Message posted by Andreas Parsch (Member since 11/19/2001) on July 02, 2023 at 1:37:23 PST:
Hi, >> "Urban myth says that when SecDef was briefed on the winner (X-35) he was supposed to announce it as the next F-24 that was next in line but mistakenly called it the F-35. I know that supposedly happened before when Pres Johnson mistakenly referred to the RS-71 as the SR-71 and folks scrambled to "fix" it." These urban myths are both "half true" ;-). About 20 years ago, I researched aircraft (and other) designations of the US military quite intensively. One of the outcomes was an article about non-standard (as in "not adhering to the official regulations") aircraft designations. I discussed a few of them in detail, incl. SR-71 and F-35. The article can still be found here: https://designation-systems.net/usmilav/nonstandard-mds.html It's old though, and external links are mostly dead. But it should be clear, what is solid fact and what is my own speculation. A lot of what is presented as fact is based on released internal USAF/DOD communication on the allocation of the respective designations. At that time, I had little trouble to acquire such documents via FOIA requests, often with very short turn-around times (a few weeks). This doesn't work so well nowadays, it seems. When the X-65 designation was announced a while ago, and no-one in the open seemed to have any idea what happened to X-63/64, I thought to give it a try and request records about X-63/X-64. The initial response didn't sound like I could expect a result soon: "Based on our initial review, we believe we cannot process your request within the statutory 20 workdays because our organization has a significant number of pending FOIA requests. To ensure all requesters are properly served in the order their requests were received, we have instituted multitrack processing of requests. Based on the information you provided, we have placed your request in the complex track. OTOH, it took my less than 30 minutes to write up and submit the request, so it was definitely worth the try ;-). Regards
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We will strive to provide an update between 90 and 120 days. Our policy is to process requests within their respective tracks in the order in which they were received in accordance with 32 CFR, Part 286.8. We will notify you in writing if additional processing time is required. We do process each FOIA request as quickly as possible, however delayed responses can be expected."
Andreas
In Reply to: Re: YF-220 and X-273 removed from Dan Javorsek resume posted by NotTelling on July 02, 2023 at 0:40:46 PST:
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