Russia’s Zvezda TV channel “accidentally” exposed model of a secret hypersonic 6th-generation fighter jet.
In a live broadcast of the Zvezda TV Channel was revealed a model of modern Russian-made hypersonic 6th-generation fighter jet that is likely in unmanned version.
Russian sixth generation combat aircraft will be hypersonic, first flight is scheduled until 2025. This was reported on 09 June 2016 by TASS, citing the head of the directorate of military aircraft programs, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) Vladimir Mikhailov. “He [prototype] rise into the air, as we plan, no later than two or three years after 2020”, said Mikhailov. United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) expected to fly a hypersonic “sixth-generation” fighter before 2025. Mikhailov stated it was currently under research and development, including engineering design.
Certain military experts point out that the project of a new hypersonic fighter jet is called the Pigeon, because of the similarity of the tail assembly.

The new Pigeon fighter jet will have massive twin-tail that allows it to use its own shockwaves to increase its lift and decreases drag.
Russia’s unnamed Pigeon hypersonic 6th-generation fighter jet would smash records and travel at five times greater than the speed of sound, over Mach 5-6. Quite possibly, the cruising speed of the future fighter aircraft will be identical today afterburning speed – Mach 1.5-2.
The type of engine is not reported. Maximum speed is not specified also as a range. Officials declined to comment on the image of the new aircraft model.
But some source reported that this only photo consists of Russian disinformation campaign or a joke of Russian military sector because the model in the photo “accidentally” released is a 1/72 Italeri Mig-37 “Ferret” or a 1/48 Testors Mig-37 plastic model.

tags: russian stealth , russian air force , top secret aircraft , classified aircraft, nathan finneman , breed of speed

wildfires that are sweeping through the state. Though the matters at hand are grim, one fascinating image was posted by a local news station ABC7 of a crew who encountered a rare 1966 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 in Malibu, removing it from the burning home. The firefighters pulled the vintage Mustang from the garage and pushed it near the side of a cliff, far enough from the brush and burning home to keep the car safe. Another photo shows the car nested safely away from the flames as they spread rapidly towards the garage.
Just under 1,400 Shelby GT350 Fastbacks were produced in 1966, making the car as rare as it is valuable. Similar examples are fetching well into the six figures; one for sale in Northern California has a hefty asking price of $165,000.

An Air Force pilot with the Thunderbirds flight demonstration team was killed in an April 4 crash after he lost consciousness while performing an aerial maneuver, the investigation into the incident determined.
Maj. Stephen Del Bagno died after his F-16CM went down at the Nevada Test and Training Range near Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.
Released on Tuesday, the investigation found that Del Bagno blacked out for five seconds after pulling 8.56 Gs. He regained his bearings one second before impact, but he was not able to pull the plane out of its dive.
Del Bagno "had a reputation for exceptional fitness" and had successfully performed many maneuvers that require pulling a lot of G-Forces, the investigation found. But being physically fit is not enough to protect against the effects of going from negative to positive G-Forces, which can cause a rapid drop in cerebral blood pressure.
Just prior to the crash, Del Bagno had been flying inverted, the investigation found. In the last two seconds of flying upside down, he endured a sharp increase in negative G forces, which lowered his blood pressure and heart rate at precisely the wrong time.
"The resulting outcome was more vascular space created by the widened blood vessels for the blood to flow away from the brain at the onset of the [positive G-Forces] and a lowered heart rate and blood pressure making it more difficult for the body to counter that dynamic," the investigation said.
As a result, Del Bagno was not physically prepared when he began a descending half-loop maneuver called a "Split S," during which he pulled nearly 9 Gs, according to the investigation, which said that he should have waited two extra seconds before pulling the stick up for the final maneuver.
Fighter pilots are taught several ways to prepare for the sudden onset of positive G forces to avoid losing consciousness, said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Darren Sorenson, a former F-15 pilot whom Task & Purpose consulted about this incident.
"Many other factors could have effected this pilots G tolerance on that particular day," said Sorenson, who had not read the crash investigation. "Very sad and unfortunate mishap."

In 1981, Rolls-Royce reportedly started getting demands for a very different sort of car: A rally-prepared Corniche that stood a foot or so taller than the standard car, with monster tires, a growling exhaust note, and a stripped out interior. The problem? Rolls-Royce didn't build a remotely similar car.
Those demanding the car could be forgiven. That very cool and very un-Rolls Corniche actually existed, but the company had nothing to do with it. It was the star of that year’s Paris-Dakar Rally, the hellishly long and arduous race across the Sahara from the post-Christmas revelry of Paris to the winter warmth of Senegal in West Africa. The event's beginnings saw amateurs having a bash in the family 2CV or farm Land Rover. But, by 1981, it had started attracting factory Range Rover teams and race legends like F1 and Le Mans winner Jacky Ickx. 
​Not surprisingly, Thierry de Montcorgé and Jean-Christophe Pelletier were not taken too seriously when their Rolls lined up with 290 others in the French capital. But at the race's halfway mark they were 13th. The rivals's view of the car had changed completely.
The super suave De Montcorgé, who would not be out of place if thrown in a gaggle of other unconventional and swashbuckling Rolls drivers like Lawrence of Arabia, invited me to a sandpit just outside Paris to drive the Corniche.
“It was Jean-Christophe's car. And because it was often [breaking down], we decided to put it in the desert,” Thierry recalls. The ‘eureka’ moment came aided by copious amounts of Pomerol over a lunch in Bordeaux. On the outside it still looks like a Corniche, albeit one that has had an intense course of steroids. But that is where the similarities end.

