ATB: B-2 evolution and competitors

The plaque adjacent to the Senior Peg picture appears to be using the same image, but mirrored. So whose office is this? What's the story of this screen grab? I assume this is a former Skunk Works employee's home office.
 
Apollo Leader said:
The plaque adjacent to the Senior Peg picture appears to be using the same image, but mirrored. So whose office is this? What's the story of this screen grab? I assume this is a former Skunk Works employee's home office.
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I think that's just a reflection of the picture on the polished surface of the plaque . . .

cheers,
Robin.
 
robunos said:
Apollo Leader said:
The plaque adjacent to the Senior Peg picture appears to be using the same image, but mirrored. So whose office is this? What's the story of this screen grab? I assume this is a former Skunk Works employee's home office.
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I think that's just a reflection of the picture on the polished surface of the plaque . . .

cheers,
Robin.
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Yes, that's exactly correct. The brass plaque is reflecting the Senior Peg artwork. More interesting is that the famous Larry McClain quote "For it is the lot of some men to be assigned duties about which they may not speak..." has been altered to reference women instead of men. A bit of a clue as to the recipient.
 
senior_peg_01-1-jpg.679641


lockheedatb-jpg.700717


Comparing these two, it seems to me the upper design is a lot more like the B-2 (early diamond config) in shape with the planform alignment on the wing leading and trailing edges and more compatible with ASPA/ATB requirements.

Comparing the size of the tail on the lower design, the angle of the shot is magnifying the apparent tail size on the upper design and concealing the true angle.

So the upper design is possibly a later development? Family resemblance is clear.

Incidentally the top pic was apparently first published in Popular Communications March 2005 (copy for sale on Ebay here if anyone is keen to scan a better copy)
 
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At this point I am betting that the top, smaller aircraft is the earlier HAVE PEG that Lockheed developed before the ASPA competition and requirements. Lockheed started work on a bomber before Northrop was invited in.
 
What are you basing the size comparison on? The apparent cockpit window?

I'd like to see a larger scan of the first design.
 
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overscan (PaulMM) said:
What are you basing the size comparison on? The apparent cockpit window.

I'd like to see a larger scan of the first design.
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Tail, facets, exhaust, overall configuration.

And having now seen a photo of ATA-B, I am certain this is not that.
 
Ooh. ATA-B photo.

I always imagined ATA-B as essentially an F-117 stretched in length (due to the published dimensions).
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Ooh. ATA-B photo.

I always imagined ATA-B as essentially an F-117 stretched in length (due to the published dimensions).
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Stretched in all dimensions, but length more than others. You would not easily be able to tell it from an F-117 unless you looked at landing gear, etc.
 
quellish said:
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Ooh. ATA-B photo.

I always imagined ATA-B as essentially an F-117 stretched in length (due to the published dimensions).
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Stretched in all dimensions, but length more than others. You would not easily be able to tell it from an F-117 unless you looked at landing gear, etc.
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Where did you see a picture of the ATA-B? I did not know a drawing or rendering had been released.
 
Here's my totally unsupported theory.

senior_peg_01-1-jpg.679641


This image is actually Lockheed Senior Peg / ATB design. It's taken from a misleading angle like the first F-117A - in this case from close above the rear, above the articulating tail on its pylon (described as like a Stegosaurus tail protruding from the top of the rear diamond).

The actual size of the tail is much more like this:

lockheedatb-jpg.700717


and the wing sweep is much closer to a B-2 than it looks.

I distorted the hell out of the image to show roughly what I mean.
Senior Peg_Distorted.jpg

This would then make the "it looks like the same aircraft" comments more understandable:

snapshot20050709222849-jpg.5896
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Note that unlike the unofficial drawings, the tail fins are forward swept.
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Just my opinion the leading and trailing edges of the v-tail appears to have their edge alignment parallel with the the trailing edge of the wing as opposed to the leading edge up front so still a swept back design. The highly swept tail depicted in The War Zone render and in some other previous depictions are probably incorrect, but until more pictures or drawings are ever released not to mention confirmation on where either of these two designs fall in the ATA-B/Have Peg/Senior Peg/ATB/B-2 design story things will remain speculative.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Don't have any idea of the provenance of this pic of course, but in its lack of detail it brings to mind this:
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That was the first image released by the USAF of the B-2. They purposefully omitted the exhausts, since they were still classified at the time. Which was why AvWeek pissed them off when they flew over during the roll out and took pics.
 
