day even though Aurora was the code name for the B-2 competition funding. Although I expect few in the media to believe me, there is no code name for the hypersonic plane, because it simply does not exist." (Rich & Janos, pp.309-310)

Despite this overwhelming testimony from Ben Rich, whom I greatly admire, I still want to believe Aurora exists. Rich himself was involved in research into unconventional propulsion technology, and in the late 1950s he worked on a project called the CL-400 Suntan, which was to be a U-2 replacement using a liquid hydrogen-powered engine (the project was ultimately canceled and Rich instead went to work on designing the variable-position engine inlets on the A-12/SR-71 Blackbird). I bring this up because part of the Aurora legend is that it supposedly uses a highly unconventional propulsion system.

I also always found the geologic evidence interesting - the supposed "skyquakes" that rocked Southern California in the early nineties. USGS has some extremely sensitive seismographic sensors, and can triangulate earthquake epicenters and their depths below (and ABOVE) ground very accurately. They had been recording sonic booms for decades, and the skyquakes were stronger and uncharacteristic of anything they had seen before. Furthermore, according to the Aurora Wikipedia page (and an aviation week article by Bill Sweetman in 2009), a retired NASA researcher who used to specialize in sonic boom analysis named Dom Maglieri took a look at Cal Tech's 15 year old skyquake seismographic data and determined it was "something at 90,000 ft (c. 27.4 km), Mach 4 to Mach 5.2." That's pretty crazy, and if true - would indicate Aurora was only barely nudging the hypersonic range and was closer in capability to the Mach 3 SR-71 rather than the ICBM-launched Mach 20 DARPA Falcon HTV-2.

Hacker15e said:
Doughnuts-on-a-rope photos are so 1993.
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You cracked me up when I read this. I can't find the article anymore but I ran across a story recently that San Diego experienced its first "sky quake" since the early nineties within the last couple months. Gives me nineties nostalgia (even though I was just a kid). :)

Back to the topic of unconventional propulsion, the Aurora page actually led me to something even more interesting - a theoretical hypersonic Russian aircraft called Ayaks. Apparently Ayaks was designed in the late 80s by a guy named Vladimir Freishtadt at a company in St Petersburg called Leninets Holding Company "as a response to the American Aurora aircraft program." The Ayaks wikipedia page contains diagrams of the propulsion system and basically spell out the plan to use a MagnetoHydrodynamic (MHD) Bypass Engine (from Proudpilot's quote below), wherein an MHD generator is used to slow down the incoming supersonic air in lieu of conventional inlet methods (the ramps in the inlets on the Concorde or the movable-spike inlets you see on the MiG-21 and the SR-71 Blackbird). MagnetoHydrodynamic propulsion should sound familiar if you're a fan of 90s action movies - it powered the silent Caterpillar-drive in "The Hunt For Red October." It was also brought up by Proudpilot in the "hypermach.com" thread last month:

ProudPilot said:
I looked up my old Hypersonic project and I had forgot about MHD. Basically it ionizes air to subsonic just for the air inlet allowing a turbofan to operate at much higher speeds. The goal is to allow a turbofan to take you to hypersonic speeds where a scamjet can take over.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/ar...onic-turbojet-using-mhd-energy-bypass-219922/

http://mipse.umich.edu/files/MIPSE_GS2011_Yee.pdf
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Like MikeD said, HAVE Blue made its first flight in 1977 and the general public had no idea what a "stealth fighter" was until 1988. Likewise the Aurora myths started in the late 80s (with the doughnuts-on-a-rope/skyquake stuff in the early 90s) and that NASA article that publicly discusses MHD's use in ramjet shows up in 2007 along with these mysterious Russian Ayaks (Aurora knock-off?) plans which utilize the same propulsion technology - if the stealth fighter could stay in the black world for a decade I think an Aurora-type aircraft could easily do the same for as long or much longer.

I also think it's interesting that the recent resurgence of the Southern California skyquakes and interest in Aurora corresponds with the DARPA Falcon HTV-2 flights, and it's clear through the Prompt Global Strike program that the Air Force wants a rapidly deployable conventional weapon delivery system. The HTV-2 and X-51A Waverider are some "white world" solutions to this program, but the HTV-2 has the misfortune of being launched on an ICBM and could be mistaken for a nuclear weapon (prompting a nuclear counter-attack).

Aurora may very well be a fairy tale, and there is absolutely no hard evidence that it exists. But I find the numerous little circumstantial clues compelling. My personal grossly-speculative theory is that Aurora did fly in the early 90s as a reconnaissance platform demonstrator, and was decommissioned and put into storage at Groom for the last 15 years. Now with the AF's desire for Prompt Global Strike, it has been taken back out of storage to investigate its potential role as a rapidly-deployable hypersonic conventional weapon delivery vehicle. And if you think I'm crazy for thinking that a high speed/high altitude spy plane would ever be converted into a weapons delivery platform, take a look at the Lockheed YF-12 Interceptor program. :)
 
I think the technology required to do this has been around since the mid 1970's, in one form or another. So in that sense, I don't disbelieve that it could be out there. That being said, it would need a reason for being, aside from just being possible. That is the remaining question in my mind, and I'm not sure that I believe that requirement has been satisfied. Do I hope that it exists? Yeah, it would be cool as hell to one day see the thing when it inevitably emerges from the darkness. Do I think that it really does? Not so sure on that count.
 
Just because Ben Rich didn't know about it in 1994 is in no way proof that a military hypersonic aircraft doesn't exist.
 
Let's also not forget that visual spectrum surveillance isn't the only thing worth capturing from over a bad guy country. In the U-2 and SR-71 days, film images were important, but as has been mentioned, there's plenty of overhead imagery of things today.

What's tougher to get are the SIGINT and MASINT...and capturing combinations of COMINT/IMINT/SIGINT/MASINT/etc....which satellites are not so great at capturing, cross-cueing, and interpreting.
 
Hacker15e said:
Just because Ben Rich didn't know about it in 1994 is in no way proof that a military hypersonic aircraft doesn't exist.
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I was expecting a far more critical reply, but that's my thought exactly. All Ben Rich knew in 1994 was that Skunk Works didn't have a hypersonic aircraft that he was allowed to publish information about in a book. :)

Hacker15e said:
What's tougher to get are the SIGINT and MASINT...
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Exactly. And like Pat said, satellites follow fixed known trajectories that are very difficult to change (limited fuel supply - although now that the Air Force has the X-37 moving satellites around might get a tiny bit easier). If you're dealing with an enemy that knows your satellite flyover patterns, think "Patriot Games" (I'm full of 90s movie references today haha ), then a rapidly deployable spy plane is irreplaceable even for visual & infrared imagery.
 
My wife's favorite movie is the Fugitive.....maybe I can con her into a marathon, been a while since I saw any of those movies
 
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inigo88 said:
......It may not even be one airplane, and could instead be a family of similar designs. And it's not called "Aurora", because that budget line was actually the allocation for the Northrop vs. Lockheed stealth bomber competition which Northrop won and ultimately resulted in the B-2 stealth bomber........
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You are correct. . It wasn't code named Aurora. . That name was picked up by some Jane's Defense types (like Sweetman) doing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) data mining and found under some Congressional budget appropriations titles, some of the money which then disappeared into the "black". . I'm not sure why everybody keeps calling it Aurora. . Just a convenient handle maybe. .

Nice research. . I see you found the USGS seismographic data. . I'm not sure how they do the math using that data (90K+ ft at Mach 5)? .

(another movie reference: Three Days of the Condor = OSINT/ OS data mining project)

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