Of course, there are many more instruments and hard points for mounting them than shown here. The 700 lbs of armor plating is on all the tops and leading edges of the wings and the rudder and the radial engine cowling, and of course the canopy is also armored - the original plexiglass 'bubble' would never survive!
Here's the kind of damage the hail does - this is a shot of the wing-tip, and you can clearly see the difference that the armor plating makes - the original aluminium wing covering is severely battered, while the armor does not show any damage.
There are several other areas that are heavily armored - the air intakes for the carburetor and for the oil cooler.
Of course, anything that stuck out was either going to get hammered or struck by lightning. What would usually be somewhat delicate instruments on other aircraft had to be modified (I wonder what the Pitot looks like on this thing?). Here's a shot of a detector with a somewhat crumpled dome...
My first thought on seeing these pictures was that it must have been incredibly LOUD in the cockpit. Not only were you riding a 1425 hp Wright Cyclone at several hundred knots, but the noise from the hail must have beed absolutely deafening, mixed in with the occasional lightning strike (which resulted in pieces melting off the trailing edges of the prop and rudder!).
Now that it has been retired, the School of Mines is in contact with the Smithsonian and others to see if anyone is interested in exhibiting N10WX. And of course, the scientific community is looking for another platform that can take this kind of punishment and keep the pilot safe. The candidates so far: an Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt "Warthog" (but chances are not good for an A-10 being released, given the current operations needs for both active ariframes and spares...); or a Coast Guard HU-25 Falcon. Both of these of course are turbofans - it will be interesting to see how the replacement holds up over 50 years of service - if they even make it that long.
The long-time pilot for the T-28, Tom Warner, has a nice homepage for the airplane here (as well as having some great WX photos that deserve a look!).
In this case, a 30 cm layer of lighter-coloured sandy tsunami deposits overlies the previous darker-coloured soil surface. Jody showed similar sections from the West coast with grey tsunami deposits sandwiched between the pre-existing soils and the later, younger soils on top of them (in the above photo, the younger soils overlying the tsunami deposit have not been deposited yet, since the tsunami occurred so recently).
As you might imagine, Jody is in great demand these days, and is in Washington DC to speak at a Smithsonian press event tomorrow morning at the Willard. She has been dealing a lot with public misconceptions about tsunamis, and she spoke to us about the threat to the Atlantic coast.
One item she mentioned was the threat from the cataclysmic collapse of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canaries, much quoted in the press, and parroted by me here. It turns out that the model producing a 25 meter high wave on the East coast is a model by Steve Ward at UC Santa Cruz (you can see a set of Steve's powerpoints on landslide generated tsunamis here, including diagrams of the Cumbre Vieja predicted wave). Of course, disasters make for good news, so the work by Steve on the tsunami and by Bill McGuire of the Benfield Greig Centre in the UK on the collapse of Cumbre has been played up a fair bit by the press.
This much, at least, is still science. On to the outright fakery portion.
Immediately after the Sumatra event, all sorts of photos emerged purporting to be of the tsunami. Fortunately many of them were real, which can help educate people on what to do in this situation, and to document what happened. Others were outright fakes that only serve to propagate misconceptions. Jody used the following example in her talk that I had seen floating around on the internet, and which I had tried to stamp out as well as I could by telling people it was a fake (the red letters are mine, more below on that...).
I hadn't paid much attention to it in the last few weeks until I saw it again, up on the big projection screen, and it screamed out "South America" to me. I don't know exactly why, but something in the architecture, setting, etc. just made me think the city was in Latin America. At first I thought it was Bogota, because one of the buildings looks somewhat like the Tequendama Hotel, and a far off building looks like the Avianca skyscraper, but there were still several things wrong for the skyline to be Bogota.
A quick search on Snopes.com identified this tsunami picture as a known fake - and pointed to a what they claim as the source for the original photo of the Antofagasta skyline at World City Photos:
Sure enough, this photo by Christian Lantadilla is of the same scene. However, I do not think this is the photo that was used in the fake.
To confirm this, I did a bit more searching myself. First, are the two photos Antofagasta at all? Sure enough, there is a giveaway photo of the Antofagasta waterfront here, in an artcle in Realidad, a Chilean magazine. Here is the photo:
I have added letters to identify several landmarks. The fake tsunami and Lantadilla photos are taken looking South, with the city to the left. The Realidad photo is taken looking to the North. The letter "A" marks a tall building with yellow and red bricks with a characteristic roof shape. "B" indicates another building with characteristic red and white brickwork, while "C" indicates a park area.
But back to the difference between the tsunami and Lantadilla scenes of Antofagasta. As can be seen in the Realidad picture, it is very probable that the other photos were taken from the dark building at the end of the road just to the left of the "B." My guess is that these two photos were taken from different floors, at different times.
