Message posted by Vahe Demirjian (Member since 04/28/2022) on September 03, 2024 at 9:55:08 PST:
Last month, I wrote a blog post on the blog section of my WordPress website "US Guided Missiles and Rockets" reviewing the book "The Complete History of US Cruise Missiles" by Bill Yenne, and in this book review, I give a critique of Yenne's brief discussion of the Lockheed Senior Prom and Northrop AGM/MGM-137 TSSAM cruise missiles in Chapters 10 and 11 of this book. Like so many aviation enthusiasts taking note of that fact that the late Ben Rich provided Senior Prom-related material to Jim Goodall in 1992 with a caveat that no Senior Prom documentation was to be published in any way for 10 years, Bill Yenne waited long after 2002 to publish photos of the Senior Prom during flight testing over southern Nevada in his forthcoming book on US cruise missiles. However, Yenne's book recycled the now-refuted claim that the Senior Prom's failure to enter production was due to the Senior Prom being too big for the B-1B's bomb bay, and Yenne overlooked a passage from the book "Dark Eagles" by Curtis Peebles mentioning that the Senior Prom was optimized only for carriage by the B-52 after 1977 (Peebles probably knew from anonymous sources that Senior Prom's cancellation had nothing to do with its size relative to that of the B-1B's bomb bay but published little regarding Senior Prom after Goodall told him that no Senior Prom-related material was to be published until 2002). Bill Yenne only briefly mentions the TSSAM at the beginning of Chapter 11 but does not give brief mention of test flights of the TSSAM (including the Army's MGM-137B ground-launched version). I don't know if Yenne did not have the opportunity to examine video footage of the TSSAM in flight, but he should have mentioned that the TSSAM flight testing had a 70 percent success rate and that delays and failed tests were related to manufacturing defects and a few other technical quirks.
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