i dunno then. Most likely is that neat just lives near a lot of taller people and all the fighter pilots he's met are shorter.
Flaps change the wing's profile to reduce the minimum airspeed and thus reducing the stall speed. This is mainly used to reduce the landing speed and starting speed, saving runway and fuel.
They aren't essential though, the gliders I fly with don't have any flaps.
I think the journalists are just being idiots and calling ailerons flaps.
[QUOTE=iFail;34461631]i dunno then. Most likely is that neat just lives near a lot of taller people and all the fighter pilots he's met are shorter.[/QUOTE]
I live on the island of the pygmies. Shit, I don't know. I need to brush up on my general aviation/military trivia. I'm forgetting all that shit.
Some older designs definitely were built for the shorter. During WWII there were fairly robust height regs. I'm guessing that at that point in time, designers just didn't have access to these statistics, or they didn't really care about the ergonomics of the planes. Also, if a design shortcut has to be made, why not just cut away support for taller pilots? There are enough people wanting to be fighter pilots, even if only the short ones are actually accepted, that the real bottleneck is in building enough planes.
[QUOTE=Kung Fu Jew;34458499]
less room for failure with less moving parts[/QUOTE]
I wonder how the air vents are controlled. They will need some kind of actuation system in there at the very least, if not an air compressor or vent off the main engine... Either way, this tech is far from simple. Ports like these get clogged with ice and dust/flies on aircraft as well (pito static ports).
The stealth reason makes sense though.
[QUOTE=S31-Syntax;34461190]But... [I][B]SPAAAACE![/B][/I][/QUOTE]
And these would be fine for aircraft designed to run in low orbit as well as in atmosphere. I'm not saying we don't need something like this, I'm just saying we don't need to replace conventional control surfaces 100% with them.
[QUOTE=S31-Syntax;34461190]But... [I][B]SPAAAACE![/B][/I][/QUOTE]
There's less air to use the higher you go up. The situation will either stay the same, or get worse when it comes to using non-puffer methods of steering at high altitudes.
Thats not the point. The point was supposed to be a slightly humorous explanation of why we should be developing this further.
space=cool
Therefore, technology that makes space flight more practical=cool
[QUOTE=S31-Syntax;34461974]Thats not the point. The point was supposed to be a slightly humorous explanation of why we should be developing this further.
space=cool
Therefore, technology that makes space flight more practical=cool[/QUOTE]
it doesn't and that is a terrible meme
go home
[QUOTE=GunFox;34458534]Though my money is still on a swing wing design being the best.[/QUOTE]
Swing wings are cool but aren't they obsolete?
I don't get why he's posted this as if it was news. Nothing's been heard from this project since that test flight, as far as I know.
I'm sure we already had a thread about it back in 2010 (back when it was actually news).
This just seems to make an already simple thing complicated an unnecessary. Cool nonetheless.
Look at the wingspan and coverage
The entire thing is one big flap
pretty cool, though the news itself is not that new.
would probably be pretty difficult to implement something like this in a manned aircraft any time soon, since losing control due to the engine cutting out is a much smaller problem if it's in a cheap UAV than something with a person in it.
[editline]30th January 2012[/editline]
that said, a few modern fighters require continuous computer control of the control surfaces, so they'd be a bit screwed in that situation also
[editline]30th January 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=GunFox;34458471]You are right, I should be less specific. They are for increasing the surface area of the wing in order to generate more lift. In doing so they also generally produce drag and thereby are used primarily in both takeoff (in some aircraft) and landing due to the speed reduction caused by the drag.[/QUOTE]
flaps also tend to decrease the angle of attack at which CLmax occurs (and also decrease the stall angle) :X
[QUOTE=ewitwins;34458810]There is one [B][h2]HUGE[/h2][/B] reason why this is a massive step forward in the aviation industry is this is successful.
Transitional flight paths from the lower to upper atmosphere. There is a specific point within the mesosphere that, when reached, allows an aircraft to reach any point on Earth in under two hours. The only this that doesn't work well is control surfaces and of course air-fuel engines. If this test is highly successful, within five to ten years we could start seeing airliner companies begin to seriously work with the idea of upper-atmospheric flights.[/QUOTE]
don't count on this anytime soon.
Sounds like less moving parts. Yay.
[QUOTE=hegrec;34469973]Sounds like less moving parts. Yay.[/QUOTE]
Fewer moving parts is a good thing, as long as the system that's replacing them is reliable.
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