I think people misunderestimate humans in such scenarios. We were collectively smart enough to develop much of that tech within a human lifetime; having the end product dropped in our lap like that would accelerate things a great deal.
I also think we’d guess pretty early on that the vehicle has weaponry, and identify the likely components for that purpose. Whether we’d blow up the hanger first by pressing every button, I don’t know (I suspect it can’t be that easy to fire missiles while on the ground, but of course I don’t know anything about the pilot interface).
But yeah, I would agree that there’s no way the thing is going to be flown.
I’m wildly speculating that there is zero chance of a WW1 flyboy getting a modern jet off the ground without leaving a large hole in the landscape. It’s an entirely different kind of flying… altogether.
I very much doubt it would ever successfully be flown. The first person to get it wrong would destroy it, and it would take decades just to develop tooling to replace the composite surfaces. I’m fairly sure I couldn’t figure out how to properly mount a missile on an underwing pylon, much less in the F-22’s internal bay.
The F-22 can take off in a surprisingly short distance, which is mostly a side effect of the high maneuverability modern fighter aircraft are designed for (as opposed to the “missile with wings” approach of the 50s and 60s): 1500 feet at maximum takeoff weight.
You couldn’t launch one from a grass airstrip, but you could probably do it from any long well-paved surface, such as Brooklands (which like many British racing tracks of that era doubled as an airfield anyway.)
Those magnificent men in that flying machine,
Don’t go up-uppity-up, they stay down-diddly-down down
They gawk at the buttons, they stare at the screen
Not going up-uppity up: staying down-diddly-down down
Up, down, wiggle it round;
Whatever they do they just stay on the ground
All these buttons to press
They’re getting themselves in a terrible mess
It looks like it should fly;
But there ain’t no way to go up in the sky.
Throw those damn chocks away
It doesn’t seem we’ll go flying today
Those magnificent men in that flying machine
Don’t go up-uppity-up, they stay down-diddly-down down
There’s no propellers, what can it all mean?
There’s no up-uppity-up, they’re stuck down-diddly-down down
There’s no way they can know
What they must do to make this thing go.
“Hold on, look at those things
Some bloody idiot’s stuck on the wings
Get rid of them and we’ll soon make it zoom…”
The last thing they heard was a terrific BOOM.
Those magnificent men in that flying machine
They went up-uppity-up, and came down-diddly-down down
If you know nothing, then don’t be too keen
Or it’s up-uppity-up, and come down-diddly-down down
A short story I read concerned an advanced aircraft and it’s pilot time traveling to WWI. I believe he filtered kerosene to obtain more fuel. His missiles wouldn’t track cloth covered aircraft, and he couldn’t fly as slowly as they. He finally discovered that he could take them down by flying through their formation at Mach I, and the other aircraft would be torn apart.
Sorta the way the F-14s messed with the Zeros in The Final Countdown. Except they just blew past them on afterburner, not at mach speeds.
After watching the shock wave from a B-1 over water, I believe that would be the best weapon. One well-timed pass could down an entire front’s worth of 1917 aircraft.
There is so much engineering, maintenance, and training involved. I can’t imagine they could transition. It would be like being used to an old manual cash register and then being given a computer, with no computer training or experience.
It actually requires less space to land than to take off. Largely because of the fact that friction is on your side on landing but working against you on takeoff.
I don’t really think that would be a problem. A modern infrared targeting system can find a shielded jet exhaust, so it shouldn’t have much trouble locating an unshielded (indeed, unfaired) piston engine even if the latter runs much cooler.
I don’t think that’s a very good analogy. I got a Windows 95 machine in 1996 and taught myself to use it with almost no computer experience (my previous computer was a 1982 BBC Micro which was hardly more advanced than a typewriter.)
If I crashed the computer, I used the restore disk. If you crash the plane, there’s no restore feature.
It’s not a problem if you already know how to fly the aircraft. But consider that you have an aircraft with an empty weight of five tons and a loaded weight of six and a half tons, with a takeoff speed near the maximum speed of WWI aircraft, and with about twenty times the horsepower. You don’t just pick your best pilot and send him out to fly it. The reason I said you’d need a lot of concrete is so that a pilot can work up to it with high-speed taxis, then ‘hops’ in ground effect and stopping before the end of the runway, and so on until he at least has a chance of successfully getting it off the ground. That takes a lot of smooth real estate.
