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Fanwing Planes?
waimate writes "Up until now, there's been fixed wing, or there's been rotating wing, and that's it. But now thanks to Patrick Peebles, there's an entirely new principle of flight called the Fanwing. Initially developed in secrecy and flown only at night, as reported in this Bulletin article this machine combines the many of the attributes of helicopters and conventional aircraft, but not by combining the worst aspects of both like the V-22 Osprey. The FanWing is a whole new way of getting off the ground, particularly suited to inner city applications. It's only downfall (he he) is that it lacks any ability to glide in the event of an engine outage. Includes videos of the prototype in action."
Will a dainty girl walking on the beach do the first commerical for this?
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The FanWing is a whole new way of getting off
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So affordable flying cars by next year then? We are a bit overdue.
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It is a neat concept and works well on the model. But it just feels like scaling it up to the point where it will lift meaningful weight will prove it to be not efficient.
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It seems their web server was in the same building than security.debian.org , because it too doesn't show any sign of life anymore.
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My Right to autorotate shall not be abridged!
;-)
Otherwise it sounds cool, might get one for my ex-wife
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Ha, it looks like someone took one of those Mississippi River paddleboat steamers and built an airplane around it...
Now, the scary part is that I wrote a report on this maniac/genius back in high school and I remembered his name so I could google for it...
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"...particularly suited to inner city applications ... it lacks any ability to glide in the event of an engine outage"
No way, bad idea! I've seen more people that I need to running out of gas to recognize this as a *bad* idea. The ability to glide is *important* and very useful when things seriously seizes to function
</KARMA>
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Google's caching of the primary pages wasn't very helpful. Too many frames and redirects to go through to get to a page that had any real information.
Try Google's Images to get at least an idea of what we're talking about.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
some images of the plane on google
So the Fanwing is especially suited for inner city applications? I'm guessing it's all chromed up and has a CD player that goes boom boom boom boom da boom.
I seem to remember a report of the first successful real-world use of a emergency parachute for light aircraft. A cessna-like plane had its engines cut own and the pilot was able to parachute his entire plane to safety.
Perhaps that is a valid solution for this fanwing bird.
i.e. it has propellers on the wings, just like the pinion feathers on the wings of a bird. It fles like a bird, therefore.
Does that not make it an ornithopter? Do the wings flap? I can't tell from the bullettin article.
The more detailed page is slashdotted, I only read the article, so it is very posible I'm missing something.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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Incidentally, where they mention "ballistic recovery system"...that is a parachute. The "ballistic" part refers to a parachute which an explosive launches from a mortar tube, for faster deployment.
Because it's an easy target, I guess. Big money, ambitious project, several setbacks, no supporters anymore. It just happens to be the perfect tool for what it needs to do... that's all.
Give designers a contradictory set of specs (long range/endurance, high speed, VTOL, high capacity) and you get a vehicle that's a bit odd and a bit difficult to build and maintain.
OTOH, I'd trust my life to an osprey ANY DAY over something that can't glide when the engines quit.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
This is not an entirely new principle, its more like a linear ducted fan. or a Stretched turbine
A new principle would exclude fanning, flapping or any kind of turning of wheels (circular motion) to create thrust. This is a beautiful project, but it is really a derivative of Leonardos helicopter, which was an Archimedes screw for air.
When there is propulsion generated without circular motion (props, turbines, ducted fans), or without shooting something out of a tube like rocketry, then we will be talking about something that is really new.
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Ironically, the first thing that they'll do is put a big wing on the back of it.
Does the 2 tons that the fanwing can lift include the weight of the craft, fuel, etc. or is that 2 tons of cargo? The site is down...
It's a squirrel-cage fan along the leading edge of a wing.
The fan throws air over the top of the wing, rather than the air passively flowing over the leading edge. This produces much more lift at slow speeds.
