国家地理ABC:战机风云-神出鬼没

国家地理ABC:战机风云-神出鬼没 Warplane: The Age of Stealth 國家地理ABC:戰機風雲,神出鬼沒 播出時間:4月26日 星期日 @11:00-12:00 This is the very latest fighter in the United States Air Force. The F22 Raptor. With twin jets delivering up to 35,000 lbs of thrust; Raptor can fly for long periods beyond the speed of sound. They call it super-cruise. The F22 can strike and be gone in a second. Not only is it fast, the Raptor is almost invisible to radar. They call that stealth. The man or woman who flies the Raptor must be at the peak of their profession. But the 100 year relationship between man and machine could be drawing to a close. Raptor is designed to fly, to think, and if necessary, to attack, without human intervention. Where the warplane is going soon man may not be able to follow. By the middle of the twentieth century technology such as the jet and the rocket made global warfare a possibility. Tensions increased with the arrival of the Cold War. The threat of aerial attack had never been greater. Above the battle space today flies a communications hub; the early warning aircraft or AWACs. This eye in the sky uses its sensors to monitor air targets. Powerful onboard computers and their operators interpret the information. They can identify friend or foe and direct the might of the military to its target. The origins of the reconnaissance plane are the origins of the warplane itself. Right from the start the airplane proved its worth to military commanders by becoming their 'eye in the sky'. But on the vast battlefield of WWI, newly scarred with trenches and gun emplacements the nimble little aircraft soon established another role... that of map-maker. If you go back to World War One both sides do a lot of aerial photography, in fact a lot of the air fighting in world war one is to prevent people from taking those photographs. The aerial photographer's ability to expose the enemy's defences gave rise to armed countermeasures. Air warfare had begun. The importance of the photographs was fully understood by the Generals, aerial intelligence had begun. This is a WWI photograph and I think at that time you can say with the height limitations and with the target and you were looking very much at the front line here, you're looking at something where the quality was adequate for the need. What the intelligence officer in those days was looking for was the structure of enemy trenches, the positions of barbed wire. Trenches were very obvious. Beautifully castellated and particularly with the Germans who had very good soil disposal, so trenches stood out very well. We can trace the barbed wire on this photograph extremely well it's a very dark shadow effectively. And this is because of the weeds and the grass, under barbed wire are uncontrolled, they grow quite tall, quite quickly. And you do get quite a dark shadow from growth. World War one proved the value of aerial reconnaissance. The need for high definition pictures at greater speeds was met with the introduction of custom built cameras. The big difference between the end of WWI and WWII was the advent of the automatic camera. This is the F24 that was typical of those early cameras. These would have been the best lenses available to the British at the time. Electric motor drive the whole thing is plugged into the aircraft electrics. And a simple switch in the cockpit gives the ability to take 20, 30, 40 frames. But as the cameras got faster so did the planes. In war the reconnaissance plane needed to be always to be a little faster or a little higher than the enemy if it was carry on doing it's job unmolested. To this end, in 1939, the Supermarine Spitfire, was stripped of its guns and armour and, fitted instead with an F24 camera. The mission, to photograph beyond the German line. And it was all the vision of maverick Australian inventor and pilot, Sidney Cotton. Sidney Cotton is perhaps the single most important figure in the creation of modern photo-reconnaissance technology. He was one of the few to appreciate that reconnaissance could be taken beyond the confines of the battlefield. Cotton rigged his plane with a secret camera. His plan was to covertly photograph German military installations. He didn't count on having to give a German general a free ride. Discovery would lead to certain death. There is story that Sidney Cotton actually undertook one of his missions with a senior German officer on board the plane, entirely unaware of what was happening below him. And when he switched on the green light in the cockpit to say cameras running the General said to him, what does that do? And he said, Oh that's my fuel state. Cotton was a man with no nerves clearly. On the eve of the Second World War, Sidney Cotton had invented the spy plane. Even as Sidney Cotton flew his covert sorties, his own superiors were testing a top secret invention that would make all airplane vulnerable. Radio Direction Finding was about to change the shape of war. In fact Radar, as it would be known, would change the shape of the warplane itself. Radar is the first effective way of seeing without your eyes. You can actually find out where things are at considerable distances. Once you know exactly where they are now you can talk about dealing with them. The advent of radar had made wartime aerial reconnaissance more difficult. The end of the war saw the end of Sidney Cotton's missions but his legacy- the spy plane it's time