I didn’t know this about the MiG-29

Sure.... as long as it’s strapped into a Falcon Heavy.... ;)
 
I bet development costs for the drones will be mondo cheap compared to development of anything space bound. Moreover, the atmospheric stuff can be recovered and repaired, not so much satellites.
 
wiki says 18km, or about 60K ft. since wiki is never wrong, ever, i'm going with that
 
https://www.boeing.com/history/products/f-4-phantom-ii.page

The F-4 established 16 speed, altitude and time-to-climb records. In 1959, its prototype set the world altitude record at 98,556 feet (30,000 meters). In 1961, an F-4 set the world speed record at 1,604 mph (2581 kph) on a 15-mile circuit. By the end of production in 1985, McDonnell had built 5,068 Phantom IIs, and Mitsubishi, in Japan, had built 127.
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https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/streak-eagle/

1 February 1975: Major Roger J. Smith, United States Air Force, a test pilot assigned to the F-15 Joint Test Force at Edwards AFB, California, flew the McDonnell Douglas F-15A-6-MC 72-0119, Streak Eagle, to its eighth Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) and U.S. National Aeronautic Association time-to-altitude record.

From brake release at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, at 913 feet (278 meters) above Sea Level, the F-15 reached 30,000 meters (98,425 feet) in 3 minutes, 27.799 seconds.
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Worked on the Streak Eagle back in the day. Hardly a production version:cool:

Cheers
 
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X3 Skier said:
Might be behind a paywall but the graphic shows the “MiG 29 jet fighter” flying at 17 miles up.
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The practical ceiling of the MiG-29 is about 17 km, so I suspect a conversion error.
 
zaitcev said:
The practical ceiling of the MiG-29 is about 17 km, so I suspect a conversion error.
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But the article didn't refer to "practical ceiling" or "service ceiling".

Mig 29's have flown up to 75,000 feet.

EoS-Flight-profile-1-300x220.jpg
 
I wish people would stop using this metric crap. Who started that stuff anyway? I bet it was Communists that started it, trying to undermine our (US and the UK, RSA, Australia & NZ, etc.) miles, feet and inches. Using it just makes people have to get their calculators out to convert centimeters to inches or kilometers to miles. If you want to use metric, go live in the EU. Am I right?

Oops. Over-reaction. :(
 
I have flown in the backseat of a MiG-29. I can't imagine one having enough gas to get that high. It has a shockingly low fuel load for how much those engines burn. The German ones were converted to carry 3 external tanks but as far as I know those are the only ones and they are limited to transit flights only. The normal Fulcrums can't shoot the gun with the centerline tank on and they are limited to 2 G's when they have gas in that center external tank.

Above all that, the thing just feels thrown together. I thought it was cool to get a ride in it but that was a one-time event for me.
 
X3 Skier said:
Worked on the Streak Eagle back in the day. Hardly a production version:cool:

Cheers
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I was wondering about that. It seemed like most of the mods listed were weight loss related and then added data gathering equipment. Of course they probably wouldn’t disclose stuff that may have been considered a military secret at the time.
 
Sundancer said:
Zoom climbs for 'em all - not cruising up there, not with those wings.
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Wings heck, most of those altitude records top out with a flameout and a relight on the way back down.

Nauga,
windmilling
 
I don't think a ballistic shot to 90,000 feet constitutes the aircraft's "ceiling". It can't sustain nor operate at that altitude so it's a meaningless figure.
 
I believe the top speed and altitude on the SR71 is still classified. They got it up to Mach 3.something just to beat the record. 85,069 sustained flight
 
MikeS said:
I wish people would stop using this metric crap. Who started that stuff anyway? I bet it was Communists that started it, trying to undermine our (US and the UK, RSA, Australia & NZ, etc.) miles, feet and inches. Using it just makes people have to get their calculators out to convert centimeters to inches or kilometers to miles. If you want to use metric, go live in the EU. Am I right?

