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Aviation technology conspiracy.

Big Les

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For once, a non-9/11 related conspiracy site here.

The gist is that to preserve profits in the aerospace industry, blended wing body designs, namely the obscure and flawed Burnelli designs have been suppressed despite supposed advantages, especially to passenger safety.

The author falls into the usual CT trap of a) assuming that governments care little for the wellbeing of their people and b) drawing spurious conclusions from photographs. The anti-establishment ranting is the usual badly reasoned illogical paranoid schtick, and comparisons of "stolen designs" are hilarious: The B-2 bomber is a BWB design means nothing, likewise the comparison of the small Burnelli aircraft with the F-15 is ridiculous; they are nothing alike.

I realise this is probably a bit "niche", but interesting nonetheless.
 
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Just goes to show, you can make a CT out of just about anything!

And I love that comparison between the Burnelli fighter and F15. It just shows how little the author understands aviation, as the whole premise of the Burnelli aircraft was the lifting body (particularly visible around the engines), while the fuselage of the F15 can hardly be considered a lifting body, despite it's width, which was made so to acomodate the engine configuration. The body of the F15 lacks the shape to provide the craft with any sort of significant lift.
 
As best as I can tell the comparison holds because the F15 has two engine intakes (for it's two engines... COINCIDENCE?????) and it has two vertical stabilizers.

If they were smart, they'd have used an E-model F15, not an A or C (hard to tell which from the picture). The E-model actually made the CFT (conformal fuel tank) that attached to the body provide some lift.
 
That's a C (overall colour, lack of "turkey feathers" on the engine nozzles). They are "plumbed" for CFTs as well, but they aren't ordinarily fitted. Funnily (co-incidentally?) enough there is some tangental credence to the idea you point up; the story of an Israeli pilot bringing one home with most of one wing missing, supposedly due to the lift provided by the partially-blended wing. But the concept was/is widespread in fighter design; F/A-18, MiG-29, Su-series etc.
 
Crazycowbob said:
Just goes to show, you can make a CT out of just about anything!

And I love that comparison between the Burnelli fighter and F15. It just shows how little the author understands aviation, as the whole premise of the Burnelli aircraft was the lifting body (particularly visible around the engines), while the fuselage of the F15 can hardly be considered a lifting body, despite it's width, which was made so to acomodate the engine configuration. The body of the F15 lacks the shape to provide the craft with any sort of significant lift.
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Actually, Aerodynamicysts are like other engineers. They (and we) hate to see stuff serving only 1 task. If you're gonna make me have it, it's gonna do some work for me!
You will find that a fair amount of lift for any military aircraft is generated by the fuselage. I don't have the numbers at my beck-and-call, but I think everyone would be surprised at the amouint of lift a 747 fuselage generates.
 
rwguinn said:
Actually, Aerodynamicysts are like other engineers. They (and we) hate to see stuff serving only 1 task. If you're gonna make me have it, it's gonna do some work for me!
You will find that a fair amount of lift for any military aircraft is generated by the fuselage. I don't have the numbers at my beck-and-call, but I think everyone would be surprised at the amouint of lift a 747 fuselage generates.
Click to expand...

Check this out. An F-15 flies home with one wing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT7DfS-9CFI
 
rwguinn said:
Actually, Aerodynamicysts are like other engineers. They (and we) hate to see stuff serving only 1 task. If you're gonna make me have it, it's gonna do some work for me!
You will find that a fair amount of lift for any military aircraft is generated by the fuselage. I don't have the numbers at my beck-and-call, but I think everyone would be surprised at the amouint of lift a 747 fuselage generates.
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My brother, who is an airframe engineer on them, told me that the nose/fuselage generates about 20% to 25% of the overall lifting force for a 747. Hence the slight nose-up attitude in level flight.
 
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Zep said:
My brother, who is an airframe engineer on them, told me that the nose/fuselage generates about 20% to 25% of the overall lifting force for a 747. Hence the slight nose-up attitude in level flight.
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That number is actually reasonable. I can bleeve it!
 