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Sundog said:
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Don't have any idea of the provenance of this pic of course, but in its lack of detail it brings to mind this:
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That was the first image released by the USAF of the B-2. They purposefully omitted the exhausts, since they were still classified at the time. Which was why AvWeek pissed them off when they flew over during the roll out and took pics.
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He was talking about Lockheed image provenance.
 
I believe according to Jim Goodall, he was given photos by Ben Rich, but the Air Force position is that Lockheed SENIOR PEG and SENIOR PROM designs aren't declassified so he was refused permission to publish them in his recent book on Lockheed Skunk Works.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
I believe according to Jim Goodall, he was given photos by Ben Rich, but the Air Force position is that Lockheed SENIOR PEG and SENIOR PROM designs aren't declassified so he was refused permission to publish them in his recent book on Lockheed Skunk Works.
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...which is mildly amusing, given that Steve Pace, Bill Yenne, Yancey Mailes & Tony Landis, and Peter Merlin all published books, most if not all of which were published prior to Goodall's Skunk Works book, which contained pictures of SENIOR PROM (the various shots of the ALCM carried underwing of a C-130), SENIOR PEG (the pole model image), or both. Some of them credited the images to LMSW via Goodall, but at least one credited them to Tony Landis. Did the others slip through the cracks somehow, or were they given some manner of permission I wonder.
 
quellish said:
For the bomber design, Scherrer revived the idea of a stealthy flying wing; like BSAX, the bomber would have to fly high and long distances, which the flying wing’s aerodynamic efficiency enabled. Scherrer again argued that facets would doom the plane aerodynamically, wrecking the lift-to-drag ratio. His managers, nevertheless, once again refused to fund wind-tunnel tests of a curved airfoil. Facets had won Lockheed the F-117, and the company was not going to mess with success. To Scherrer, it was “clear to me that the faceted ATB [bomber] was doomed because the Laws of Physics would not bend to fit Company policy.”8 Scherrer finally gave up and quit Lockheed in frustration in June 1979.
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In September 1979 Dick left Lockheed and went to work at the Northrop Corporation as a design consultant on their entry for the Advanced Technology Bomber. There, he refined the planform, airfoils and internal arrangement of what became the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit after Northrop won the US Air Force competition. (He was a good friend of mine)

1686192512707.png
 
I did not know Dick became a Northrop consultant and I know Dick was a brilliant aero-engineer. When I hired into Northrop's ASD in 1986, I had a feeling the ATB would be a flying wing, just had no idea of the configuration until I saw the full-scale mock-up. I had three uncles who worked for Northrop back in the day, two of them on the XB-35 and YB-49 periodically.
 
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SOC said:
overscan (PaulMM) said:
I believe according to Jim Goodall, he was given photos by Ben Rich, but the Air Force position is that Lockheed SENIOR PEG and SENIOR PROM designs aren't declassified so he was refused permission to publish them in his recent book on Lockheed Skunk Works.
Click to expand...
...which is mildly amusing, given that Steve Pace, Bill Yenne, Yancey Mailes & Tony Landis, and Peter Merlin all published books, most if not all of which were published prior to Goodall's Skunk Works book, which contained pictures of SENIOR PROM (the various shots of the ALCM carried underwing of a C-130), SENIOR PEG (the pole model image), or both. Some of them credited the images to LMSW via Goodall, but at least one credited them to Tony Landis. Did the others slip through the cracks somehow, or were they given some manner of permission I wonder.
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I have yet to see any evidence that the SENIOR PROM and SENIOR PEG images that have been making the rounds all these years are actually classified. Perhaps Lockheed Martin considers them proprietary. I don't know. Much, if not all of the HAVE BLUE material was declassified on December 31, 1990, and perhaps the SENIOR PROM stuff was, too. Ben Rich apparently gave some photos to Jim Goodall in the early to mid 1990s.

