ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 129
F-l 17 A, composed of its mass of angled flat panels, was "first-generation
stealth."
The B-2, or the Advanced Strategic Penetrating Aircraft, as it was
known when it was still deeply gray, was a second-generation aircraft and
this, according to Northrop, was manifest in its blended aerodynamic
shape. Instead of being rough and angular like the F-l 17A, it was smooth
and rounded—a product, Northrop claimed, of five years' worth of
improvements in computing technology between the start of the Have
Blue program and the ASPA.
Improved software algorithms processing had allowed Northrop to
come up with a shape—a refinement of the YB-49 flying wing jet bomber
it had first flown in 1947—that allowed the aircraft to look and fly right
and to remain invisible on enemy radar screens.
Not only that, but according to LaViolette it had the capability to fly
electrogravitically as well.
In my basement, where the noise of the city couldn't intrude upon the
sort of silence you needed to sift a decade's worth of documents and files
on the arcane properties of stealth, I still wasn't happy about LaViolette's
assertion, because of the absence of that all-important switch, the one
that kicked in the B-2's antigravity drive system.
There was one other beguiling aspect to Scott's story. His sources said
that charging the airframe electrostatically not only helped to make the
B-2 stealthy, it also reduced friction heating of the airframe, its sonic
footprint and its drag.
This last point was crucial. If it were possible to alter the "drag" or air
resistance of an aircraft, you could either make it fly farther or faster or
both.
The drag reduction system was supposed to work as follows: By
creating an electrostatic field ahead of an aircraft, it ought in theory to
repel air molecules in the aircraft's path, allowing the plane, in effect, to
slip through the atmosphere like a thin sliver of soap through warm
water.
Like antigravity itself, the whole notion of using electricity fields to
reduce aircraft drag was heresy—it was, according to traditionalists, just
smoke and mirrors. But here, in Scott's article, was a reference to
Northrop having conducted high-grade research in 1968 on just such a
phenomenon: the creation of "electrical forces to condition the air
flowing around an aircraft at supersonic speeds." Furthermore, the
California-based aircraft company had supposedly submitted a paper on
the subject to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
that same year.