Northrop T-38 Talon

The Northrop T-38 Talon is a two-seat, twin-engined supersonic jet trainer. It was the world's first supersonic trainer and is also the most produced. The T-38 remains in service as of 2015 in several air forces.

The United States Air Force (USAF) operates the most T-38s. In addition to training USAF pilots, the T-38 is used by NASA. The US Naval Test Pilot School is the principal US Navy operator (other T-38s were previously used as USN aggressor aircraft until replaced by the similar Northrop F-5 Tiger II). Pilots of other NATO nations fly the T-38 in joint training programs with USAF pilots.

As of 2015, the T-38 has been in service for over 50 years with its original operator, the United States Air Force.

Design and development

In 1952 Northrop began work on a fighter project, the Fang, with shoulder-mounted delta wing and a single engine. The proposed General Electric J79 engine, weighing nearly two tons, meant the resulting aircraft would be large and expensive. Then in 1953, representatives from General Electric Aviation's newly created Small Aircraft Engine Department showed Northrop a relatively tiny engine (around 400 lb installed wt) capable of 2,500 lb of thrust, and Northrop VP-Engineering Edgar Schmued saw the possibility of reversing the trend toward the large fighters. Schmued and chief engineer Welko Gasich decided on a small twin-engine "hot-rod" fighter, the N-156. Northrop began its N-156 project in 1954, aiming for a small supersonic fighter jet capable of operating from the US Navy's escort carriers. However, when the Navy chose not to pursue equipping its fleets in that fashion, Northrop continued the N-156 design using in-house funding, recasting it as a lightweight fighter (dubbed N-156F) and aimed at the export market.

T.38

T.38 is an ITU recommendation for allowing transmission of fax over IP networks in real time.

History

The T.38 fax relay standard was devised in 1998 as a way to permit faxes to be transported across IP networks between existing Group 3 (G3) fax terminals. T.4 and related fax standards were published by the ITU in 1980, before the rise of the internet. In the late 1990s, VoIP, or Voice over IP, began to gain ground as an alternative to the conventional Public Switched Telephone Network. However, because most VoIP systems are optimized (through their use of aggressive lossy bandwidth-saving compression) for voice rather than data calls, conventional fax machines worked poorly or not at all on them due to the network impairments such as delay, jitter, packet loss, and so on. Thus, some way of transmitting fax over IP was needed.

Overview

In practical scenarios, a T.38 fax call has at least part of the call being carried over PSTN, although this is not required by the T.38 definition, and two T.38 devices can send faxes to each other. This particular type of device is called Internet-Aware Fax device, or IAF, and it is capable of initiating or completing a fax call towards the IP network.

T38

T38 or T-38 may refer to:

T-38 tank

The T-38 amphibious scout tank was a Soviet amphibious light tank that saw service in World War II.

History

Designed in 1934–36 by N. Astrov's bureau at Factory No. 37 in Moscow, the T-38 was a development of the earlier T-37, based in turn on the French AMR 33 light reconnaissance tank. The tank was powered by a standard GAZ (Ford) engine and was cheap to produce. Buoyancy was achieved by the large-volume hull and large fenders. In water, the vehicle was propelled by a small three-bladed propeller mounted at the rear.

The tanks were intended for use for reconnaissance and infantry support. As a scout tank the T-38 had the advantages of very low silhouette and good mobility through its ability to swim. The T-38 was also intended to be air-portable; during the Kiev maneuvers in 1936, the tanks were transported by Tupolev TB-3 bombers, mounted under the fuselage. Infantry battalions were each issued 38 T-38s, with 50 being designated for each airborne armored battalions. However, the thin armor and single machinegun armament made the tank of only limited use in combat while the lack of radios in most T-38s was a serious limitation in a reconnaissance vehicle. The T-38's limitations were recognized, and it would have been replaced by the T-40, but the outbreak of the Second World War meant that only a few T-40s were produced.