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

NICK COOK 135
jet flap on takeoff and it was the same as if the wing area had been substantially
increased, with a parallel reduction in drag and a concomitant
improvement in lift—by perhaps as much as 30 percent.
Bingo.
This could explain how the B-2, or an aircraft like it, staggered into the
air with a full bomb-and-fuel load. Thirty percent seemed far too high,
but even a few percentage points would constitute a breakthrough. A
substantial lift improvement was the equivalent of a substantial reduction
in weight. Maybe the B-2 lost weight, so to speak, aerodynamically, not
electrogravitically. It would explain why Northrop had beaten Lockheed
to the B-2 contract. While the Skunk Works had been playing around
with Maxwell's equations and two-dimensional shapes, Northrop had
already worked out how an aircraft could be enveloped in a shield of static
electricity and how that energy could be put to work: as both a cloaking
device and a method for reducing its air resistance.
No laws of physics broken, no antigravity switch in the cockpit, but an
extraordinary development nonetheless.
A weight reduction device by proxy.
And in working this through, I realized something else. The B-2
antigravity story actually played into the hands of black world security. It
was so fundamentally unbelievable that it discredited any serious investigation
of the application of electrostatics to aircraft. What defeated me
was why the spooks should have worked so hard to stop its disclosure—
pulling papers from the AIAA and so forth—and yet be content for
details to be released of the Lockheed stealth method.
But then, disinformation works best when you mix it in with a little
truth.
It was then that the picture cleared momentarily and I glimpsed something
through the snow and distortion. The keywords I'd written down
and then hurled into the bin in the basement of my home a few days
earlier swam into focus. If I could just hold the picture a second or two
longer . . .
Marckus' voice, punchy and impatient on the other end of the line,
brought me back to the here and now of my room in the Sahara.
I'm still here, I told him.
He was asking me where I was headed next.
I told him there was only one possible place I could go. If Northrop
had been working on electrostatics since the 1960s, if it was now
operationally deployed on a $2 billion frontline bomber that had been
designed in 1980, there had been plenty of time in the intervening period
for improvements and refinements. I knew there was no way that