transports – Page 13 – Aerospace Projects Review Blog

Bell fold-back tiltrotor

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Aug 122018

A photo of a 1960’s Bell Helicopter concept for a high-speed tiltrotor. In this design the aircraft would operate in hover and low speed much like the V-22, but at higher speeds the prop-rotors would stop rotating and fold back to reduce drag. Forward thrust would be provided by pure jet exhaust from the convertible turboshaft engines within the fuselage.

I have uploaded high-rez scans of the color glossy photo to the 2018-08 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.

If you are interested in this image and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on? Taxes? Bah. Invest in the APR Patreon instead.

Boeing HLH art: 1

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Aug 102018

A piece of Boeing Heavy Lift Helicopter artwork that was on ebay a while back. The XCH-62 HLH was an early 1970’s concept cancelled in ’74. The first prototype was under construction when cancelled; NASA tried to revive and finish the prototype in the 80’s, but got nowhere. The prototype was controversially turned into garbage at the US Army Aviation Museum in 2005. This was *not* a popular decision. nor was cancelling the thing in the first place; had it been built it would have had the ability to lift 22.5 tons.

This illustration shows it carrying a standard shipping container from a cargo vessel to shore. The container seems to contain fuel; it’s being used to refuel a Boeing Vertol UH-61, a design which competed against- and lost to – the Sikorsky S-60 Black Hawk.

So you want to know what the inside of a Soviet-era ekranoplan looks like…

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Jul 022018

This will hook you right up:

https://zen.yandex.ru/media/promtur/gde-raspolojen-tualet-i-drugie-vnutrennie-osobennosti-ekranoplana-orlenok—5b0ed4827ddde88e54b59c90

Lots of photos.

“Life With Lockheed”

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Jun 302018

In 1959 Lockheed printed up a self-promotion booklet to sell to new and prospective employees the advantages of their Georgia facility. It includes a lot of photos showing the joys of working in the deep south in the era before universal adoption of air conditioning while wearing three piece suits and ties, as well as photos and art of the various facilities, aircraft and projects then at work at Lockheed-Georgia.

I have posted the full-rez scan of the booklet, available to $10+ APR Patreon patrons. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

Boeing Hypersonic Airliner

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Jun 262018

Faster Than Concorde: Boeing Hypersonic Jet Concept Would Cross Atlantic In 2 Hours

Boeing revealed artwork of a hypersonic transport at an AIAA conference in Atlanta. Capable of Mach 5, Boeing suggests that they could build this aircraft soon… in as little as 20 or 30 years.

Not a whole lot of detail on this one as yet. And given that the claim is “thirty years in the future,” chances are that this design is little more than artwork. The fuselage is pretty generic (although those are some big windows for a Mach 5 aircraft), but the wings and stabilizers (and apparent engine nacelles) are taken from previous Boeing designs stretching back to the 70’s.

APR Patreon April 2018 rewards issued

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Apr 292018

Rewards have been issued to APR Patreon patrons for April, 2018. This month, the “Diagram” is a Sikorsky lithograph of a Heavy Lift Helicopter concept. The Documents include a US Army catalog of airborne weaponry; a paper describing possible additional missions for the Saturn launch vehicles, and BOAC brochure extolling the virtues of the Comet 4 jetliner. The CAD diagram is of the British Interplanetary Society’s “Deadalus” starship design.

If you are interested in helping to preserve (and get copies of) this sort of thing, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

Extras added for APR Patrons

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Apr 212018

APR Patrons contributing more than $10 per month were today sent a 1969 diagram of a preliminary design for what would become the AWACS plane… close, but with eight engines rather than four. This design was illustrated in color artwork from time to time.

And for APR Patrons at the $4 and above level, a diagram of the 777 and scans of a McDonnell-Douglas brochure on the “Med-Lite Family” of launch vehicle concepts have been uploaded to the 2018-04 APR Extras folder on Dropbox:

If you are interested in these and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on? Taxes?

Lockheed L-2000 SST art: 2

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Feb 282018

The L-2000 was Lockheed’s entrance into the mid-1960’s FAA contest to design and develop an American supersonic transport. The FAA wanted the US to have an SST substantially better than the Anglo-French Concorde, with up to 250 passengers and a cruise speed of up to Mach 3 (as fast as an SR-71). Interestingly, the Concorde was not expected to be a long0lived design, but rather was simply going to be the *first* SST, a technology demonstrator, a diplomatic endeavor between historic enemies Britain and France, a flying sales brochure for Angle-French industry. And the Tupolev Tu 144 was an attempt to put something, *anything*, into the air first.

In the end, the FAA selected the Boeing 2707 design, ending the L-2000. And after great promise was shown, politics killed the Boeing 2707, ending substantial forward progress in civil aviation. Since then, air flight has gotten cheaper and more efficient, but it has not gotten any faster… and it certainly hasn’t become more comfortable.

This artwork depicts an earlier configuration with a simpler, less elegant shape.

I’ve uploaded the full rez scans to the 2018-02 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all current APR Patrons at the $4 level and above. If you are interested in this and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. Chances are good that $4/month is far cheaper than your espresso/booze budget!

APR Patreon rewards, February, 2018

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Feb 272018

Rewards have been issued to APR Patreon patrons for February, 2018. This month, the diagram is a 1/40 scale B-52B diagram. Normally the diagrams are sent out at full 300 dpi (with 125 dpi for the $1.25 patrons), but at 300 dpi the diagram is simply Way Too Big at over 40,000 pixels wide. Most image viewing programs will simply go “nope”and refuse to even try to display such images. so this month the image is sent out at 200 dpi (still slightly over 30,000 pixels wide), and 83 dpi for the $1.25 patrons. The 83 dpi version is also included for the higher level patrons for easier viewing.

Also: the documents this month include a United Aircraft paper on advanced future space propulsion systems as seen from 1969, and a January 1953 Douglas Aircraft design study for the DC-8. The CAD diagram this month is the Ganswindt Weltenfahrzeug… a truly terrible design for a spaceship from 1899. Terrible though it may be, it one of the first designs that is clearly in the Project Orion family tree…

If you are interested in helping to preserve (and get copies of) this sort of thing, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

XC-120

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Feb 252018

Almost forgotten these days is the Fairchild XC-120 “Packplane,” the single example of which flew from 1950 to 1952. It was a cargo plane with a difference… the cargo was carried not in the fuselage, but in a replaceable “pod” carried below the flat-bottomed fuselage. It would permit the carriage and easy swapping of specialty pods… surgical units, housing, that sort of thing. An interesting notion, but not interesting enough to merit production.

Like a lot of aircraft, not a whole lot of good diagrams of the XC-120. I found a kinda horrible copy in a report, split into several pieces, and stitched it back together.

I’ve uploaded the full-rez version to the APR Patreon Extras Feb 2018 folder, available to all APR patrons at the $4 level and higher.

Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light!

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