Engineers at Ohio State University are using zirconium dioxide otherwise known as fake/synthetic diamonds, to protect jet engines from high temperature corrosion.

The zirconium dioxide coating has proved to comprise of better protective properties than standard ceramic coating that is currently applied to the fan blades of modern aircraft engines.

The ceramic coating provides adequate protection but when it comes to grains of sand, it becomes a different matter.

The ceramic coating expands with the hot engine blades offering continual protection. But grains of sand that may be sucked up into the engine melt in these high temperatures to form glass.

The glass can break down the ceramic coating when hot and when cooled, it forms an inelastic layer on top of the protective coating. The next time the engine gets hot, the new glass layer restricts the ceramic layer from expanding causing the protective coating to crack and break off.

This process greatly reduces the life expectancy of the engine.

Zirconium on the other hand is able to force the glass to bond with the other elements in the protective coating.

This basically turns the glass layer into an additional layer of protective ceramic every time sand melts in the engine.

The picture above shows the ceramic coating which is easily damaged on the left, and the zirconium coating on the left which provides protection from the molten glass.

Unfortunately the zirconium application doesn’t come cheap and is yet to be tested on more complex shapes.

However it does promise a great solution for efficiency not just in aircraft but possibly for automobiles too.

The revolutionary F-117 Night Hawk, the worlds first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology, is scheduled to be retired at the end of this month.

‘The Black Jet’ with its futurist angular design has spent a wholesome 27 years serving as part of the airforce’s arsenal, secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq. This will all come to an end on April 22nd when the last F-117’s are scheduled to arrive at their final destination, Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, the site where the jet made its first flight in 1981.

Last month the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which previously managed the F-117 program, had an informal private retirement ceremony with military leaders, base employees and representatives from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The last of the F-117’s will now fly to Palmdale, California, for one more retirement ceremony on April 21st, before making their final flight to Holloman.

Fifty-nine F-117s were made; 10 were retired in December 2006 and 27 since then, the Air Force said. Seven of the planes have crashed, one in Serbia in 1999.The technology which led to the development of the F-117 was designed back in the 1970’s and although it was not invisible to radar, the shape and coating of the F-117’s design greatly reduced its detection.

The single-seat aircraft was designed to fly into heavily defended areas undetected to drop its payloads with surgical precision.

Since the F-117 went operational a total of 558 pilots have flown the jet. Each pilot is then dubbed a ‘bandit’ each with their own bandit number. Feest, ‘Bandit 261′, was the first to lead the stealth fighter on missions into Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991.

He said the fire from surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns was so intense that he stopped looking at it to try to ease his fears,

“We knew stealth worked and it would take a lucky shot to hit us, but we knew a lucky shot could hit us at any time,”

Incredibly, not one stealth was hit during those missions,

The Air Force decided to accelerate the retirement of the F-117s to free up money to modernize the rest of the fleet. The F-117 is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, which also has stealth technology.

There is no doubt about it, guided ammunitions are changing the way we fight wars. In the days of the Vietnam War, guided ammunitions had already been developed however dumb or iron bombs were still largely in use. These days many munitions have guidance systems ranging from lasers to GPS, some of these systems are even being fitted to unmanned vehicles to enable a totally autonomous attack.

Dumb bombs are what most people imagine when they think of a bomb. There is no way to control the bomb once it has been deployed, they simply fall to the ground and explode, hence the name. Needless to say hitting a target with a dumb bomb is an extremely difficult task and innocent bystanders are often caught up in the carpet bombing technique which is employed.Smart bombs are designed to guide themselves to the target. The concept of this smart weapon is certainly not new. First developed back in 1943 by the Germans, the technology would go through stages of radio-controlled and laser-guided developments before being used on a large scale. The first large-scale use of smart weapons came in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm when they were used by coalition forces against Iraq.

More Information On The Air Force’s Newest Smart bomb Plus Two Videos After The Jump.

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The AC-130 gunship is a heavily-armed ground attack airplane. The basic airframe is manufactured by Lockheed, and Boeing is responsible for the conversion into a gunship and for aircraft support. It is a variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane. The AC-130 Gunship II superseded the AC-47 Gunship I in Vietnam.

Well, the Spectre crew members have never been this HOT!

Mufasta Ali and Bin Ladin Better Watch Their Tails!

Vanessa Dobos is a gunner on a USAF AC-130 Gunship. She has seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan. She likes long walks on the beach, men who are not afraid to cry and puppies.

Her dislikes include feed tray stoppages, tracer flareout of her NVGs and premature fixed-wing strikes scattering her high-value targets.

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Making the rounds to an Email box near you! I just got it and found out that this has been circulating for some time. Below are photographs of a prototype aircraft known as the Talon. Reportedly it was taken onboard the USS George Washington CVN-73 for catapult fit checks. It noted that it was not exactly still Top Secret but certainly not yet made public.

The specs that were known were list to be a Mach 3.5 (top speed in the Mach 4 range), super-cruise stealth fighter / bomber / interceptor with approximately a 4,000nm range.

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Since the Cold War the U.S Missile Command and the U.S Air Force have continually focused their efforts on designing an Airborne Laser Weapon. Whilst this idea may still seem like science fiction, testing for this ground breaking technology has already begun.

A powerful Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) has been mounted in a turret-like array on the nose of specially modified Boeing 747-400 air freighters. The Airborne System’s (ABL) primary mission will be to locate and shoot down enemy ballistic missiles whilst still in the launch stage.

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Range, speed and flexibility. Hard rules once defined by the limitations of previous medium-lift helicopters. The V-22 is the world’s first production tilt-rotor combines the vertical performance of a helicopter with the high speed and range of a fixed wing aircraft which offers twice the speed, three times the payload, five times the range, and can fly more than twice as high as older rotor craft it is destined to replace. The Osprey is about to revolutionize military air transport in a way that has not been seen since the introduction of helicopters more than 50 years ago.

The Osprey is a tilt rotor vertical/short take off and landing (VSTOL) multi-mission aircraft with capabilities like no other. Combining the vertical flight capabilities of a helicopter with the speed and range of a turbo prop airplane it permits air to aerial refueling and worldwide self deployment.

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Boeing have been hot press this year following the highly anticipated 787 Dreamliner, despite the huge launch campaign and all the time spent perfecting the Dreamliner, Boeing have still found time to develop and begin testing the new X-48B an unmanned Blended Wing Body Aircraft or BWB.

The first ever flight took off on the 20th July from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. This X-48B is only the second prototype that Boeing has built and the only one tested in flight; it was created to test the “structural, aerodynamic and operational efficiencies of the BWB concept,” according to Bob Liebeck, the BWB program manager, especially during take off and landing.

BWB planes don’t have a tail, the wing itself blends into the fuselage, giving more lift and less drag than a traditional circular fuselage. This means 30% less fuel consumption than a normal plane and also less noise, both inside and on the ground.

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