was yet to come. In the uneasy peace that followed WWII covert surveillance would come of age. One man would take the spy plane into the history books. His name, Clarence 'Kelly' Johnson. Kelly Johnson was just an unbridled genius. And you can just see in his daily journals how his mind worked and how he would take a design, a very advanced design from the earliest stages to the final stages and always be ahead of the problem. He believed that he knew what was needed by the customer and deliver to him the sometimes even before the customer knew what was needed. The new spy planes were designated U2 for Utility plane to hide their real job, surveillance for the CIA. By 1950 radar was powerful enough to see ten miles high. Russian interceptors could only reach the same height. So Kelly Johnson designed a plane that could fly higher than both; 70,000 ft, nearly 13 miles high. The U2 was a remarkable concept in that it was very simple. It was basically a high flying sail plane powered by a jet engine. U2's first flight was in 1955. A year later it was approaching the Soviet Union on a highly secret mission- to pull back the iron curtain and take a look. This ability to see what the enemy is doing. To photograph what's going on in the Soviet union so you can actually discern on the ground what the facilities are doing, what the plants are doing, what nuclear facilities are, whether they're exploding atomic weapons. This ability in a sense to photograph the earth and to see what's going on in your enemy's territory. At last the might of the secret Soviet armoury could be counted. Flying and photographing 13 miles above the earth, the U2 enjoyed unparalleled access over foreign soil. But on May Day 1960 its cover was blown sky high. Whilst on a secret CIA mission flying into Soviet air space, U2 pilot Gary Powers, was shot down by a Surface to Air Missile over the City of Sverdlovsk. The destroyed U2 was paraded for the entire the world to see. The radar guided missile, had caught up. Powers, was put on trial. Sentenced to ten years imprisonment for espionage he would be repatriated two years later in 1962. In time to witness the U2's finest hour. On the Island of Cuba photographs taken by a U2 uncovered a sinister threat, Soviet missiles within striking distance of the USA. The Cuban Missile Crisis, brought global nuclear destruction closer than ever before. For 13 days the world held its breath until the missiles were finally removed. U2 continues its patrols today and have been active in two Gulf wars. After the Powers shoot down- U2 never again flew over the Soviet Union; the iron curtain slammed shut. The next spy plane was already taking shape in the mind of Kelly Johnson, interviewed here in 1975. We knew that in over-flying Russia for four years that they were making great advances in radar and missiles. And so in 1958 two years before Gary Powers was shot down we decided we'd try to make a follow on airplane which became finally the SR-71 to fly higher and four times as fast. What Kelly Johnson proposed was a leap into the future. Only ten years earlier man had broken the sound barrier, now Johnson wanted to produce a warplane that could go three times that speed. At over 2000 miles per hour no missile would be fast enough to catch it. He called this one the SR-71 Blackbird. If anyone had asked an ordinary designer to build an aeroplane with the requirements that were laid out in the SR71, at that time they would have said it's impossible. Every part of this warplane demanded brand new technologies. Its skin would't be aluminium by the U2 but titanium to withstand the heat generated at super high speeds. A unique liquid was created to act as both lubricant and fuel. Its shape was like nothing that had gone before. Skunk Works engineers completely re drafted the warplane blueprint. But by far the biggest challenge was the engine. The designers faced the problem of having an engine that would work all the way from take off at zero speed up to Mach three. No jet engine existed that could take the Blackbird where Kelly Johnson wanted it to go. Turbo jets are good at the lower speeds but for good fuel efficiency at higher speeds you need a ram jet. Where the air flow enters the engine is burnt and goes out with the fewest obstructions possible. In a conventional turbo jet, air is squeezed into a combustion chamber by a series of compressors at the front of the engine where it's ignited creating thrust. Air entering a jet engine travelling at twice the speed of sound becomes compressed merely by the speed it enters the combustion chamber. The compressor discs of the turbo jet become a hindrance to that fast moving air. In order to avoid putting both ram jets and turbo jets separately in the same airplane and pay a big weight penalty the genius of Pratt and Whitney was to add these bypass tubes around the core of the turbine. At lower speeds the turbo jet engine is the power source. But at speeds over 1600 mph by pass tubes divert the incoming air creating a Ram Jet. Everything about Blackbird was done in secret. At Beale Air Force Base Kelly Johnson and the top Air Force brass turned out to witness the latest and greatest airplane to join the Strategic Reconnaissance Wing- the SR-71 Blackbird. Test pilot Jim Eastham was one of the first to see how fast the Blackbird would take him. And there was no holding it back. We'll let this thing cook and