Researchers to build underwater airplane
DARPA have launched a program to create an aircraft that can maneuver underwater. Assuming the voyage will not be a one-way trip to the bottom of the sea, this should hold some pretty nice prospects for underwater research and commercial trips from your closest airport to Atlantis.
On another note, I think the work on Steve Fossett's deep ocean submarine should be used in conjunction with this. I've always wanted to visit the Mariana Trench, but having to journey to Guam before using a hypothetical instance of Fossett's submarine would be annoying. Anyway, here's the full article: --- Researchers want a submersible airplane Submitted by Layer 8 on Mon, 10/06/2008 - 8:28am. This sounds like something straight out of a James Bond movie but no, it's real and it's your government: Those way out engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to build an aircraft that's as capable of zipping through the sky as it is underwater. The agency's Submersible Aircraft research project is exploring the possibility of making an aircraft that can maneuver underwater with the goal of revolutionizing the US Department of Defense's ability to, for example, bring warfighters and equipment to coastal locations or enhance rescue operations. DARPA said that the concept being evaluated here is for a submersible aircraft, not a flying submarine. It is expected that the platform will spend the bulk of its time in the air and will only spend short periods of time submerged according to the agency. According to DARPA: "The difficulty with developing such a craft come from the diametrically opposed requirements that exist for an airplane and a submarine. While the primary goal for airplane designers is to try and minimize weight, a submarine must be extremely heavy in order to submerge underwater. In addition, the flow conditions and the systems designed to control a submarine and an airplane are radically different, due to the order of magnitude difference in the densities of air and water." There are some major requirements of such a craft, DARPA said, including:
DARPA acknowledges the difficulties in designing such a craft and said that prior attempts to demonstrate a vehicle with the maneuverability of both a submersible and an aircraft have primarily explored approaches that would endow flight capability to platforms that were largely optimized for underwater operation. Unfortunately these prior attempts have been unsuccessful largely because the design requirements for a submersible and an aircraft are diametrically opposed. Interestingly there was a patent issued in 2007 to Gennady Ploshkin, for a disc-shaped aircraft that could take off like a helicopter and submerge like a sub. There have been other sub-plane designs as well. Probably the most famous flying sub was in the TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. --- Source: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33648 |
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