I haven’t had a chance to work on the RV over the past few days, and today was no different, but at least I have a good excuse. I woke up quite early and flew our Cardinal down to Mojave, CA with a couple of friends. We arrived about 9 am and parked out in front of the Scaled Composites hangar. White Knight Two was out on the ramp when we arrived. The coordinator for our trip had arranged for a fleet of limos to drive us over to Edwards AFB, so we hopped in for the 20 minute drive over. We boarded what looked like a retired prison transport bus for the last part of the trip.
First stop was the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. They have a nice museum with many of the supersonic and hypersonic aircraft on display as well as a number of other research aircraft. We got to tour the flightline and saw the apparatus that loads the space shuttle onto the back of the 747 for the trip to Florida when the shuttle lands at Edwards.
After lunch, we went to Edwards where we toured the base and then toured the flight line. They have an enormous number of aircraft there that they use for a wide variety of flight tests. We saw a huge number of F-16 and T-38 aircraft that they use for chase and flight currency. They also have a number of KC-135 and C-17 aircraft stationed there. We saw a B-1B on the flightline as well as a couple of F-22s and one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. There are a number of other aircraft based there including the Predator, but we didn’t get to see them.
The dry lake bed is pretty amazing. 40 square miles of basically perfectly flat surface that’s harder than concrete. They’ve painted 18 runways out on the lake bed including one that’s 7 miles long. There’s also the world’s largest compass rose painted on the lake bed that is 1 mile in diameter.