Power/failsafe LED

[roger_plant]

Has LED changed its meaning to Light Entertainment Discussion?

[anukhet]

We have digressed - sorry

[typhoon_driver]

hehe sorry to continue the off topic conversation but I usually manage to get into airshows for nothing because we do robot displays at a lot of them!

Well be at farnborough this year, so anyone that wants to have a go of the feather, come along!

[roger_plant]

These very noisy jets are very impressive to watch close up, but a word of warning, they are not good for your health.

I spent 14 years in the RAF, most of them working on Lightings, Vulcans and other equally impressive and noisy beasts.

111 Squadron, AKA the Black Arrows aerobatic display team, practiced their displays and tried new manoeuvres often directly over my head, not more than 50 feet away and flying at Mach .99, once at Mach 1 plus.

As a souvenir of those otherwise enjoyable days, I have had severe tinitus in both ears for the last 20 years.

[fluppet]

Far be it from me to miss an off-topic conversation...

Kev/Karoline (sorry to be a bit belated - fast moving thread, appropriately): The same happens on the hills near Bath, which is an interesting thing by which to be distracted when youre trying to take the bend with a large drop behind it should it go wrong.

Mind you, its distracting enough to have a 747 coming in what Im sure was a tad low to land at Heathrow. Just what you need when youre in stop/start roadworks - a 747 appearing from behind a sun visor and filling the windscreen. Im astonished I couldnt hear it, although I guess the engines werent doing much other than being prepared for braking.

btw, does Duxford really have an SR71? Theyve got one on the poster, but it certainly wasnt there many moons ago when I last visited. You have to approve of the strategy of stealing an aircraft by letting it land and then building a motorway over the run-off zone needed to let it take off again, too. :-)

--
Fluppet

[big_nipper]

Not as intrested in Aircraft as I used to be, the noise does get on my nerves at work. Working in Lytham, half a mile from Warton we regually get LFO (Low-flying-objects) and in a meeting you just have to wait until its gone before continuing. Having said that the first time I saw the Euro-fighter as it was called then take off it just looked like a normal take off until it was a 100 or so feet in the air and then it seemed to go to near vertical and dissapear into the clouds, that was impressive.

Fluppet, I went to Duxford a few years ago just after they opened the new building with all the American stuff in there and was quite impressed when I found out they had built it around the plane. Wasnt there for the aircraft though. I was there for the AGM for the Ford Anglia 105E club. We all parked just across the road and got free entry. During the day an AA van stopped just around the corner and asked me if I had seen an Anglia. I laughed and said its probably in the car park over there with over 100 others. He didnt even know what colour it was, he said he thought it would be easy to find!

[kaideejee]

Ive yet to see a Eurofighter/typhoon in flight, tho Ive seen one being towed. It was at Warton that I saw the Tornado - I work for the IT company that look after BAEs IT systems so occasionally I get an excuse to spend a week or two working there.

Oh and on a related note - the Typhoon is (according to some bloke who claims to know) only the second fighter plane which can accelerate vertically upwards, the other being the Lightning. That sounds wrong to me tho, as *strictly* speaking, the Harrier can take off vertically, which is of course a vertical acceleration. Think he meant with the nose pointing upwards tho i.e. main engine thrust weight.

What sort of LEDs do they use for the port/starboard lights on fighter planes then? Are they so you know whether theyre turned on (ooer) or not?

And on another random note - the rule that allows flying robots (at the discretion of the event organiser) - how would you failsafe something like that? Some sort of passive magnetic field to make it hover in place?

-- Kev

[jamesb]

not true. F15, F16 (block 15-20 strugled but the later block 30s and onward ahve more than enough power), to name but a few. depends on what they are carrying at the time. Think your friend is making it up to make his fave plane sound more impressive. As for the lightening being the only other plane.... there really have been better aircraft since so its a stretch to suggest we never surpassed it.

Back to LEDs, they are used on F1 cars too

[jim]

The first time I saw a blue LED was on an F1 cars instrumentation - this was back when they were very expensive, not a barrier to many F1 teams though