see where it goes. It wasn't long before Jim was doing over Mach 2. And gee the next thing you know this thing clicked up to about 2.3... I said hmm maybe we're onto something. Just about the time we went back over our base, 3.0 showed up. That day Blackbird took Jim Eastham to Mach 3- over 2,000 mph. Kelly Johnson's genius had lifted the iron curtain once again. Closer to earth the picture was very different, caught in the stand off between the super powers of the cold war were many smaller nations armed in turn by either west or west. There wars were all too real, in the Arab Israel conflict of 1973 the Russian built radar guided surface to air missile or SAM, was developing a taste for low flying warplanes and the Israeli airforce had no answer. Over nineteen days of conflict, the Israeli air force lost a hundred and nine aeroplanes, representing thirty five percent of its pre war combat aircraft strength. Quite clearly had the war gone on for any extended length of time beyond that point the Israeli air force might have been taken out of the conflict. Israeli ground forces finally secured the victory. But their air force had been almost annihilated by the radar guided missile. In the USA the destruction of Israeli piloted, American warplanes like this F4 Phantom came as a huge shock. Uncle SAM needed an answer to the SAM. A very imaginative response was to attack the radar system itself and do this by reducing the radar signature, the radar-cross section, of the attacking warplanes. If a Warplane were invisible to radar it would be invisible to missiles. It was a theory that would produce a remarkable result. This is Stealth. The F-117 Stealth Fighter. The first warplane designed from scratch to be invisible to radar. How do you make a warplane invisible? By convincing the radar it isn't there. Radar is a sensor that uses micro waves to detect the presence of targets within its vicinity. By transmitting a signal into the space around it, the targets reflect echo signals back to the radar and therefore give away their presence. Imagine this torch as the radar source and the metal as the warplane. Radar works like the beam from the torch hitting the metal. The light bouncing back represents the reflected radar signal. Radar cross-section is the term used to describe echoing area of a target so in essence the size of the target has perceived by the radar. A micro wave generator is used to provide radar energy. The amount of energy reflected back can be measured from different shaped objects- which represent the warplane. The goal is to minimise that radar return. Here we have a shaped target. We see that it has a rather large flat face. Now let's put this back in with the flat face facing directly towards the radar itself. And let's see what we get. We can see there's a large target response here. That is recording a signal strength here of 24 milli units. To avoid a radar guided missile the warplane's signal would need to be almost zero. At Lockheed fooling radar was second nature to their advanced technology division known as The Skunk Works. U2 they had designed to fly over it, Blackbird, to out run it. Now, with Stealth, they proposed simply to deceive it. Kelly Johnson wasn't convinced. But he was no longer in charge. Instead his hand picked protegee Ben Rich, was running the show. Ben Rich was an incredible character, a one of a kind guy. He took over running the Skunk Works from Kelly Johnson in 1974 and to most people in this country and particularly in the US air force, he is viewed as the father of stealth. His former boss had been against the Stealth programme but Ben Rich took a gamble. Ben Rich was going really to stake his reputation on and indeed the reputation of Lockheed and the Skunk Works on, was the stealth programme. For the Stealth programme Rich put together a team of specialists to work on the basics. The first breakthrough would come from their radar man. Dennis Overholser walked into Ben Richs' office and said, Ben I think I've got a layout that we can come up with that has a very, very, low radar cross section and Ben said you mean down to about the size of an eagle and Dennis said try an eagle's eye. Radar may be invisible but it sees everything. We can now re-orientate our target to direct the apex of the pyramid directly toward the radar system. Now bear in mind the radar still sees the same square shape of target the same area but the shapes of the facets and their orientations towards the radar is clearly different from the first case. Suppose this was one metre square and you held this up at right angles to a radar, the equivalent radar cross section would be about 1,000 square metres. If you bend it back to some shallow angle it would drop down to a number like about a tenth of a square metre. Now if I rotate it like a diamond, clearly it's still a big mirror just like it was before but I tip it about this angle it now drops down to about a thousandth of a square metre so from one thousand to one thousandth it changes by a factor of a million so all you have to do is to make your airplane of a lot of diamond shaped sections like this and you get a very low radar cross section airplane. The team from Lockheed were beginning to believe radar could be fooled. Well it's fairly obvious that the strength of the echo has gone down enormously. And the marker read out is confirming that the amplitude, the strength