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Robotic Aircraft To Supply Troops
Cowards Anonymous writes "PC World reports on a prototype driverless aircraft designed to shuttle hundreds of pounds of supplies to soldiers in war zones. Dubbed a flying Humvee by Frontline Aerospace's CEO, the robotic vehicle can fly 600 to 1,000 miles carrying a full cargo of 400 pounds. It's about the size of a large SUV, weighing in at 2,400 pounds and measuring 21 feet long and up to 26 feet wide."
While unmanned aerial vehicles are the future of the military, there are some serious concerns in the defense industry about the company Frontline Aerospace that is making noise about this particular drone. Specifically, the CEO appears to be all over the place in terms of his interests and talents as well as some of his claims and there are some substantial criticisms of the packaging and design.
Additionally, UAVs are principally successful because one of the first companies, General Atomics (GA), that produced the successful Predator and Reaper aircraft, developed the Predator design to a functional platform on their own dime and then asked the DOD if they were interested (they obviously were). Frontline Aerospace only has a concept right now and many folks in the defense industry are expressing a healthy skepticism at some of Frontline Aerospace's claims. Admittedly, the fact that GA essentially owns the show with Predator and Reaper does lead to some problems and the pilots are not entirely happy with all of the solutions from GA, but at least GA came to the game with a working system before making substantial claims about performance and capabilities.
I'll be looking forward to what this design potentially has, but as of right now, my eyebrows are a bit raised.
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Anyone bothered to look at the massive composite photo they created with a few soldiers running out to the CG generated drone? You'd think for $4 million a pop they'd at least spend another $1000 to make the photos -look- realistic.
;)
I see quite a lot of these sorts of getups happening, someone gets some specs, waves their hands about, generates some crappy CG and utters a price of a few million. Couple of years later there's nothing really to show for it except some rudimentary framework and an empty office.
Only wish I had gotten in there first
The entire design of this craft baffles me.
First, ducted fans are inefficient compared to rotors. You get a lot more force out of a large diameter and small exit velocity. Its why props are more efficient than turbofans, which are in turn more efficient than turbojets. The ONLY advantage is that the fan is out of the airstream, so high velocities are achievable.
Second, it has very low wing area, meaning you have very high wing loading (bad for fuel economy). Alternatively, they could be using a lifting body (also bad for fuel economy). Considering they have the big fan duct running through the center of the body, the body cannot provide much lift anyway, leaving the fan (even worse fuel economy).
Third, they chose a joined box wing. Box wings can considerably reduce losses from the tip vorticity, but there is so little lift coming off those wings, there's no purpose. The only purpose to joined wings is that they provide structural rigidity to large, light, high aspect ratio wings for high altitude, long endurance craft. This is obviously not the case here.