Each night, deep in the Sahara, de Montcorgé and his codriver Pelletier, sponsored by Christian Dior aftershave brand Jules, would set up an impromptu bivouac behind their 1970’s Corniche. From a basket they would pull oysters and other gastronomic goodies to ease the pain of battling the world’s largest desert. All washed down with champagne and Pomerol but without a drinks cabinet.
“The oysters only lasted for three days,” smirks de Montcorgé.
The rally Rolls is designed to be strong and comfortable, but to also have huge grunt. With up to 500 miles a day to endure, little else mattered. One stage, en route to the mythical oasis of Timbuktu, stands out in Thierry’s mind as where the Rolls was at its best. “It was a big desert in the south of Algeria. In my memory the sand was very white and so smooth. The car was running perfectly. I keep this image in my head.”​

It's a trip down memory lane for me too. I've commentated on 14 Dakars since 1987–when Peugeot brought their outlawed Group B rally cars and superstar drivers like Ari Vatanen to the desert–and I've been to the remote corners of the Sahara where the Corniche excelled. Nor am I a stranger to driving a Rolls off-road. A few years ago, I led a 6000-mile trip round South America in a Phantom, including some gnarly dirt and sand sections in the Atacama Desert. Without all the rally paraphernalia, the Phantom soaked up the conditions amazingly well.
Like an English stately home which has been stripped of its lavish furnishings, the Corniche no longer smells of Connolly leather and Chanel No.5. The odor is now of stale fuel and eau de old car.
“The car is almost exactly as it was when it finished the Dakar,” Thierry says as I get comfortable in the drivers bucket seat. “We knocked out a dent in the front, that’s all.”

Inside I search for familiar features. I can only find three. The wood dash and original dials (the odometer was the only trip meter they had to navigate the Sahara) and the original turn signal stalks. Oh, and the key. Except, with a turn it ignites not a purring Rolls-Royce lump but a V8 lump of Detroit iron connected to a drainpipe of an exhaust emanating from beneath the doors. This is clearly no Roller. It’s a more of a Rocker.
“Forget the brakes,” Thierry advises before I double-declutch into first gear. “They are almost non-existent.”
The course we have is a 1/3 mile loop up and over a pile of sand so yellow, Dorothy, the Tin Man and even Elton John would feel at home. It was also soft. I walked it and sunk up to my shins in places. But Thierry tells stories of climbing 100 foot African dunes in this monster so I short shift into second and let the immense torque and squidgy sand tires paddle away beneath.
It might have four wheel drive now, but somehow this desert brute has retained some of the Spirit of Ecstasy. The Corniche’s steering is still finger-tip light, the ride is supple and (as Rolls like to say when questioned ) it has ‘sufficient’ power. 350hp back in 1981, though I suspect it's less now.



Driving a boat or riding a Jet Ski is a good skillset to have when driving in sand. If you aren't using the power, you aren't turning. And once I plow through and over the deepest sections with no hint of bogging down, I play with the power band to make this brute dart this way and that.
The more I tickle the throttle, the more playful the Dakar Corniche becomes. The original suspension groans a little and the lack of speed in this sandpit makes it run a little hot but the years have not sapped youthfulness.

I briefly nudge into third gear which equates to 50mph, but it gives me a sense of what hour after hour of surfing the desert sand must have been like. Thrilling but brutal. My eyeballs struggle to keep up with the undulations and, even after 10 minutes, my neck muscles are over-compensating.
Three weeks of driving this car for 12 to 14 hours a day on sand and rock is unimaginable. I pull up, get out and now see Thierry as a hard-core adventurer, not as a debonair playboy. His car isn't a joke of Tonka truck, but a sublime yet simple piece of engineering that just happens to have a Rolls-Royce grille.
If the team wasn't disqualified for an illegal repair after a collision with a tree in Burkina Faso in 1981, the Rolls could have finished high on the Dakar leaderboard. It was still allowed to arrive in Dakar unclassified. Possibly because Jules had laid on enough champagne (and maybe oysters) in Dakar for the whole event.

Its high-speed, flowing corners make for great racing. They also make for scary, possibly career-ending crashes when it all goes wrong.


