The Black Aerospace Project that Was About To Be Disclosed That Wasn't

This is an update on various posts about the possible public release of information about a black aerospace project from over a year ago.

It is a personal pet peeve of mine that we have on the Internet and other venues (e.g. Aviation Leak and Space Mythology) breathless sightings of what may be a black (e.g. very secret) aerospace project, and then dead silence. Nothing.

Well, nothing is a little hard to interpret. So I am going to attempt to interpret “nothing” for my readers, and for what it is worth.

To recap, there were some very interesting sightings reported on www.foxtrotalpha.com. These sightings were of what appeared to be a manned flying wing aircraft which was not the B2. More than one, in fact. The B2 is a very distinctive plane and the observers, who seem to be respectable, knowledgeable and who took reasonable pictures of what they had seen, were of the opinion that it was not a B2. Well, nothing else of that type of airframe that is manned is flying, so that it seemed to be a reasonable conclusion that they had in fact sighted something not only secret, but also in (at least) limited production, as there was more than one of them.

The speculation was that whatever they had seen (and I liked the theory that it was a stealthy tactical reconnaissance aircraft that came from work in the mid-1980s and went into very limited production in the 1990s) was that this aircraft was about to be made public. Hence, they were less careful about bringing the plane back from somewhere (Iraq? Africa?) in broad daylight and so forth.

Ok that was the speculation.

Well, a fair amount of time has passed since those sightings and whatever they may or may not have seen has not been publicly announced which means one of several things. If it was an aircraft in limited production use, then whatever it is still has its uses or in some way has technology that still needs protecting and is not just ready for public release. Or maybe they saw nothing at all so there was nothing to announce. Or maybe they were B2 bombers after all.

Actually, I think they probably did see something but whatever.  In a sense this is good news, because if it is in limited production this means it is still of value, which means that the money was well spent, at least to some extent. Alright, thats a bit of a stretch.

One more thing, there are a variety of aerospace forums that discuss these things. I am not a regular reader of them but this is often where more information is found, if you have the patience to read through them and all the tendentious bullshit that accompanies the occasional nugget of interest. You can find them by searching for "black aerospace discussion forum" or words to that effect.