If you read the test pilot's report of the crash of that Burnelli UB-14 (from 1935!), it doesn't pass the sniff test:
The indicated air speed was 195 m.p.h. at the time it became essential for me to make a crash landing (Through maintenance neglect which caused control system failure). I flew the ship into the ground from about 200 ft. altitude and estimate the speed of contact at about 130 m.p.h. the right wing being nearly vertical and absorbing the first shock. This impact caused the airplane to cart wheel tearing off the engines and crashing the wings and tail group with the body tumbling through remained intact and no fuel leaked from the wing tanks.

It is my firm belief that the fact that the box-body strength of this type combined with the engines forward and the landing gear retracted saved myself and the engineer crew and had the cabin been fully occupied with passengers with safety belts properly attached, no passengers would have been injured.

This crash landing, in my opinion, is an extraordinary example of the crash safety that can be provided by the lifting body type of design.
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Zep said:
My brother, who is an airframe engineer on them, told me that the nose/fuselage generates about 20% to 25% of the overall lifting force for a 747. Hence the slight nose-up attitude in level flight.
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Slight nose-up attitude (say two degrees) is typical for all aircraft, and has nothing to do with body lift. It's because most wings are set up to lift optimally with a slight angle of attack. If the nose was giving you preferential lift, that would give you some pitch moment on the aircraft, and you'd actually angle the aircraft down slightly in order to compensate for it.

Contrary to popular belief, a flat plate makes a pretty decent wing, provided you give it some angle of attack. The most important feature of a wing is the sharpness of its trailing edge. Without that, airflow can sneak from underneath around the back, separating the flow on top, and that spoils all of your lift. Wings are shaped the way they are to give you more efficiency, more stability, or controllability over a wider range of conditions (such as angle of attack). But as anyone who's ever built a paper airplane knows, a flat wing works fine -- so long as there's some angle of attack. Otherwise, you have what is known as a "dart." :D

-----

Regarding the OP, I think I've actually met some of those guys. Eons ago when I was at Caltech in the Aero department, every once in a while some folks I didn't recognize would crash our weekly seminars. Sat next to one of them once, and he had a stack of glossy papers loaded with interesting, yet impractical, design ideas for commercial aircraft. The one I recall for sure looked like your standard 737, but with two fuselages, side by side... kind of like an enormous commercial Twin Mustang.

Anyway, he brought up some of his wacky design ideas, challenging the presenter, and was quickly "suppressed" by the gathered luminaries of GALCIT. Quite pathetic to behold, really.

I also wonder if those poor deluded souls think these cute little buggers were ripoffs of their genius, or suppressed by the Boeings and Airbuses of the world...

There's lots of bizarre aircraft ideas out there. A book I recommend for its humour potential, a sort of collected works of engineering case-studies gone berzerk, is The World's Worst Aircraft, containing quite a few ideas put to prototype that simply didn't work.

It's awfully hard to let go of an idea sometimes.
 
Funnily (co-incidentally?) enough there is some tangental credence to the idea you point up; the story of an Israeli pilot bringing one home with most of one wing missing, supposedly due to the lift provided by the partially-blended wing
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I seem to recall several ocasions where an A-10 had much of its wing shot off and still made it back to base.

I really don't think an A-10 qualifies as a Burnelli type craft does it?

As far as comparing to an F-15 when illustrating a lifting body design, wouldn't a SR-71 be a better choice?
 
Anti-sophist said:
As best as I can tell the comparison holds because the F15 has two engine intakes (for it's two engines... COINCIDENCE?????) and it has two vertical stabilizers.
Click to expand...

Of course there is some coincidence BUT what it shows is that two seperate development teams when faced by the same aerodynamic challenges came up with similar designs to over come those challenges.

There was also the same accusations being thrown around about the design of the Su27 when compared to the F15. A number of people were accusing the Soviets of stealing F15 design documents when in reality it was just two teams coming up with similar designs to overcome the same challenges.

Actually the last quote on the first page has all the hallmarks of a 9/11 conspiracist cnut quote. The plane hasnt "merely run off the runway". Its farken travelled down a ditch and across a large span and then hit a bank on the other side! That isnt "merely running off the runway"!!!