Apparently it operates at slow speeds (100 kph, about 60 mph, is mentioned). I expect that at high speeds, when the forward motion exceeds the speed of the fan rotation, the fanwing behaves like a wing with ridges along the leading edge -- but air can leak through these ridges. A fanwing which starts moving too fast probably begins to lose lift from the leading edge, although it might gain some lift from the rest of the wing. But if a fanwing does not have thrust engines and only gets its forward motion from the fanwing, it can't move faster than the fanwing can push it.
Entirely new? I think not - especially given that the date on the main page says the site was last updated in early 2001(!). Additionally, Radio Control Modeler (RCM) and Model Airplane News (MAN), arguably the two most popular magazines covering model aircraft of all types, had an article about this back in 1999.....
"He's developed a batch of inventions - an electric fork for twirling spaghetti,..."
I think that's sort of a "Hello World" for inventors.
i.e. it has propellers on the wings, just like the pinion feathers on the wings of a bird. It fles like a bird, therefore.
... the full flight one shows the plane stopping and hovering a couple of times ... one of the nice features of having no stall that my plane, alas, cannot emulate.
Does that not make it an ornithopter? Do the wings flap?
Ornithopter wings flap. The fan wing does not flap, so it is in no way an ornithopter (nor does it resemble one). It is a fixed wing with a horizontal rotor inside which pulls air across the lifting surface and creates a vortex which lifts the plane. Think of a big combine built into the wing, spinning quickly, and you get a rough idea. The videos are pretty cool
It isn't a new "principle" of aviation by any means, but it is a new and very promising design. Unfortunately the patent will probably limit design improvements by anyone other than the original inventor for the next twenty years or so, but there will be some innovative uses and improvements despite that, and in twenty years, once the patent expires, there will doubtless by quite a hayday of new designs.
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I am no pilot, but I can give a view of autorotation. Basically, the rotor can work both ways - rotor turns and drives air, or air running through rotor turns it. So if the engine fails, you declutch the engine and keep the rotor turning as yo descend - fast but not too fast. You use the enerdy of your descent to keep the rotors turning, keeping the rotors on shallow pitch - which also slows your descent. As *just* the right moment, you put the rotors into steep pitch, which rapidly converts the kinetic energy of the rotors into lift - which kills your vertical speed just befor you hit the ground - you hope.
Autorotaion is *much* hairier than gliding a plane, because you have to time things much more precisely, killing your descent at the right moment. But it is *much* better than the alternative (plummetting).
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In sum, with a glide ratio of 2:1 or 3:1, you don't want to lose power in a fanwing. Let's hope they're successful in increasing it.
A reconnaissance platform needs survivability. A design such as this does not appear to offer any sort of low-observabilty, or alternatively, high speed for defensive requirements. This particular design could be brought down with the lowest-tech of weaponry. That said, it might serve well as a surveillance platform for peacetime uses, if it had loiter time that made the development effort worthwhile - if such a wing/propeller design could handle heavy weather well, and hold together for long periods of time (you are rotating a large mass at a high speed in this design). A development effort for a large passenger-carrying aircraft such as depicted in the google cache of the photos can be a several hundred million dollar process to meet FAA certification requirements to have people on board.
Because of the design expense, an aircraft needs to be focused to a particular market segment. However, paraphrasing Bill Lear, who designed the Lear jet, the trick is to discern that market before others. This particular aircraft has a unique wing and lift-engine design, but that doesn't mean at endgame that it'd be a worthwhile development effort, since the technology in use now has made great strides in efficieny and cost. But it's certainly worth studying at a certain level of investment (of time and money), since who knows what will turn out to be the better mousetrap.
Capitalizing on such technological improvements in design approach, material availability, market desire for a particular platform, etc, is hard work and a lot of luck to make it a cost-effective endeavor considering the (necessary for safety) expense of certification.
Disclosure: I work in the business - www.avtechgroup.com
Very good description. And the way we "de clutch" the engine (in the UH-1Hs that I flew) was a "sprag clutch" that would allow the engine power to go to the transmission system but would disengage if it was not driving the rotor, thus not dragging down the trans/rotor/etc.
