This design was made by Waldo Virgil Opfer. 244,265, and closely resembles the earlier mentioned example. On May 10, 1977, a design of an aircraft was patented by Teledyne Ryan under number Des. Cota, employees at Teledyne Ryan, a firm specialized in building unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. This aircraft of low observability, as it is called, was invented by Robert W. This contention is supported by United States Air Force (USAF) sources in the late 1980s confirming that the United States had no short-term plans to develop a low-observable U-2 successor.Īnother candidate for the alleged spy plane is a design from Teledyne Ryan, patented in the United States on April 26, 1977, under number 4,019,699. Potential candidates for TR-3īecause there is little evidence to support TR-3's existence, only sightings and "experience" stories by real people and also the web discussions on it, it is possible that the mysterious flying wing sightings associated with Black Manta could be a technology demonstrator for a potential new-generation tactical reconnaissance aircraft. The Tier III Minus program that resulted in the unsuccessful Lockheed Martin RQ-3 DarkStar was a scaled-down derivative of the original Tier III. It is, therefore possible that TR-3 is merely a corruption of Tier III, a name given to a cancelled large reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying wing designed around the time of alleged sightings of the Black Manta, circa 1988–1990. It is clearly not a continuation of the R-for-Reconnaissance series, since ER-2 (NASA designation for U-2 aircraft modified for Earth science studies) stood for "Earth Resources", not "Electronic Reconnaissance". How the TR-3 designation came up in publications is unclear. The TR-3 was claimed to have been manufactured by Northrop. It was alleged to have been used in the Gulf War to provide laser designation for Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk bombers, for targeting to use with laser-guided bombs. The TR-3 was said to be a subsonic stealth spy plane with a flying wing design.
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