of this reflection is now a mere 4.5 milli units. Ben Rich and his team had made a warplane disappear- almost. The facetted shape was working... but there was one more key that would take them from the model to this. Not only would it be a weird new shape it would need to be coated with weird new materials too. This is radar absorbent material. And what we can see here now is a flat response where we once had the echo. But for all intents and purposes now that target has disappeared from the radar screen and we've achieved a stealthy performance. The stealth fighter is a radical re-thinking of a warplane's shape and skin. However it's not aerodynamic. For all its incredible stealth attributes they had designed a plane that couldn't fly. If it wasn't for computer aircraft control systems we would not have any chance of flying that airplane successfully. Without a computer, the F-117 might leave the ground but it wouldn't be for long. With the computer in the loop, the pilot now told the computer what he wanted the airplane to do and the computer would try and figure out how to give the pilot what he was asking of the vehicle. The one thing this allows you to do is that to fly things that you could not normally fly, things that are unstable. Shapes like the F-117 which would be un-flyable without the flight control computer on board. The system that enables the F-117 to function came about with the birth of the computer age, its called 'Fly-by-wire'. A technology that does away with the age old system of pilots pulling cables and replaces it with a series of electronic commands. The real proof of fly by wire was realised on test flight of the F-117. The chase plane, flying alongside, spotted a problem. The chase pilot called out and said I think it would be a good idea for you to return home because the left fin just fell off your airplane. The interesting thing was that the pilot did not know that because the computer automatically compensated for the lack of the control system and he was flying along without any knowledge of the fact that that happened to him. Fly-by-wire gave stealth wings. The pilot's faith in the computer would soon be rewarded. In February 1991, in the skies over Baghdad forty F-117s flew into a maelstrom of ground fire and came out without a scratch. You see triple AAA fire and you see surface to air missiles being fired. Because they were firing at something they thought they had seen on radar. Stealth worked. And now the whole world knew it. The US Air Force had revealed their radar proof secret. Now they would have to future proof it. They needed a bigger stealth bomber with longer range. And they would do that with a return to basics, to the very principles of flight itself. A return to aerodynamics. The B2 Spirit. One of the advantages of a flying wing is it's a very efficient airplane because it's nothing but a wing it has very little drag. So as a result it has very good long range performance. The B2 has the wingspan of a Jumbo Jet. It can fly 8 thousand miles before it needs refuelling. The flying wing's low drag means not just increased range but even greater pay-loads. The B-2 has, in fact, a solid pedigree one which pre-dates the computer. The secret of how to make a wing fly lies in a dusty hanger at the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California. It is a craft built by a man who, in the evolution of the airplane, thought the fuselage and tail to be redundant. The inspirational father of the flying wing, Jack Northrop. He built this to prove that a wing alone was capable of controlled flight. Instead of a tail, he devised an ingenious method to keep the aircraft flying straight. A set of flaps that opened like a clamshell at the end of each wing when one clamshell opened it would create drag above and below the wing acting like an oar plunging into the water at the side of a speedboat. In 1940 Jack Northrop's prototype took to the air, the clamshells worked. He was convinced this was the shape of the future. The point of it was it demonstrated that you could actually have a flying wing that did not have a rudder and a vertical tail yet the plane could still fly quite safely. When the army saw the prototype fly they thought it would be the answer to their search for a new long range heavy bomber, they ordered 13. As the planes entered their test programme they discovered the all new jet powered YB-49 displayed worrying characteristics. It had problems in the sense that it was neutrally stable but it had a tendency to wallow somewhat. Is the best way to put it directionally because it didn't have a tail. During flight the clamshells demanded constant attention just to keep the plane on an even keel. The pilot had to damp out all these un-commanded motions. As a result his work load was increased tremendously. A system of gyroscopes helped to keep the plane stable but the problem wouldn't go away and on June 5th 1948 disaster struck. On a test flight just north of Muroc Dry Lake in California a flying wing crashed killing the entire crew, pilot Glen Edwards included. The air force base bears his name to this day. But if Edward's name lives on Jack Northrop's was heading for the history books. The control problem that had eluded Jack Northrop's was instantly overcome by the application of the flight control computer. You have giros inside the airplane that sense when the airplane moves and