Though some of you might like this....

[callum666]

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/484066/L/

anybody know anyting about this aircraft?

callum.

[Hakan_Olsson]

It's a flying testbed for a fighter radar owned by Raytheon. The nose looks similair to a F-15 nose but I can't tell for sure.

It's quite common to use testbeds like this to thorougly test a new radar system before you put the system in the aircraft it was designed for. This way you can have a bunch of test engineers monitoring the system and changing components during one single test flight instead of having to do a number of flights with a fighter.

Best regards,
http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...741259b532.jpg

[ChrisTrott]

That's the F-16 nose on that one. F-15 is bigger in diameter and is more round than oval.

And this kind of testing isn't limited to just radars. The USAF had an NKC-135 (KC-135 test aircraft) that was reconfigured to fly the entire integrated offensive and defensive avionics suite of the B-2 to test it out. Similar tests were done with another NKC-135 for the B-1B.