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Russians Invade with Flying Saucer

Posted by michael on from the bem dept.

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.'"

1 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. It's time for somebody to do this by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Aviation R&D in the 1950s produced several interesting, but unstable, design concepts. The flying wing, the flying disk, and the flying platform were all tried. Many of the prototypes ended up at the Hiller Aviation Museum in Silicon Valley, which is worth a visit. But all those designs lacked stability, and electronics technology wasn't good enough to do active stabilization at the time.

    The Flying Wing concept was pushed all the way to bomber size, and several were built. Most of them crashed. (Edwards AFB is named after a Flying Wing pilot.) Not until the 1980s, and the Have Blue stealth prototype, was the stability problem resolved adequately. (A modified F-16 analog autopilot handled the stabilization.)

    Some of those 1950s designs could now be revisited. The AvroCar could be made to work today, if anybody cared. If a competent aircraft designer, like Rutan, built one, it would work.

    The problem, of course, is that all pure-thrust vehicles need huge engines and have lousy fuel economy, since they need enough power to go straight up on thrust alone. The only sucessful pure-thrust VTOL aircraft is the Harrier. Since modern fighters have enough thrust to go straight up anyway, a VTOL fighter is feasible. Marginally.

    This new Russian thing sounds flakey, but not fake. They should be able to build a prototype and fly it. But the claims for efficiency are probably not real.

    It sounds like they're fooling around with boundary layer control. This has been done before, all the way back to WWII. Aircraft with "blown" or "sucked" wings have been tried. It works, but the practical problems with a wing full of holes and plumbing have been too great. Ice, for example. A few aircraft, including the C-17, have blown control surfaces, but not the whole wing.

    There's considerable interest in disk-shaped craft in small scales, from the micro air vehicle people. AeroVironment has built some.