FanWing, an unusual new kind of airplane

Ha, wow! Not that is cool. Very interesting concept from an aero point of view.

 

What happens in a bird strike?

What happens if the "squirrel cage" falls apart?

Doesn't seem like it'll glide.

 

They have merely moved the propellor to a spot in front of the wings, and stretched it out the length of the wings--the plane will always have wind over the wings, so there will always be lift. They also seem to have divided the propellor/fan into sections, so if one section fails, others will still continue to send wind over the wings. But if they are all revolving around a common spindle, or share some other dependency, that will be critical to protect. And asymmetric thrust is no joke, as any multi-engine pilot will tell you.

Interesting concept. Would like to see the numbers--is it more efficient than a centerline thrust propellor setup?

 

Nothing more that a "side-wheel" paddle boat in the air.


That video has been floating around for a while... think I saw it on f-chat last year.

So, what DOES happen when the engine quits? Can't think that it would glide. Cirruschute????

 

Most likely it would "autorotate" in much the same way a helicopter does. Put the nose down and the rotor would continue to spin and it would still induce air flowing over the wing and create lift.

Would be a problem if the engine locked up, but if it is critical to keep the rotors spinning you could use a one way spague clutch. That is what is done on a helicopter where if the rotor would stop bad things would happen.

 

Glide slope would be compromised, but it would glide. Of course, you could also have deploy sliding panels that cover the fan blades and make it a conventional wing, giving you the better gliding ability.

It's a big wing with tiny body. Hence the decent performance. Would like to see it's lift vs. power-consumption figures for a conventional airframe.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. It's not like air does not want to go over the wings, and this is a clever new design that finally induces air to do so. Depending on the turbulence caused, this design might actually be more of a step backwards than forwards.

 

As with most powered lift approaches, the L/D isn't going to be very good. That's the price you pay for the slow flight capability that powered lift provides. Another way to look at it is that the propulsive efficiency isn't great, but you are getting lift out of it.

The advantage of this approach is that it spreads the powered lift over a larger area, as opposed to something like a channel wing where the lift is concentrated over a small area and it doesn't provide as much lift.

As an aside, if you go looking on the NASA servers there is a paper that NASA did on the Channel wing. What they did was determine the amount of "bending" that the channel wing did on the prop flow and this very nicely explained where the lift came from.

Powered lift is a good thing, but the biggest problem with it is how do you convert it back to a real wing when you want to go fast. The F4 (I'm pretty sure it was the F4) had surface blowing that provided a lot better low speed lift and made it possible to land the aircraft on a carrier, but it cost a lot of power to do it, and it wasn't very efficient, but it worked.

 

Phantom II?

Were those the leading edge slats on the last edition of the F4?

Never heard that (surface blowing thing).