Sorry that I missed answering part of Ender Ryan's question. Yes, I have autorotated meny times, it is something we practiced in flight school and throughout the time I was flying. Since I began flying helicopters and then learned to fly airplanes much later, autorotation seems "normal" to me and gliding an airplane seems "boring". Just a perspective thing.
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Another aircraft that combined many of the advantages of helicopters and airplanes was the Fairey Rotodyne. It was an autogyro that converted temporarily to helicopter mode for vertical takeoff and landing.
This was back in the 1950s.
An autogyro generates lift using an unpowered rotor that rotates in the airstream. It is probably the safest type of aircraft because it can land by autorotation. Some helicopters can also do that but they are much more difficult to control. An autogyro can fly faster than a helicopter, though not as fast as an airplane. Autogyros are also more fuel-efficient than helicopters.
The big drawback of autogyros is that they can't take off and land vertically. They need a short runway.
The Rotodyne overcame this limitation by using small jets at the tips of the rotor blades that converted it to a helicopter for the duration of
the takeoff and landing.
See this page if you want to know more about the history of the Rotodyne and why we don't have regular Rotodyne passenger flights between city hubs today.
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****Warning****
I am not responsible for any severed arteries, eyes gouged out, or for you getting fired for doing this at work. It's all you baby!
1) Get the materials.
Go get one of those plastic Bic ball point pens. The kind with the white tube. Then get a pair of scissors, a pocket knife, or a pair of needle nose pliers.
2) Remove cap from pen. Remove the black plastic cone from the "writing" end of the pen. This also pulls out the ink tube.
3) You now have a white plastic tube with a little black cap in the end. Get that cap out. Use the pocket knife, scissors, or the pliers to get the thing out. If you destroy the end of the white plastic tube, just cut it off clean again.
4)Now you have just a white plastic tube. Wee! This is your fanwing plane. You're about to make it fly using the same principle.
5) Clean off a table so there's nothing on top. Face one side of it. Put the pen tube near and parallel to the edge. Lock your thumbs under the edge of the table and place all 8 fingertips on the white tube.
6) Pressing down as hard as you can, roll your fingers back towards you.
7) If all goes well, the tube will spin very fast and fly through the air, doing loops and such.
I've actually got the things to fly twenty yards. And the do all kinds of twists and loops.
The principle that keeps the fanwing plane in the article in the air works here too - only with no control or stability.
Enjoy, and don't get in trouble.
I was downtown, tooling along the sidewalk on my Segway, when this moron in a Fanwing who was trying to read email on his simputer crashed into me.
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gliding an airplane seems "boring".
Just gotta say that in anything that flies, boring is considered a good thing. Excitement can mean something is going very wrong.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
...as I think they were called in the states ... my airman's exam included a few ancient questions about them, though to my knowledge they are essentially extinct. A helicopter pilot I quered described them as you do -- combining features of a fixed-wing and helicopter -- but as he put it, the gyroplane adopted all the worst aspects of each.
:)
:)
Most regular helicopters can land quite well by autorotation, in fact emergency autorotation is 75% of helicopter flight training if one already knows how to fly. Autorotating is basically diving to build up momentum in the rotor after a power failure, then increasing the pitch of the blades to slow descent into, one hopes, a half-decent landing. I tried this once with an instructor in a doorless Robinson, and as a fixed-wing pilot I admit it scared the heck out of me.
I glimpsed a gyroplane in flight for the first time the other night watching the classic It Happened One Night (1934; Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert). Highly recommended -- the movie, not the flying contraption.
... he used to mow his lawn with it. Rotary push-mower, I believe it was called.
There's an amusing but morbid story of how he connected a B&O engine to the mower, and ended up flying over two counties and setting a new altitude record before running out of gas and thereby learning that the thing simply does not and, rather terminally, will not autorotate.
Ol' Ms. Winslow's petunias were crushed when he hit the ground, and she went rather catatonic for several months, what with having been working on the begonias a few feet away when the old man splattered, but the story goes that they were prize-winners the following year.
