Studies In Ornithopters 223
weileong writes "This should be of especial interest to fans of Frank Herbert's Dune (or maybe only those who preferred House Atreides) - a genuine, flexible, flapping-capable winged aircraft (by which I don't mean passenger-carrying. Yet.) has been produced by the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies and SRI International (Washington Post article, free reg required). Advantages include everything from low speed control to efficiency. Once these things really hit "real world" usage, the V-22 Osprey really HAS no reason to exist (and all the army personnel at risk of dying in one should rejoice)."
Material Fatigue ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that a military ornithopter transport would be safer than the Osprey. A bit of a leap of faith seeing as it hasn't even got past the university project stage.
No pictures?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Googling...
Could this [reallycooltoys.com] be it?
Need more modpoints (Score:4, Insightful)
If submiter had bothered to read the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Various small ornithopers have been built. You can even buy toy windup versions. In small sizes they work.
They do not scale. There is no known way to make them scale. Neither the physics nor the engineering support the idea of producing large amounts of lift be rapidly anad violently flapping around large inertial masses.
Not to mention the fact that in the large scale the problem has been solved already with the rotating wing.
I haven't a clue how thousands of pounds of rapidly flapping metal could be deemed to be potentially safer than the Osprey, particulary given the sorts of mechanisms that would be required to drive them.
KFG
Re:No pictures?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Other than that, it's pretty cool.
~S
Re:Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
And the ornithopter, being a different design, clearly will not have this fault.
Flight is one area NOT to copy nature in. (Score:5, Insightful)
flight using fixed wings wings far more efficient than flapping for the sort of aircraft capable of carrying people or cargo. People should bear in mind
that just because nature comes up with a particular solution does NOT mean its the best one. Wings only exist in nature because continuous rotary motion using vertibrate
muscle - bone structure is simply impossible therefor the next best thing evolved - backwards and forwards motion of wings. Evolution comes up with the "good enough" solution , not the best.
Re:The V22? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:1, Insightful)
Second of all, how long would this flapping-wing technology take to develope into a viable aircraft? It could take years and be very expensive. The Osprey might even finish development before ornithopters become a viable means of travel.
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:2, Insightful)
In a fundamental sense (at least the way I see it) the flap-wing aircraft would just be doing things "within parameters" though, yes, it's at a "university project" stage now.
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, there were hundreds of CH-46's in the Fleet. There were, what, 8 Ospreys?
I also don't see why an ornithopter would fill the role they envisioned for the Osprey. The Osprey was meant to be a VTOL or STOL aircraft with over-the-horizon capability. How would a 'thopter solve that problem?
WTF's up with all the talk of carrying PASSENGERS? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article was crystal clear on this.
Quote: "Mentor came into being in response to a vision of a "fly-on-the-wall spy"
Quote: "stealth "micro-air vehicles"
Quote: "Flapping wings offer several advantages over the fixed wings of today's reconnaissance drones"
Quote: "long toyed with many scenarios, including one in which soldiers would deploy a swarm of camera-equipped robotic insects to probe inaccessible terrain."
Quote: "... ah, the hell with it! Go ahead and talk about your flying cars as long as you like.
Re:The V22? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on, give the submitter a break. They did say when orithopters hit the "real world", V22s wouldn't be needed.
Yeah, 500 years in the future when micro-fusion produces the massive amounts of energy needed to drive an ornithopter capable of hauling 22 fully loaded marines, when we spin nano-tech fibers strong enough to withstand the vibrations yet light enough to beat without huge inertia... yes, by then there'll be no need for a 490 year old v22 fleet.
Pretty fun stuff to watch (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you even read your link? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Avro Arrow was a plane produced by Canada that was years ahead of its time. Unfortunately, because of the immense pressure from the U.S. (they didn't want Canada to sell the technology to other countries), the project got shut down.
From the article you linked to:
As costs rose, other divisions of the armed forces saw their own budgets cut, and even groups inside the RCAF in charge of European operations were worried that there would be no money left over for a new tactical fighter needed there. In-fighting soon reached the top of the military. In August 1958 the CSC advised the government to cancel the Arrow, and buy two Bomarc and 100 interceptors from the US, as well as constructing two SAGE control installations in Canada.
