Message posted by lone wolf on June 04, 2006 at 20:26:25 PST:
After looking at some photos of the Global Hawk I took at Edwards, I think the antenna isn't extra. Rather, due to the black paint job on the Beale Global Hawk, the white antenna was more distinctive. The wire antenna on the Rivet Joint is a standard HF antenna (overseas flights use 11.175, 13.2, 8.992, etc) for communications. That was about the only standard looking antenna on the Rivet Joint. The engines look odd from the back, as the exhaust is funneled. I don't know if this is to suppress the IR of the plane, or to change the heat signature of the engines in a manner to allow on-board optics to function. [The Rivet-Joint isn't strictly sigint.] I think this show was the only time I saw T-38s fly in formation. Not to turn you into a plane spotter as there are enough loons at the fences of airports with cameras, but nearby to you is Mather, which is home to the Guardrail aircraft testing. It's just a King Air with a serious number of antennas on it. I haven't been following this too closely, but there is a new varient of this plane, perhaps more than one, i.e. a contest of vendors. They fly from Mather, so the first step would be to figure out the callsign.
In Reply to: Re: Beale Air Show This Weekend posted by Will(NorCal) on June 04, 2006 at 19:15:37 PST:
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