You know sometimes a train entering a tunnel is just a train entering a tunnel! :)

Mailman
 
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mailman said:
Of course there is some coincidence BUT what it shows is that two seperate development teams when faced by the same aerodynamic challenges came up with similar designs to over come those challenges.
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Actually, that's unlikely. The F-15 Eagle was designed according to a specific set of requirements. That Burnelli bird from 1947, that they claim was "the same design," couldn't possibly have been designed to the same spec, since in 1947 the concept of Mach 2+ heavy air superiority fighters wasn't even viable.

In contrast, the Su-27 was intended for the same environment as the F-15, so naturally its design is similar in many aspects.

The Burnelli, on the other hand, is visibly different from the F-15 in many key areas, so much so that it is obvious from that single artist's picture. The engines, mounted wide, will greatly increase the roll inertia of the aircraft, limiting roll rate, a critical factor for a dogfighter. The inlet geometry of those engines is unfavorable for supersonic flight. The boom horizontal stabilizer, due to its placement inboard and attachments to the vertical stabilizers, causes several problems -- it will limit its effective elevator area and inibit high-speed turns, it may be too close to the axis of travel to work at supersonic speeds, it will interfere with the rudders, and it makes the control surfaces as a whole more susceptible to battle damage. The cockpit location will preclude target illumination radar, although to be fair this was completely over the horizon for fighters in 1947. And on and on...

The F-15 is really not limited by lift. Consider the F-15E, which carries a payload roughly four times that of the original air-to-air only F-15A, and carries it well. There's tons of margin in the design. One of the design requirements was the ability to lose 30% of its wing structures and still return home, if I recall correctly, something the Israeli one-winger verified nicely...

As others remarked, if you want to see a strong airplane, look at the A-10. Not a Burnelli feature in it, aside perhaps from mounting the engines above the fuselage -- done so because in attack profile, the engines are hidden behind the wings from an enemy, and their exhaust is masked by the tail, not for the reasons Burnelli proposed.

What we ought to do is look up Burnelli's actual patent to see just how vague his claims really were. There's a huge range of things claimed by that website, and I imagine that won't be borne out by the patent's text.
 
The F-15 pilot had to fly the plane at 250 KIAS to keep it under control. All pilots are trained to test their damaged aircraft at a safe altitude before staying with it. You figure out you min speed for control and then stay above it. That means if you are rolling to the right and you get to full left stick you stay above that speed because you have no more control. He must of got a good feel that he could maintain control near 250 KIAS or around 230; added 5 for the wife and 5 for each kid.

So this guy was landing at 100 KIAS over his normal landing speed or he would loose control. His engines alone could save him; push them up and you are going the direction you are pointed.

He did a good job; saw a photo in 1991; first time for the video; good job.

That Mr. Burnelli aircraft in 1941 would have a few problems as did all early fighters with jet engines; fires! I am not so sure the thing would hold together with the lack of modern materials. I do not see how it is anything like the F-15. Not even like a B-2; the first flying wing was too unstable to fly in the early days; the B-2 requires computer flight controls to maintain stability.

Look at the planes; not close. Engines; tails; elevators. Not even close.
 
Maybe I just don't "get" the CT mindset, but how would suppressing this somehow help the aerospace industry? I would think that, given a superior design, every company would be rushing to design planes based on it and improve upon them in order to get more customers.

Even if this guy is claiming the Burnelli design is protected under patent and the Evil People wanted to avoid paying for it, a patent is only good for 17 years in the US and would've long since expired. Anyone could copy this design that he claims is so amazing, and they'd get additional business for building safer airplanes.

I don't know jack dingle about aircraft design, but the whole premise of this conspiracy theory, and by extension the theory itself, makes no sense!

Too bad we won't be seeing any defenders of this theory around here anytime soon, because I'd really love to hear what economic incentive they feel exists for suppressing this AMAZING DESIGN THAT HAS NO FLAWS or whatever it is.
 
What's more interesting is how it was also suppressed in the USSR during the Cold War...
 
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