The Avro Arrow was an interceptor designed at a time when everybody else was shifting to missles for anti-bomber defense. The plane's expense threatened funding for other programs, so it was killed in budgetary battles.
Then there's this:
The US is also often blamed for the demise, often with claims that the US aerospace industry was upset about the 'upstarts' in Canada that were making them look foolish, or alternately that they were hunting for Avro employees. A cursory examination of the historical record shows the falsity of this claim. Quite to the contratry, the US military was distressed at the prospect of losing a first-rate staff in their own North American ally, and even considered buying 50 Arrows to give back to the RCAF in order to ensure production.
I know it's fashionable to blame the Americans for everything. Don't get me wrong, I find it quite entertaining. But you shouldn't be too quick to rule out the Freemasons or the Illuminati, or perhaps even something so mundane as internal politics.
When Idiots Comment on Military Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
For starters, the US Army does not have any personnel at risk from the V-22 Osprey, because the US Army is forbidden by Congressional Mandate from operating fixed-wing aircraft. The US Marine Corps is spearheading the operational deployment of the Osprey. Also, the US Navy and Air Force are evaluating prototypes.
The next idiocy is the implication (likely based in outright aviation ignorance) that the V-22 is at all an unsafe aircraft, or even more outlandish - that an untested and infinitely more complex aircraft design is going to be safer. The V-22 Osprey has an outstanding record for a fixed-wing VSTOL aircraft, and considering it is a new type of VSTOL (of which none have every peen deployed, and only a small series of research prototypes have been based on), it is without saying that thus far the aircraft has peformed very well.
That one insipid litany of ignorance ruined what would have otherwise been a decent article - except that really, Slashdot has been going down the tubes when it comes to "quality" articles for a while now. If you get that many submissions in a day, you'd think you could weed out the pedestrian ones like this, or at least trim the fat off the meat.
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:2, Insightful)
BUNK looking for a research grant ! (Score:5, Insightful)
"nature can provide ready-made solutions." is a comment made in many fields including computer science. The problem is that nature developed solutions for a carbon based lifeform. Imitations in silicon, steel, polymers cannot hope to achieve the same results. Flocks of birds do fly but they also eat and their cells reproduce and die. Steel and silicon simply dissipate energy (with nothing close to a Krebs cycle [demon.co.uk] for renewal) and wear out (since repair or replacement of steel or silicon is hideously demanding of energy). So on a very fundamental level, solutions found in nature do not completely translate to the current materials of technology. You can get aspects of them, like the imitation of flapping flight, but not the whole package.
But lest you think, "Fine. We'll go with _some_ of the benefits." Think: what are they? The article says Flapping wings allow insects and birds to fly at low speeds, hover, make sharp turns and even fly backward. The latter cite trying to imitate a hummingbird's flight. A hummingbird's flight can already be imitated by helicopters and even the V-22 Osprey. But both the helicopter and the Osprey achieve the desired result (within bounds dictated by inertia and thrust-to-weight ratios) with a structure evolved for maximum efficiency given the materials i.e. the propeller. Even if you are utterly fanatic and feel that flapping is the way to go, consider further the imitation of a hummingbird. The birds virtually eat constantly [144.90.137.57]. In fact, you could argue that the researchers haven't looked to nature very closely for their solutions. Even if you could translate the physical properties of a hummingbird to a machine, nature itself demonstrates that the energy requirements are huge for that type of flight. At least the researchers acknowledge this at the end of the article but the impression is more that it is an afterthought rather than an evident truth even before the research had started.
And is the flapping flight really the goal of ornithopters in this article? In this article it's a flock of small, lightweight robots hovering over Martian land rovers and guiding them to places of interest that seems to be the pitch. So what advantage do ornithopters have over other "eye in the sky" objects like helicopters, blimps, gliders, or high power satellite cameras? There don't seem to be any.
At this point one might even ask, how appropriate is a solution inspired by nature (on Earth) to the environment on Mars? Environments on Earth that are similar to Mars don't have an abundance of life because there isn't much to support the energy requirements of life. Therefore a solution based on "nature" is arguably inappropriate.
And finally, Mars exploration has top priority at the CSA. Sorry but Canada officially bowed out of its option to participate in the Mars exploration program via lack of federal funding [css.ca]. Maybe some Canadian companies will keep their hand in without the CSA but odds are NASA will buy American, and why not?
