So all you aircraft buffs

[Stealth Blimp]

Was the Aurora real yes or no?

No sonic booms without odd-shaped contrails!

[Blackfingers]

No Aurora was  project name for B2 Bomber wing trailing edge redesign off memory.

[Zaphod58]

No. The amount of money in the budget was far too low to be an actual program, and any contrail becomes the so called "donuts-on-a-rope". I watched three do it last week after commercial aircraft went over.

[Avicula]

One point I consistently see people going on about with reference to “Aurora” is the donuts on a rope contrail that were allegedly the result of a pulse detonation engine. 

So…two things about that. First, as Zaphod pointed out, that’s a fairly normal occurrence with regular, every day commercial jets. Under the right atmospheric conditions, you can almost predict when they’ll appear. 

Second, pulse detonation engines are a pretty good option for smaller hardware like missiles, but are apparently not that great for anything that you’d want to put a human into, particularly in that era. 

Now then, did the United States have or work on something to follow the SR-71 in the Cold War 70s and 80s? I would have a hard time believing that we didn’t at least try to do better. I suspect we were trying to engineer something in that time, and that if we HAD managed to pull it off, there would have been a small number of these things that functioned more as technology demonstrators than actual working spy planes. The SR-71 was still in service and, although somewhat limited in where it could go safely, was still working very well elsewhere.

[Kurokage]

Was the Aurora real yes or no?

No sonic booms without odd-shaped contrails!

I'm gonna say no.

Like others have said though, was work carried out on building a replacement/demonstrator?

There must of been a ton of research done and supposedly Area 51 is covered in buried aircraft that will never see the light of day.

[andy06shake]

Was the Aurora real yes or no?

No sonic booms without odd-shaped contrails!

Seems to me an aircraft capable of moving fast enough to skip sonic booms would still leave heat-distortion and plasma trails.

So not the odd contrails people claimed.

[Stealth Blimp]

No. The amount of money in the budget was far too low to be an actual program, and any contrail becomes the so called "donuts-on-a-rope". I watched three do it last week after commercial aircraft went over.

If Zaphod58 doesn't think it existed that's good enough for me!

[Stealth Blimp]

I wonder what engineer Chris Gibson saw in the North Sea in 1989 refueling?

[Kurokage]

I wonder what that engineer saw in the north sea in 1989 being refueled though?

I often think that maybe 'they' built a few test aircraft that saw use a handful of times.

[Zaphod58]

I wonder what that engineer saw in the north sea in 1989 being refueled though?

There are holes in that story. I can’t go back through it right now, but I remember some inconsistencies in it.