Oops. Over-reaction. :(
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Because 128 ounces to 1 gallon... 12 inches to 1 foot... 5,280 ft to 1 mile.. 0.3333333333333333333333333... yards in a foot.. all makes perfectly clean sense

Only reason people struggle with metric is you don't have an innate sense of scale for it. But imagine if you knew a meter as intuitively as you know a foot.. and a kilogram as intuitively as you knew a pound.. actually you do! One gram is basically a paperclip(ish) in weight. Less common things would have so much more meaning and conceptual scale. Which, btw, even the meter makes sense as it's not an arbitrary unit, it is a fraction of the distance from the equator to the north pole.. something like 1 ten millionth

It's not even a 'Murica thing.. we inherited imperial from those pesky British redcoats with distances based on arbitrary things.. "bloody good Podrick! Splendid!"

PS - I don't actually care.. and have sworn many a time when trying to convert newton meters to inch pounds, etc.
 
I don’t know how they did it but somehow they forced Airbus to use SAE. They got back at us for it though as everything is in 32nds. So instead of 1/4 inch it will be 7/32 and instead of 5/16 it will be 9/32.
 
Tantalum said:
. . . Which, btw, even the meter makes sense as it's not an arbitrary unit, it is a fraction of the distance from the equator to the north pole.. something like 1 ten millionth . . .
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Are you implying that using the fraction of a distance of an imaginary line which has an inconsistent measurement across different points of the Earth isn’t arbitrary? Lol.

I also don’t care one way or the other, but the basis for most measurement systems is arbitrary in the grand scheme of the universe. The main bonus to the metric system is ease of conversion between distance/volume/etc. Easier to calculate how many liters are in a cubic meter area than it is to convert square yards to gallons.
 
MikeS said:
I wish people would stop using this metric crap.
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Yeah, it bugged me when nuts and bolts on cars went metric. People would look at me funny when I asked to borrow a 10 meter wrench....
 
Silvaire said:
I don't think a ballistic shot to 90,000 feet constitutes the aircraft's "ceiling". It can't sustain nor operate at that altitude so it's a meaningless figure.
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This..

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 | Wikipedia

It was in a "zoom climb" (absolute altitude rather than sustained altitude in horizontal flight) and it wasn't a stock MiG-25, but a Ye-266M with more powerful R15BF2-300 engines.

Wikipedia said:
On 31 August 1977, Ye-266M again flown by Fedotov, set the recognized absolute altitude record for a jet aircraft under its own power.[20] He reached 37,650 metres (123,520 ft) at Podmoskovnoye, USSR in zoom climb (the absolute altitude record is different from the record for sustained altitude in horizontal flight). The aircraft was actually a MiG-25RB re-engined with the powerful R15BF2-300. It had earlier been part of the program to improve the aircraft's top speed that resulted in the MiG-25M prototype.
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> " . . . as intuitively as you knew a pound.. actually you do! One gram is basically a paperclip(ish) in weight . . ."

heh heh, I've got an intuitive sense of what a gram is :cool:
 
Stan Cooper said:
This..

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 | Wikipedia

It was in a "zoom climb" (absolute altitude rather than sustained altitude in horizontal flight) and it wasn't a stock MiG-25, but a Ye-266M with more powerful R15BF2-300 engines.
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Hey.

Unfortunatelly I am not able to share links yet ... I am new here. There is a nice official web of RSK MiG (in Russian, of course) with list of all records set by MiG-25. World's top speed on 500 km closed loop was set by standard E266 (first version with prototypes of R-15BD 300 engines - at times called R266 by mistake). Sure, all unnecessary equipment is removed for those record-setting flights. The top altitude achieved with this aircraft was 35 230 m.

E266M has no top speed records ... Only ceiling (not sustainable altitude, sure). The engine there was the mentioned R-15BF2-300. This plane has never became a standard type, as new MiG-31 was developed and SR-71 was not a threat to SSSR anymore.

Practical ceiling for SR-71 and MiG-25 (serial) is very close - 25 000 m and 23 000 m, respectivelly.

MiG-25 has had only 1 purpose: fly very high an very fast to shoot down existing and perspective spy planes / strategic bombers. It has served its purpose very good, obviouselly.

Wikipedia is an open source: lots of facts are not correct, or incomplete due to wrong translation.

Sorry for not using imperial units, but there is really no logic in there :) I was trying, no luck ....
 
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