Russians Invade with Flying Saucer

Ridgelift writes "Wired is covering a project revived from Russia by the US Naval Air Systems Command: The Ekip, a pita-bread-shaped, stubby-winged, wheel-less, unmanned ship that weighs in at 500 pounds. 'For more than two decades, engineers at a former Soviet aerospace plant have been toiling on a drone aircraft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space.'"

Comments

Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[evil_one]

AVRO Canada had a working flying saucer back in the height of the cold war.
Link: http://www.avroarrow.org/Avrocar/Avrocar.html

Re:Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[digital bath]

Moller International has been working on personal 'skycars' for a long time. Some of their earlier models resemble flying saucers, strangely enough.

I can't wait to own one of these, though.

Re:Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[pkhuong]

Working is a bit of an exaggeration. IIRC, it could hover, but wasn't stable enough, so they only let it fly tethered to the ground.

Re:Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[pipingguy]

AVRO Canada had a working flying saucer back in the height of the cold war.

The hosers also developed a great interceptor, but it got shitcanned due to the emerging threat of ballistic missiles. Or something like that. Some say the program was killed by the Marecans.

Re:Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[Anonymous Coward]

You will be waiting a long time. Moller has been bilking investors since the early 70's for his various sky-cars that will be available 'next year'.

Re:Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[DynaSoar]

From the WIRED article: "In the 1950s, at a plant just outside of Toronto, the Avro-Canada company designed a jet-powered saucer it dubbed the Avrocar. Intrigued by the UFO-esque craft, the U.S. Air Force took over the project in 1955."

Had the designer allowed them to put an apron around the bottom and keeping it close to the ground, rather than insisting on trying to make it fly as it was, he would have been credited with inventing the hovercraft. The original design was too prone to rotary oscillation when it got too high (like 3 feet).

Also: "But despite piles of Pentagon cash, and years of testing, the Avrocar couldn't stay stable more than a few feet off the ground. The program was finally killed in 1965. An Avrocar test model can still be found in a National Air and Space Museum storage facility near Washington."

The other AVRO (of the two built for the US) is on display outside the US Army Transportation Museum at Ft. Eustis, Virginia, half an hour northwest of Norfolk/Virginia Beach. The visitors' center plays a 15 minute documentary about it including footage of flight (such as they were) tests.

Re:Ever heard of the AVRO Car?

[GooberToo]

I've seen a documentary on this vehicle on History or Discovery channel. The car was crap. The only reason it was even semi-stable close to the ground was because of the cushion of air (ground effect) that it cruised on to keep it stable. Once it left the "ground effect", it was a death trap. One of the "cars" were finally taken to a wind tunnel to find out how stable it was and how much lift they could hope to produce from one in the wild.

The wind tunnel tests showed it to be a death trap, begging to kill anyone that wanted to fly it. In order to help stabilize it, they added a huge horizontal stabilizer to the tail end of it. It was basically a huge wing grafted to the tail of it. It was still considered to be a flying death trap, in spite of the fact that it was considerably more stable with the horizontal stabilizer attached.

Worse yet, the engines were not able to generate enough thrust for the vehicle to ever properly fly because the vehicle was so incredibly over weight. Early vehicles could not generate enough thrust to get more than 10 or 20 feet into the air. Basically, just high enough to leave the "ground effect" generated from it's thrust and shape, to properly kill the pilot. Long story short, the vehicle was a horrible design, which was horribly under powered, and unfit for flight, even with a large "wing" added to it. Aerodynamic engineers certainly had a good bit of laughs when they go a hold of that beast.

This uses ION propulsion technology

[rkz]

I spent a lot of time studying this technology while I was working towards my Bachelor's Degree. Okay, let's get some facts straight, for those of you without a degree in Mathematics or Physics:

1) Ion Propulsion is NOT new technology. The Russians and German's have been experimenting with Ion Propulsion since the early 1950's. NASA is actually a late comer to the game, although the first with a completed ion propulsion engine.

2) Ion Propulsion do not work in an environment with an atmosphere. An ion engine does not have enough force to lift a sheet of paper more than a few inches.

3) An Ion Engine is very simple in design. For a simple explanation, an inert gas is ionized and injected into a chamber with an opening on one end. The opening has a magnetized torid ring around it. Using the right hand rule (make a fist, stick your thumb out like you are hitchhiking...your thumb is the direction of the electric current, your fingers are curled in the direction of magnetic field flow) you create an electrical flow around the metal torid ring. The resulting magnetic field 'pulls' the ions through the ring, resulting in propulsion.

4) The reason for slow inital acceleration is because the force of the ions passing through the ring is very small, but the velocity of the ions is very high. So, since there is no friction or other losses in space, after a period of time the velocity of the ions leaving the ring increases the velocity of the engine. After a matter of days the engine can be travelling at 10-30,000MPH.

For more information and history on Ion Propulsion engines you can go to the following websites:

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop06 ap r99_2.htm

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/ds1.htm

http://space-power.grc.nasa.gov/ppo/projects/nst ar /

Re:Really?

[mr i want to go home]

Ok, before I get flamed to hell, I'll correct that last post.... It does use turobojets, and is supplemented by turboshafts. My bad. But it's still not ion propulsion technology. The parent poster has been stealing crack from SCO.

Bad Design for Passengers..

[hopbine]

One of the things that killed the passenger flying wing project was that folks on the outside of the aircraft will be going up and down too much when the plane rolls. This design appears to have the same problem. Hand out the sick bags!!!

Re:Bad Design for Passengers..

[owlstead]

Yes, the prototypes are unmanned. But if the article is as short as this, you might want to take a look at the link. There _are_ meant for passengers.

Not that they will succeed in the current financial climate. Which is a shame, since I hope that that these cramped, noisy, poluting jets we are using now are not the end of aviation evolution.

Ekip Aviation Concern Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out http://www.ekip-aviation-concern.com/ for a brouchure with lots of details and more pictures.

The AVROCAR couldn't even get it up

[Colymbosathon ecplec]

According to the article (yes I actually read it before posting, and yes I am new here): But despite piles of Pentagon cash, and years of testing, the Avrocar couldn't stay stable more than a few feet off the ground. The program was finally killed in 1965. An Avrocar test model can still be found in a National Air and Space Museum storage facility near Washington. A "working flying saucer"? I don't think so.

Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets

Re:Wright Flyer vs Flying Saucer.

[uradu]

> had used lift tables on their early gliders that had been made 30 years before by a German man

That "German man" was Otto Lilienthal, hardly an obscure figure. In fact, many consider him at least as important as the Wrights, since he pioneered controllable heavier-than-air flight and made further pursuits into and consideration of flight even acceptable. And he did it all alone.

Re:Haven't seen Plan 9

[DrEasy]

Plan 9 From Outer Space is a very cheaply made B-movie by Ed Wood. It's kinda entertaining in its own way. You can easily tell that the flying saucers in there are very cheap props hanging by a thread... Tim Burton is a big Ed Wood fan, he even did a movie bearing his name which I haven't seen, but Mars Attacks is also some sort of tribute to him I guess.