commanded without the pilot commanding it to move. And it automatically without him taking any actions moves the control surfaces in order to kill that motion. As a result of the flight control computer the flying wing was resurrected in the shape of the B2. but it wasn't the only reason. Back in the 1940's when Jack Northrop's' flying wing bomber was undergoing development so too was radar. One of the things that was noticed during the testing of the YB-49, and it was a sort of after thought, was it was very hard for the radars to see the flying wings. And they did do a flight test where they actually deliberately flew at a radar and said OK tell us when you see us. It was surprisingly close to the radar before they saw them. But no one was particularly interested in that so they just filed it away. The battle with radar pushed technology to the limit. The F-117 and B2 are the first and second generations of stealth. The Raptor is the latest. With a cruise speed of over 1,000 mph stealth has now gone supersonic. But now it must go further, engineers have pushed the jet engine and the jet has pushed the pilot and pushing the pilot and the plane to their very limits is the test pilot. And they learn that role at centres like the National Test Pilot School, located at the edge of the Mojave desert in California. Greg Lewis, a veteran test pilot on the F4 Phantom, and others besides, is deputy director. The image, what's a test pilot? A test pilot in today's world is very much a professional. A very meticulous planner. On a test programme of a new type there could be the case where things could go badly and you could end up out of control. Every little detail of test flights are planned...//There have been times when control has been lost. I think its important in test pilot training to intentionally put the new pilot in that situation and then bring him back. In our school we put a lot of emphasis on experiencing that during the education they get here because of that experience I think they are better able to handle the unknown when they get out doing tests on a new airplane. Two of the pilots on the course are about to encounter spin testing. When a plane goes out of control there has to be a procedure. The test pilot's job is to establish that procedure. To write the manual. And it's different for every aircraft. If you're doing out of control spin testing in an airplane you have a certain amount of time before something very bad happens. So getting that practical side of the training in addition to the classroom stuff is critical to success in the future. These trainees are going to endure moments of controlled danger. They will have to remain calm enough to carry out their role as pilots. Behind every test pilot there's a bank of engineers sitting in a centre like this. Engineering data from the test aircraft is wired back to those engineers. How the aircraft responds to an out of control state is measured. The purpose, to determine if the plane reacts the way that it has been designed to. It's an extreme test of both plane and pilot. Throughout the spin, ground control keep a watchful eye. If the plane gets too low- it's their job to give the order to eject. To do their job test pilots must know their own limits. The modern fighter can easily achieve twists and turns that create forces too high for the human body to withstand. Its flight computer, however, is programmed not to carry out any manoeuvre that would go above the human limit. At the US Air Force centrifuge in Dayton, Ohio, they study what those forces do to the human body. Good afternoon Cassie, are you feeling well today? US Air Force volunteer Cassie is a trainee pilot. She's about to experience just how much her body can endure. The human body limits the modern fighter to generating no more than 9 Gs of force. Any time you have an object that's accelerating it can be subjected to g force which is the force of gravity. When you have a high performance aircraft it's say pulling a high speed turn you gonna be upwards of 5 to 9 times the gravity. As you're increasing G level your blood is getting pulled out of your head and will pool down in your legs. So if you were to sit there and do nothing around 31/2 to 4 G in about 5 to 10 seconds you would likely lose consciousness. Cassie, dons a g-suit. A standard piece of equipment for all fighter pilots. This is the G suit and when I get in there they hook this up when it gets to certain G levels it will flow air in here different amounts... there's different amounts of pressure depending on how high of a G you're at. You don't have to do as much straining with your own muscles. It kind of feels like someone squeezing your legs and your abdomen. The g suit fitting tightly around Cassie's lower torso and upper legs, will constrict the bottom half of her body to keep blood in the upper body and brain. This can improve resistance up to about 6 and 7 g. If for any reason Cassie wants to stop the run- she can hit the stop button. At 5 Cassie begins the strain manoeuvre tensing her body to stay conscious. Her breaths are getting sharper and shorter. OK your at 6. When you get close to blacking out your eyes kind of bug out that's the body's response. And my eyes are pretty huge so and I can say I was pretty close to blacking out and I couldn't see very much and I was thinking about hitting the stop button but I wanted to see if I could