First, look at the mountains and the air and light surrounding them. The lighting and visibility is totally different between the two pictures, and this is not something easily changed with image processing - nor would there be a motive for the person faking the tsunami to put the work into changing the apparent visibility. The Lantadilla photo was taken on a clear, sunny day, while the fake tsunami background was taken on a more overcast, flatter lighted day. On the street next to the park there are tree shadows in the Lantadilla photo that are not present in the other (there is also a vehicle on this street in the tsunami picture that is not in the Lantadilla photo).
Second, the parallax in the photos is different. My guess is that the fake tsunami photo was taken from higher up, and more to the West (seaward), than the Lantadilla photo. It's difficult to tell with the images here, but if you download the originals, you can tell that the red & white brick building shifts ever so slightly against the more distant buildings behind it when you alternate between the two photos. You can see more of the roof (upwards motion) in the fake photo, and the red brick stripe moves leftwards against the building in the background (seaward movement of the observer). In this area there are several other inconsistencies - a possible reflection in the blue-glassed building that is either not there or due to intervening construction between the two photo times, and construction or modifications on the grey building that extends from the red & white to the park area.
I'm convinced that a) the tsunami photo is fake, b) the background is Antofagasta, and c) the fake was not made with Christian Lantadilla's photo.
In the end, what is wrong with the fake photo's water? Why couldn't this be a real tsunami in Chile? First is the scale - look at the height of that wave - it's taller than some of the apartment buildings. Only a major asteroid impact would give that kind of height. A tsunami is a low wall of water that simply keep on coming - sort of like a step function, and not a tall curling wave. Second, the scale of the features in the wave is wrong - look at the ripples and the foam - they just look wrong compared to the size of the cars. Now - there have been tsunamis in Antofagasta, with 1995 being the most recent - but they NEVER looked like this. This is not what a tsunami looks like - at a distance, tsunamis look harmless enough for you to simply stand there and watch. ...and take photos. ...and wait. ...and film. ...and suddenly realize that there is a river of seawater coming for you!
I had to chuckle as I was putting this post together: "Realidad" is Spanish for reality, or truth.
This is a picture of something any sedimentologist would recognize as a classic example of either cross-bedding or an angular unconformity (thanks to Ian Carr and Jackie Huntoon, who sorted out my misconceptions here...).
In cross-bedding, an advancing dune lays thin layers at an angle ('foresets') on its down-current face. This can be caused by either wind or water. The foresets are usually quite thin, and often occur in sets of sets, between bedding planes that are (or were) horizontal. Unfortunately, we can't see much lower - the section is buried in debris at the bottom.
In an angular unconformity, the lower layers (to the lower left in the frame) would have been laid down, tilted, and then eroded, cutting across the bedding (the diagonal discontinuity). The upper layers (in the upper right of the frame) were then laid down on top of this new surface. This is usually interpreted as physical evidence of at least tectonics and erosion, very possibly water-related.
These processes are common enough on Earth, but this is the Burns Cliffs inside Endurance crater on Mars. I'm amazed this didn't receive more press time than those incredibly cryptic "blueberries."
I'm sure that someone out there is doing numerical modeling of cross bedding for Mars, because there are a whole different set of physical constraints - different gravity, different viscosity of the air, windspeeds, etc. A lot of money has gone into this modeling for Earth, because of the oil industry, so there are probably a lot of starting points for budding Areologists...
Here is a (very large) image of some great soft sediment deformation - usually interpreted as a stream or river deposit, or at least a lake bottom with active slumping going on. The famous "blueberries" are quite prominent here - they were at first thought to be spatter from eruptions or impacts (like tektites), but some of their settings convinced the mission scientists that they were formed in place as concretions. Other physical evidence for water was the presence of vugs, or cavities where a crystal of some mineral deposited was later dissolved, leaving a hole.
It is very likely that similar cross bedding features exist on Titan, since there are liquids, winds, and enough body size for tectonics. However it is doubtful that we shall ever see them, since Huygens had no way to get around, much less usable battery power to do so. It was a feat just to get there and sit crippled on the surface while freezing to death.
...and yes, I feel sorry for the poor thing. I've felt sorry for them before (1, 2).
Huygens is on the surface! Blocks of ice (?) litter the surface in this raw DISR image from the surface of Titan, 67 light-minutes distant from us. Luckily the lander was not toppled over and unable to point its uplink antenna... what I noticed was the rounded nature of the rocks. Also, very much like Mars, isn't it? Even with such different surface composition and temperatures!
ESA Cassini-Huygens website
First image of the surface of Saturn's moon Titan from the Huygens probe. Prominent are the dendritic drainage patterns that appear to head off to the upper left, and what appears to be a remnant crater in the center of the scene. The contrast between the light left and darker right side is not yet understood - perhaps even a shoreline with some islands, but the center of the scene is definitely a solid surface, upon which the probe appears to have survived at least two hours, transmitting data to Cassini above.
Image is a screen grab from NASA TV transmitting from ESA HQ in Darmstadt, Germany. Altitude of lander about 16.2 km, leading to a pixel size of about 40 meters. The quality is so bad that I am reminded of the Mariner Mercury shots... expect better quality soon.