After Rich died in 1995, his family donated his papers and photos to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Apparently, everything had to be examined by Air Force Office of Special Investigations/Special Projects (AFOSI/PJ) so anything sensitive could be removed before the collection was made available to the public. Eventually, the Los Angeles Times announced that the collection finally available to researchers. As it stands now, the Ben Rich Collection at the Huntington contains a substantial amount of SENIOR PROM material.

The February 14, 2005, issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine ran an article that included a few SENIOR PROM photos and at least one image tentatively identified as SENIOR PEG (or at least as an ATB model). The following year, Air Force historian Yancey Mailes and NASA photographer Tony Landis published F-117A Stealth Fighter Photo Scrapbook (Specialty Press, 2006), which included some of the SENIOR PROM images and a photo of the SENIOR PEG pole model. That book has recently been republished (Detail & Scale Aviation Publications, 2023). As noted above, these SENIOR PROM and SENIOR PEG images have been published numerous times over the past two decades in various magazines, books, and web sites without any repercussions from the government.

As someone posted above, Jim Goodall planned to use some of the photos in his latest book, 75 Years of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, but was told if he did so his book would not be carried in the Skunk Works employee store in Palmdale or other LM venues. He may have been threatened with the withdrawal of other LMSW support for his project, as well.
 
Going through some stuff and found these, the FCHIL lab patch and decal are rare, mainly only the folks (including myself) who worked in the iron bird lab during the FCHIL development got these to my knowledge. To all, ENJOY!
 

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Whisperstream said:
I have yet to see any evidence that the SENIOR PROM and SENIOR PEG images that have been making the rounds all these years are actually classified. Perhaps Lockheed Martin considers them proprietary. I don't know. Much, if not all of the HAVE BLUE material was declassified on December 31, 1990, and perhaps the SENIOR PROM stuff was, too. Ben Rich apparently gave some photos to Jim Goodall in the early to mid 1990s.

After Rich died in 1995, his family donated his papers and photos to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Apparently, everything had to be examined by Air Force Office of Special Investigations/Special Projects (AFOSI/PJ) so anything sensitive could be removed before the collection was made available to the public. Eventually, the Los Angeles Times announced that the collection finally available to researchers. As it stands now, the Ben Rich Collection at the Huntington contains a substantial amount of SENIOR PROM material.

The February 14, 2005, issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine ran an article that included a few SENIOR PROM photos and at least one image tentatively identified as SENIOR PEG (or at least as an ATB model). The following year, Air Force historian Yancey Mailes and NASA photographer Tony Landis published F-117A Stealth Fighter Photo Scrapbook (Specialty Press, 2006), which included some of the SENIOR PROM images and a photo of the SENIOR PEG pole model. That book has recently been republished (Detail & Scale Aviation Publications, 2023). As noted above, these SENIOR PROM and SENIOR PEG images have been published numerous times over the past two decades in various magazines, books, and web sites without any repercussions from the government.

As someone posted above, Jim Goodall planned to use some of the photos in his latest book, 75 Years of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, but was told if he did so his book would not be carried in the Skunk Works employee store in Palmdale or other LM venues. He may have been threatened with the withdrawal of other LMSW support for his project, as well.
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I got a reader's card to the Huntington Library and spent two days working in their collections on site a few weeks back. I focused on their collection of Kelly Johnson papers and Northrop Grumman corporate archives. I didn't have time to get to the Ben Rich collection.

These collections are extensive and mind boggling. In particular, I now have a copy of Kelly Johnson's suppressed 1942 Institute of the Aerospace Sciences paper "Compressibility Effects on High Speed Aircraft". This paper was approved for publication by the War Department, but NACA later demanded its retraction. The archive includes letters from other companies requesting copies and later letters from Johnson asking for their return.

I also found that many of Kelly Johnson's college assignments are in the archives and a diary of a trip he made to Europe in 1947.

Cover of Compressibility Effects on High Speed Aircraft.png
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