Jan 042021
 

Let me  get this out of the way: flying cars are a COOL IDEA that, when the rubber meets the road and the math hits the calculator, generally doesn’t make much sense. You end up with a car that isn’t that good married to an airplane that isn’t that good.  More expensive than either a car or a light airplane should be, with the performance of neither.

Nevertheless, it remains an evocative notion. And from the standpoint of an aerospace engineer, an interesting engineering exercise. And one of the more recent, more interesting flying car concepts is the “Firenze Lancaire.” This design says “to hell with making a flying car for the masses” and goes straight for the “hypercar” market. The end result is a carbon fiber bodied vehicle with Tesla motors and batteries for getting around on the roads, and two turbojets for getting around in the air. The car is quite large and would be difficult to park, but if you’re paying five million dollars for a car you’re probably not taking it to WalMart.

The website is filled with snazzy images. It just looks sci-fi-cool. But it also looks… kinda incomplete. There are no control surfaces; the wing structure is largely undefined. The wing folding mechanism is interesting and all, but the wings do not appear to have a good structural attachment to the car. They look like a modest G-load and they’ll snap right off.

Is this for real? Is it a serious engineering effort… or is it just someone’s demonstration of their ability to make spiffy CAD models? I don’t know, though I have suspicions. There are enough moving parts on this thing to get it legally qualified as an Autobot, and that worries me some.

 

 Posted by at 2:31 pm
Dec 142020
 

A while back someone on ebay was selling vintage glossies of concept art of lighter than air cargo lifters, something that got studied with some seriousness in the 70’s and 80’s. As always, money was spent, progress was made, projects were cancelled and nothing came of it.

 

 Posted by at 6:43 pm
Nov 302020
 

The rewards for APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers have been sent out. Included in the November 2020 rewards package are:

1: A diagram of a proposed DC-9 aft propfan research configuration

2: A Kaman K-Max brochure

3: A preliminary draft/outline for a report on F-108 employment

4: A CAD diagram of the M61A1 Vulcan

 

If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 Posted by at 5:42 pm
Nov 242020
 

Hey! Anybody hereabouts interested in unbuilt variants of the North American B-70 bomber? I know a guy who can hook you up:

https://media.defense.gov/2020/Nov/23/2002540204/-1/-1/1/B-70%20VARIANTS.PDF

An official publication from the AFMC History Office, edited by noted aerospace author Tony R. Landis. Recommended.

 Posted by at 8:34 pm
Nov 232020
 

Stratolaunch starts building Talon hypersonic plane for Mach 6 flights

Construction is underway of an unmanned rocket-powered aircraft to be carried by the Stratolaunch “Roc” aircraft. The Talon-A is supposed to be something like the proposed X-24C… a lifting body hypersonic platform that can have various experimental units – including scramjets – attached to it. The Roc would be capable of carrying three Talon-A’s at a time, though it seems unlikely that there’s a really good reason to do so.

 

 Posted by at 2:52 pm
Nov 072020
 

A piece of art that was on ebay a while back depicting a C-130 Hercules converted into an AWACS-like aircraft by the inclusion of a radar rotodome to the top of the vertical fin. This may look a little odd, but it was a good position for such a radar system as it puts it above all aircraft components.

 Posted by at 12:30 am
Oct 202020
 

Two years ago I released US Transport Projects #8 that had a piece on an SST designed by staff of the NACA for Life magazine. To make the best possible diagram I did the best job I could of scanning and stitching together several pages from a vintage issue of Life. I’ve finally gotten around to uploading the full-rez version of that to the APR Dropbox, into the 2020-10 APR Extras folder. This is available to any APR Patron or Subscriber at the $4 level and above.

The full-size version is six times wider than this one:

If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. If you know of someone who might be interested, be sure to nudge them this way… I could do with an infusion of new patrons/subscribers and as is blisteringly obvious I stink at marketing.




 Posted by at 10:02 pm
Oct 032020
 

The “Colossus” was a proposed cargo aircraft from the early 1970’s by the “Turbo Three” corporation. It was to be made from a mix of new parts and old… the nose of a C-97, the wings of the Turbo Three “Virtus,” an even bigger plane designed to carry the Space Shuttle. I have made the full-rez of the art below, along with a 600-dpi scan of the three-view that went with it, available to above-$10 Patron/subscribers.

 

 

If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 Posted by at 7:09 pm
Sep 272020
 

A magazine ad from 1967 looking for people wanting to hire on with Sikorsky. The ad shows a stowed-rotor helicopter design for the CARA (Combat Aircrew Recovery Aircraft) role. In the midst of the Viet Nam War, US pilots were being shot down over enemy occupied territory and needed rescue. A helicopter was a perfectly serviceable vehicle for that role… it could hover over the jungle and drop a line down through the canopy that the pilot could latch on to and be pulled up and flown away. The problem was that choppers are relatively slow. You’d much rather get to the ASAP before enemy forces could find them. A stowed-rotor design could theoretically fly at airplane speeds and hover like a helicopter. But as with all hybrid vehicles, being capable of two things means you’re great at neither.

Additional art of this design:

 Posted by at 11:42 am
Sep 232020
 

Recently sold on eBay (but not to me, I got beat out) was a piece of concept art of the “Colossal Guppy,” a proposal by Aero Spacelines to convert a B-52 into a Saturn S-II carrier. All of the artwork I’ve seen before has shown a 12-engine design; this eBay art shows only the original 8 engines that were fitted to the B-52. I would assume that this is an earlier iteration of the concept, but can’t say for certain.

 Posted by at 10:46 pm