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The Aviators Thread

ghce
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DoctorEvil DoctorEvil
That's a lot of ejections...
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Image courtesy of Martin Baker's Facebook page.
Is ejections the right word? After all they were Navy pilots so officially Seamen......
 
Duracuir1
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I found these patches at a local thrift store. Good deal at 50 cents apiece.

And Chris Hadfield is from the area so the Atlantis patch sewn to an olive velcro band could turn into a good story. (Just add alcohol!).
 
Fallout Boy
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In any case, there were (yellow?) firefighting planes in training (southern France).
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high-season

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Fallout Boy
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IMO yes. Nice "humming" when low pass by FOUR of thes birds! 🥰
 
SpeedyPhill
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Some history on NASA astronauts wearing their (military) wings.
☕
I always liked how the US military branches almost immediately had their version of an Astronaut wing ready. Alan Shepard and VIrgil Grissom received their aviator/pilot astronaut wings in December 1961 with Glenn following in March 1962 getting his US Marine Corps astronaut wing.
We all know that pilot/aviator wings have always been worn on the heart (leftside) but NASA wanted to emphasize a "civilian" look during the Gemini Project by putting the NASA meatball on the heart.
Funny, while the Gemini astronauts were asked to perform military tasks (e.g. Gemini V observed a “Minuteman” launch and Gemini VII photographed a “Polaris” launch).
In fact the Gemini astronauts wore the black leather name tags, not their wings but on Gemini VIa Schirra and Stafford effectively wore their "metal" aviator/pilot wings on the actual space suit, the first to do so (later on Gemini XI both Conrad & Gordon wore their sewed-on US Navy aviator wings on the space suit).
By the time of Skylab, the name tag moved to the leftside again. BY the time of STS, astronauts started to wear their wings again on the leftside of the pumpkin suit.
NASA came up with a mission/payload specialist astronaut wings and I believe the US Coast Guard were the most recent with their USCG astronaut wings as we already have 3 USCG astronauts; Bruce Melnick, Daniel Burbank and Andre Douglas.
(Photos: NASA)
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JimInOz
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He was a great designer, but I'm sure that Norman Bel-Geddes had no idea whatsover about aircraft "physics".

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DoctorEvil
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JimInOz JimInOz
He was a great designer, but I'm sure that Norman Bel-Geddes had no idea whatsover about aircraft "physics".

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Hmm.. doubtful that it would fly if using piston engines. Maybe use modern high bypass ratio turbofans and lots of lightweight composite materials in its construction? 😃
It reminds me a bit of the Soviet era "Ekranoplan", an aircraft that was designed to fly over water taking advantage of ground effect:
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Pascal S
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I see they finally gave the Lun a lick of paint, as it originally was in a sorry state when they dragged it from Kaspiysk to its current location, Patriot Park in Derbent, on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

Its sister prototype, the civilian rescue version Spasatel, is still in open-air storage in Nizhny Novgorod, and is clearly visible on Google Maps satellite view.
 
ghce
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These SES planes always intrigued me.
 
Pascal S
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With China now exploring ground effect technology with its own take on the old ekranoplan concept, I wouldn't be surprised to see more countries, starting with the US, replicating this engineering in their own projects. After all, even with the Soviet Union's limited funding, it had shown promise.
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