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Soto a écrit :tiens en parlant de ca .... j'avais lu dans une revue plus ou moins sérieuse (me demandez pas laquelle j'ai oublié) qu'il avait été évoqué la these du suicide du pilote de F-104 qui à heurté le valkyrie.

Cela date d'il y a une dizaine d'année donc les données précises m'échapent mais cette théorie à t'elle infirmée finalement ou pas ?

bpao a écrit :allez .. une idée cadeau pour noel... si je retrouve le post ou jeanba a mis un scan du meme genre je rajouterai ce message :

Idée cadeau ...

Warlordimi a écrit :Complètement idiot! Sur la vidéo d'époque, on voit bien que le F104 est littéralement aspiré par le Valkyrie.

Warlordimi a écrit :Complètement idiot! Sur la vidéo d'époque, on voit bien que le F104 est littéralement aspiré par le Valkyrie.

il y a pas volonté de suicide, mais un "simple" accident, voire, suivant certains, juste une incompétence concernant le vol en formation près d'appareils plus gros que soi...

51-Polo a écrit :c'était à le demande du motoriste General Electric, pour faire de la publicité
il y avait en plus du XB70: 1 YF5A, 1 F104N, 1 F4B et 1 T38

Quand au pilote du F104 Joseph A Walker il était le chef pilote du X15 pour la nasa entre 1960 et 1963.

By that time, Lacy had already made a name for himself in another area. In the mid-sixties, he began shooting air-to-air footage for Douglas Aircraft. He was also soon shooting for airlines and did a lot of chase work for the military.

That work gave him a front-row seat to what is considered the costliest crash in the history of aviation. He was enlisted to film a formation of five supersonic airplanes, each powered by General Electric engines.
"GE was paying for it," he said. "They were going to use the footage commercially, but the Air Force was going to use it, too."

Before Lacy could start filming on the morning of June 8, 1966, he would have to take care of another matter. Frank Sinatra was loaning his Lear 23 for the chase work, taking place around Edwards Air Force Base. Early that morning, Lacy received a call saying he needed to pick up Sinatra and Dean Martin in Burbank and take them to Palm Springs.

"They had gotten into some kind of trouble with someone in a Beverly Hills hotel, and they wanted to get out of town," Lacy said. "It was quite a scene."

After depositing them at Palm Springs, he headed toward Edwards. The star of the show that day was a North American XB-70, one of the most exotic aircraft ever built. Originally conceived as a high-altitude, Mach-3 capable bomber to replace the B-52, budget cuts reduced the number of aircraft to two and the program to a research effort aimed at studying aerodynamics, propulsion and materials used on large supersonic aircraft.

The XB-70, with a length of 185 ft. and a span of 105 foot, was built largely of stainless steel honeycomb sandwich panels and titanium. It utilized the phenomenon of compression lift, where the aircraft "rode" its own shock wave. It was able to do this in part because of the wingtips, designed to droop as much as 65 degrees. Six YJ-93-GE-3 afterburning turbojets of 30,000 lb. thrust each powered the "Valkyrie."

The first prototype made its initial flight on Sept. 21, 1964. The second first flew on July 17, 1965. Al White, North American's chief test pilot and Air Force Col. Joe Cotton were at the controls when that prototype made the XB-70's fastest flight, Mach 3.08, on April 12, 1966.

White was flying AV/2 again that day above Edwards, with Maj. Carl Cross, taking a familiarization flight, as copilot. In the formation, Joe Walker, the chief pilot for NASA at the time, was piloting a Lockheed F-104 "Starfighter", a Mach 2 plane. The chief test pilot for the Navy, out of Point Magu, was flying a McDonnell F-4 Phantom, and a test pilot for GE was flying a Northrop F-5.

"Joe Cotton, who was a bird colonel at the time, was in a T-38," said Lacy. "We'd been up for over an hour, and we were completing the photo mission when the horizontal stabilizer of Joe Walker's airplane touched the wingtip of the B-70."

The F-104, caught in vortices coming off the XB-70's wingtips, rolled through its tails.

"It knocked both the vertical fins off the B-70," Lacy said.

The F-104 burst into flames, killing Walker immediately.
Onboard the Lear 23, John Zimmerman, a still cameraman who was working for "Life" at the time, and was using a Nikon Motor Drive, caught the tragedy on film; the photo of the burning F-104 later appeared in a "Life" centerfold.

"The B-70 flew along for about 25 seconds, straight and level," Lacy said. "It looked like it was going to keep flying."
However, it soon rolled and violently yawed. Lacy said there was an overcast that day, into which the B-70 tumbled.

"I went down in the overcast, and when I came out, the B-70 was below me and had stopped tumbling," he said. "It was falling straight down, straight and level, and then it went into a flat spin."

White managed to eject, but Cross failed to, and died in the crash. Lacy said it was a shame that the project basically ended there.

"It was almost finished," he said. "It was under 50 million dollars to complete it. If they had finished that airplane, we'd probably have supersonic airliners now; it was much faster than the Concorde."

Some modifications were made to the surviving XB-70, but since problems had caused AV/1 earlier to be redlined to Mach 2.5, the aircraft wasn't a satisfactory replacement for supersonic tests, and the USAF dropped out of the test program. NASA conducted 33 more test flights until Feb. 4, 1969, when AV/1 was flown to the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

On that day over Edwards, filming took place out the window, because Lacy hadn't yet begun shooting with the revolutionary Astrovision camera system. During a conversation with Rex Metz, a cameraman for Continental Camera Systems, in 1973, Lacy commented that there was a need for a periscope system that could rotate 360 degrees. Metz discussed it with Bob Nettmann and John Carroll, owners of Continental Camera, and the system was designed.

"We got it in 1975," said Lacy. "It just revolutionized photography."