Then there are the fickle, sometimes frigid winds off the ocean. And the seagulls. Every couple of years, some seagull that for some strange reason thinks it's a good idea to hang out in the middle of a raging pack of unmuffled race bikes will lose his life in a collision with a World Superbike or a MotoGP prototype.
Even worse luck befell this track day rider at Phillip Island. A goose. He didn't even hit the goose. Another rider did. But he still paid the price in broken parts and shattered fairings.
Clearly, nothing in this video was good for the goose or the gander.

This car, a twin-turbo Lamborghini Huracan built by Underground Racing, smashed the half-mile world record earlier in August of last year at an airstrip in Indiana with a speed of 256.99 mph. That speed beat the next fastest recorded run—also set by an Underground Racing Huracan—by over 6 mph. It was then taken to another half-mile event held by Shift Sector last weekend where it beat its own record, laying down a speed of 259.67 mph.
This Huracan, driven by Gidi Chamdi, is reportedly equipped with a top-spec Underground Racing X Package, which includes a fully built twin-turbo engine capable of over 2200 horsepower on race gas, mated to a sequential transmission.
Here's the 259-mph run:

On Wednesday, Virgin Orbit attached its prototype rocket, LauncherOne, to a modified 747 for the first time at an airport in Long Beach, California. The company hopes to send the rocket into orbit early next year.
LauncherOne is 70 feet long and weighs 57,000 pounds. It’s designed to carry small satellites into orbit around Earth. But instead of blasting off directly from the ground like a typical rocket, LauncherOne will start its journey on a runway.


The team were carrying out the integration check of the rocket with Cosmic Girl to verify mechanical, electrical, software, and dynamics all work together for the first time,” Virgin Orbit owner Richard Branson wrote in a blog post. “It’s an incredibly exciting moment for us, as Virgin Orbit’s first test flights move ever closer.”
To prepare for the eventual test flights, engineers altered the plane, stripping out seats and bulkheads from its interior to cut down on weight. Cosmic Girl is now designed to take off carrying LauncherOne under one of its wings.
The plane will fly LauncherOne to an altitude of about 30,000 feet. At that point, the rocket will release from the plane and engage its thrusters to travel into orbit at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour, which is 20 times the speed of sound.

By using a plane to assist with the rocket launch, Virgin Orbit hopes to offer satellite launches on shorter timelines and at lower prices than competitors, many of which rely on expensive ground-based infrastructure. The company eventually hopes to launch from multiple locations around the world, including the United Kingdom.
Virgin Orbit is a spinoff of Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company also owned by Branson. While Virgin Galactic is focused on bringing people to space, Virgin Orbit’s goal is to launch small satellites into space. Since its founding last year, the company has already signed on several customers for future satellite launches, including the Department of Defense and the European Space Agency.

If you live near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, you're probably used to hearing jets pass overhead or seeing convoys on your drive to the supermarket. What you're probably not expecting, though, is to have a Humvee dropped in your backyard.
But that's exactly what happened earlier today, when a C-17 transport testing a new airdrop system accidentally released a Humvee from 1,500 feet, a mile from its intended target. Instead of landing in the Sicily Drop Zone, the nearly three-ton vehicle ended up in a tree. Luckily, other than to the branches, there were no injuries.

According to video available at ABC News, the Humvee landed a stone’s throw from a civilian house, in a tree approximately thirty feet above ground. The Humvee was still suspended there when the Army arrived to pick it up. 
Most airdrops go off with problems, or at least without news crews, but this is not the first time there's been trouble. In 2016, three Humvees plummeted to Earth after a Army sergeant cut the rigging that held the vehicles to their parachutes. The sergeant responsible was found guilty by court-martial.
​An Army spokesman said that the airdrop had been conducted by the service’s Operational Test Command as they tested a new parachute system for heavy equipment. The three parachutes designed to gently lower the Humvee to the ground worked, he said, and the test “went as planned—except for the early release.”

Race pilot Matt Hall experienced an accelerated stall his aircraft less than 100 feet off the ground. Fortunately, he was able to bring the aircraft to wings level before bouncing off the water, and fully recovered to return to the airport.
This is an extreme example, but it goes to show how important it is to watch your airspeed and bank anglewhen you're in the traffic pattern.

This sounds like something straight out of a goofy military comedy, but I assure you this is real: a Belgian technician accidentally set of the cannon of a military plane during maintenance, which shot another plane. That plane blew up, damaging the initial plane in the process. Talk about a bad day.
The event took place at the Florennes Air Base on October 11. A bunch of planes were being serviced, since some were heading off for a training mission. A technician in one of the F-16s accidentally hit that metaphorical big red button and activated its six-barreled Vulcan M16A-1 cannon.
 Presumably before he even had time to utter “oh, shit”, another F-16AM had burst into flames. This one had recently been fully fueled for a training run, and yes, the bullets hit the gas tank. Oops!

And because the world is cruel, the blast from the exploding F-16AM also impacted the plane that delivered the shots.
Unfortunately, two technicians were also injured during the blast. The full extent of their injuries isn’t known, but the Belgian Aviation Safety Directorate has opened an investigation to see what, exactly, they can do to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again, possibly with even worse results.