Vril 7 at Arado Brandedburg '44/'45

From: (

(B2431) wrote in message

From: "Pete"

"B2431" wrote

Next time you are in the Ft. Eustis VA area go look at the saucer shaped
aircraft (Avro?) they have. It could carry 2 men, hover all of 2 or 3
feet
off the ground and manoeuver rather nicely. Other than low hover it could
not
fly and wobbled a lot. Unlike the Nazi ideas this saucer WAS built and
proved
how complicated things really were. The downward ducted fan concept has
been tried several times and not one vehicle had the performance to justify
proceeding to an operational prototype.


The results of the tests were as follows:

http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~billzuk/F...aucer%202.html
"The results of the testing revealed a stability problem and degraded
performance due to turbo-rotor tolerances. Before modifications could
be achieved, funding ran out with the final flight test program
completed in March 1961. With the problems that the contractor was
facing in the wake of the cancellation of its premier fighter program,
the Avro Arrow by the Canadian government, Avro was unable to continue
the project. "

OK so the engineering problem of turbo tollerances is corrected ( a
cinch for todays wide bodied cowling manufacturers I expect ) and the
stability problems are solved by a gyroscoep based "Fly By Wire"
stability augmentation system.
( an FBW system like this is an of the shelf cinch today )

Why wouldn't it work now?


From what I can see this system should work. An efficient VTOL device
needs large volumes of slow moving air. A helicopter achieves this
with a rotor. A "saucer" like this can do so by sucking in air at the
top and distributing it to a lip at the edge of the saucer where the
high velocity air is converted to low velocity by inducing an airflow.

However that is not how the Avro machine worked. See:

http://www.laesieworks.com/ifo/lib/avro-graph02.html

If you poke around the web you will find all kinds duct being used to hover.
You will even find a few that can transition from vertical to horizontal
flight. The closest to being practical I can recall was in the 1960s Boeing
produced on with four ducts mounted on winglets.

Dan, U. S. Air Force, retired