make it through. OK you're on your way back down. Human performance is clearly the limiting factor in a modern high performance aircraft. And people still lose consciousness from G exposure despite these interventions. Computers have made it possible for the pilot to concentrate less and less on flying the plane and more on flying the mission. But what if the plane could also fly the mission? When you look at flying in the kind of places we so heavily defended and the pilot becomes really a premium it's certainly something we don't want to waste or lose and so those areas that we can do more effectively by taking the pilot out of the cockpit become what most technologists seek to work on. They're known as UAVs or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and you think they're model airplanes, don't. Global Hawk has the wingspan of a jet airliner. It cruises at 50,000 ft and can stay airborne for two days without refuelling. But even Global Hawk has a test pilot. It's a little embarrassing to be the chief test pilot for an unmanned airplane for a fighter pilot. Most people think of UAVs as being airplanes as having wings spans about as long as your arms. But Global Hawk has 116 ft wing span. So these are not toys. The Global Hawk may be the latest but the first did look like toys. No longer built to human scale the first of the new generation of UAVs could be small and simple craft. Their first role of the UAV mirrors that of the first manned warplanes 100 years ago. Reconnaisance and target spotting. In Desert Storm, Iraqi soldiers encountering a pioneer for the first time came out of their fox holes waving white flags. Perhaps they were wise to do so. Unlike Pioneer, the Hawk is not a remotely piloted aircraft. With it's powerful computer brain, satellite communications and GPS system it knows exactly where it is and knows exactly where it's going. Once a mission is set, Global Hawk pilots itself. So we have air force pilots that get up in the morning, eat breakfast with their wife, kiss them good-bye, go to work, fly 8 hours of combat over Iraq and then come home and play with their kids in the afternoon. Not surprisingly, government agencies around the world are developing UAVs in every shape and form. Autonomous, stealthy and armed. Even flying in swarms as wing men to a manned fighter. The UAV is becoming increasingly more threatening. It can see and now its looks can kill. Equipped with Hellfire missiles the Predator can turn from spy plane to hunter killer in the blink of eye. Here at the US Air Force research lab in Dayton Ohio, scientists are making the next leap in unmanned vehicles. They're attempting to combine the fly-by-wire computer and autonomy in an unstable craft that really shouldn't fly. Based on the pogo fighter of the fifties, it was too difficult then. But if they can make it work it will have all the benefits of the helicopter, all the speed of an aeroplane... without the pilot. And the crafts new name, skytote. Skytote is an unmanned air vehicle that flies both like a helicopter and like an aircraft. A lot of helicopters are limited in their top speed and most airplanes cannot stop in mid air so we've found a middle ground here. So it can hover, it can have precision landing capability yet it can also fly at a relatively fast forward speed. This hybrid and autonomous UAV will big enough to carry large loads, even human cargo. What you may need to do is fly around like an airplane so you can look at a lot of area. Stop, hover and look at one area in particular in more detail. Or maybe if you have a pilot down or somebody in trouble somewhere you need to get out in a hurry, we will be able to use this concept to go in and pick them up again with a precise landing because of the hover capability then bring them out. Helicopters do the job right now but those are manned and that puts a lot of people at risk. Many see the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle as the pilot's life saver- the future for the Warplane. Others believe there is still a need for a pilot in the cockpit. In Sweden, a country with a population of a mere nine million, they have their own answer. Their very own frontline fighter. The SAAB Gripen. Hidden from view, a hive of activity is taking place just off the local highway. A ground crew prepare for the arrival of a Gripen- it's about to land on that very highway. The Swedes have designed their warplane to be a flexible platform that can turn any road into a landing strip. And they've built it to be low maintenance too. A ground crew of four conscripts and one technician is all it takes to turn this Warplane around. To rearm and refuel it and get the pilot back in the air fast. Nobody knows where tomorrow's threat will come from, or what shape it will take. The Gripen is one nation's answer to an unknown future. And so, all over the world, the airplane continues to patrol that fine balance between the sudden demands of war and the never ceasing requirements for peace. It has done so for a hundred years. The bi-plane spotter of WW1 has become today's un-manned aerial vehicle. The fighter has gone supersonic and the bomber taken the shape of Northrop's flying wing. As technology develops even further, there will be new roles for the Warplane. Roles that have yet to be defined. The next generation of warplane is certainly on the drawing board. Perhaps it is already landing.