Stavatti Military Aerospace has come up with another unusual airplane. I have absolutely no idea why a wing in that configuration is considered optimal and their website doesn't give details...but for pure fantasy its hard to beat.
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The website actually has quite a bit of info, but basically the shape of the wing produces more lift at lower speeds than a conventional wing by 'pulling' the air over it, allowing the aircraft to become airborne in a short amount of time so it can take off and land on short runways. Sort of like Credible Sport but with a lot less rockets.
ReplyDeletei'll go back and re-read it.
ReplyDeletebut why would you use such an unorthodox configuration to achieve this?
The engines have to be behind the wing to pull the air over it and the half-cylinder shape, which is the same size as the rotor, allows only air from above the wing to be pulled by the rotors to create the pressure difference needed for lift.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia has some good articles on it;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_wing
&
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer_Channel_Wing
Willard Custer worked on his "Channel Wing" concept for decades, and reading his patents make for some good technical history reading. The lift and controlability performance gain at low speeds were impressive for the day, but the higher speed performance was disappointing. The channel wing's low-speed aerodynamic attraction could never be overcome by the penalty coming from structural complexity (difficult to manufacture with attending manufacturing costs) and weight. While advances in composites may help make the channel wing economical to build, it seems the originators of this design decided to make using the channel wing even harder. Can you imagine the structural rigidity required between the engine mounts and the wing channel? You have to beef up the engine nacelle/pod that is cantilevered off the horizontal. You'd have to beef up the horizontal to handle the twist from the mass of the engine/pod AND bear the mass of the pod itself at the end of the cantilever off the aft-most fuselage. And you have to keep all that mass relatively rigid to the wing cantilevered off the mid fuselage. I suspect this is an Aero's fantasy put to CGI without a reality check from structures/mass properties (and I suspect they haven't showed it to propulsion yet either). Cool looking though.
ReplyDeleteOops, shouldn't have just looked at the design so furtively. Upon second glance, most of the cantilever comments are rendered irrelevant. Replace that concern with a probable slightly less severe weight penalty from all the trussing used: That's some complex structure there! The suspicions remain the same however.
ReplyDeleteOooooh...Ya' got me. You should have saved this for April Fools day. You had me hook line and sinker. I should have followed the link earlier (i.e. 'first'). I would have then noticed this guy (guys?) are the 'originator' of the 'Machete': a 'design family' that consistently clogs up the X-Plane.org 'new' and 'modified resources' lists. Kudos to him/them for creating interesting sim designs and sharing (I only use X-plane for personal aircraft design explorations) with the computer pilot community, but hardly worth linking to in a military blog.
ReplyDeletewell on that count SMSGT Mac, you got to cut me a little slack. i had no visibility on these guys and didn't know exactly where they were with the Machete project.
ReplyDeleteit seems doable and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force once stated that a counter insurgency wing was in the making so i kinda took them seriously...i mean if a former crop duster can be used as an attack plane then anything is possible!