Within my own family, it led to an everlasting fear of lawnmowers. My grannie had her yard turned into a gravel Zen garden, and my father took it even a step further when he married and moved out of the home, choosing to encase the yard in a foot-thick pad of reinforced concrete painted a nasty, hinky green.
I'm the renegade of the family, though, what with being several generations removed from this early air disaster, and have planted my own yard with low-growing, never-needs-mowing golf green fescue. It doesn't need trimming, and I've every opportunity to practice my putting.
True story, all of it, I swear.
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Nonsense. You can bring a light airplane down on any flat surface that is a couple hundred feet long. I have personally landed Cessnas in muddy fields during flight test practice. It's bumpy, and not ideal, but it can be done. In emergency situations, all you care about is walking away, not saving the airplane.
Incidentally, landing into trees is preferable to landing on water. Skimming the tops of trees cushions the landing and provides gradual slowing. And if you're knocked unconcious, you'll hang in the trees till rescuers arrive. If you pile into the water, on the other hand, you might as well be hitting concrete at those speeds. Sure, there won't be a fire, but if you're knocked unconcious, you're as good as dead (drowning).
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Last time I checked, helicopters didn't tend to glide all that well either (sometimes akin to rocks).
A lot of helicopters have the ability to decouple the blades from the engine in the case of an engine failure, alowing a much more controlled landing than would be possible if the blades simply stopped. The momentum of the blades allows the helicopter to stay in the air a lot longer, in a sort of glide. You're more committed to an immediate landing than in some planes, but it's still a lot better than simply plummeting to the ground...
I went through military flight training in the late 80's. We would autorotate to the ground, not only in UH-1H (Hueys), but the little TH-55's as well (military name for a Hughes/Schweitzer 300).
There's two basic flavors of autorotation; from a hover and from forward flight. There's a whole range of the flight envelope that is unrecoverable, basically anything low and slow. Autorotation from a hover is simple. You let the thing settle towards the ground and just pull up before you collide with it. From forward flight is when you have to declutch and "glide" down with a flare at the end.
The TH-55's were light enough that we could pretty much stop our forward momentum before touching down, but the Hueys, being a bit heavier, would land with a fair amount of forward momentum left. They strapped these inch-thick steel bars to the bottoms of the skids for us students to grind off on the landing strips. Hours of fun!
The sprag clutch is a one way clutch. If power is applied it engages and drives the shaft to the rotor mast (if I remember correctly where it is located. for this discussion it is just important that it is in tthe drivetrain). When power is removed it disengages and allows the system to turn without the friction of the "dead" or reduced RPM engine dragging it down.
;-) The main thing you are looking for when you loose power is a clear place to land and you don't need much room since you can land, safely and reliably, no power, within the dimensions of the aircraft and without a "slide" or runout.
A sprag clutch failure does result in rotor RPM being coupled to engine RPM. An engine failure at this time would be catastrophic.
Yes, landing with no power is reliable, since you WILL land if you loose power
We would usually practice autorotations in conjunction with a simulated forced landing, with the instructor chopping the throttle while announcing "forced landing" and the response is to call for the governer switch to be set to emergency as you drop the collective and setup an approach to your selected landing spot. During the process, the engine is providing no power to the rotor system, but it is sitting at idle waiting to be "run up" again in case of an emergency or completion of the maneuver.
The only time that I "banged one up" was practicing night low-level (50') autos and I was landing hard on an asphault strip. Cracked a skid shoe (metal part under the skid for flight school aircraft because of the extra wear the maneuvers put on the aircraft) in the process.
Some time before I stopped flying the Army stopped doing auto's to the ground outside of flight school and unit instructors since the statistics were lining up that we were breaking more aircraft on landing than the number of engine failures were producing, or something like that.
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What most people do not understand about light aircraft is that the propellor does not actually provide any thrust; it is there to cool the pilot. This is easy to prove -- just watch how much the pilot starts to sweat if it stops.
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