(As for the submitter's comments, let's put on our thinking caps people. What kind of ride would people in the hull of a flapping aircraft get? Replacement for the Osprey indeed!)
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Military officials knew about defects in the flaps and ejection system for years before fixing them, while planes crashed and pilots died."
Well, that's a maintennace issue, isn't it? If you know something needs fixing and you deliberately ignore it bad things will happen. That's true whether it's a Harrier, a car tyre or unpatched web server.
Proficiency in the Harrier cockpit requires, at minimum, 15 to 20 hours in the air each month, according to the Marines... As recently as 2000, they averaged 8.2 flight hours a month; that has since increased to 13 hours.
So, you put unexperienced pilots into an aircraft that is nothing like anything they've ever flown before and you wonder why they safety record suffers? Would you put a novice car driver into seat of an Indy car for Indy car? Would you allow an neophyte rider to get on a top-of-range Harley first time around?
The Marines also scrimp on spare parts, causing mechanics to cannibalize components from one plane to keep others in the air. As a result, planes often fly with known ailments, or "gripes," that are not considered serious enough to warrant immediate repair.
If you put together a PC cobbled together with parts that had failed intermittently would you really be that surprised if the thing didn't run for years without a single hitch? Which do you think would last longer, that machine or one that's brand new?
These things are avoidable, just like the Columbia shuttle disaster, and it's only sheer stupidity that puts an untrained pilot up in an aircraft with faulty flaps and spare parts that have taken their fair share of wear and tear.
Re:Do you want to be shaken, not stirred? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:3, Insightful)
In Britain, where maintenance-related mistakes are relatively rare, some Harrier mechanics have worked on the plane for more years than their American counterparts have been alive.
Some Marine leaders acknowledge that the Harrier, quite simply, is often too complex for the recent high school graduates who typically maintain it.
"We had regular guys fixing them, not engineers," said retired Lt. Gen. Charles H. Pitman, a former chief of Marine aviation," and so we found that some of the problems were caused by us doing something we shouldn't have done."
If "maintenance-related mistakes are relatively rare" in Britain and they are common in the US doesn't that tell you something? Everything in the article points to the US Marines Harriers as being underfunded, poorly maintained and flown by under-qualified pilots. No disrespect to the US Marines concerned, but this isn't the way to maintain a front-line aircraft.
The difference between the British and American philosophies to the Harrier are startling. The British devote proper resources to it, only let the best of the best fly it and hence have a much better safety record with the aircraft. The Americans, who regard supersonic aircraft as more prestigious, devote fewer resources to it and put less experienced pilots into Harrier cockpits. If they took the British approach then their safety record would be much better.
Lastly, the reason why the RAF is part of the JSF programme isn't because the Harrier is hazardous, it's because the Harrier has been in service for over three decades and is way past its originally envisaged service life - nothing extraordinary about that at all.
Re:Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups... (Score:3, Insightful)
All good points, and all understood. But, that doesn't mention whether the other planes with much better safety records get the same treatment pilot/maintenance wise. I understand that the Harrier is difficult to fly and maintain, but don't those make up some of its primary faults?
Should anything in an aircraft be harder or more dangerous to do than landing an F/A-18 Hornet on a moving aircraft carrier? The Harrier has more than 3 times the accident rate of those Hornets.
Saying that we shouldn't expect the Harriers to fly for years without a "single hitch" seems to be stretching it a little bit, don't you think? We're not talking about minor hiccups here, we're talking about major accidents. (By the way, my latest PC is made up almost entirely of "spare parts" and it runs quite well, thank you) According to three different people in my family who have worked in separate generations in aircraft maintenance in the Air Force and Navy, if there is a problem that could put the pilot in danger, that airplane is grounded immediately. This is, of course, at the maintenance level, political maneuvering in the higher ranks notwithstanding.
Aside from that, there will always be problems with any airplane due to budget, training and parts availability, but those alone did not give the Harrier the worst record in the US armed forces. Once again, let me point out that even in Britain, where as you say the pilots and maintenance people are more experienced in the aircraft, the crash record is higher than the ones in service in the US.
Re:Absurd (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Absurd (Score:3, Insightful)
The seeds from Maple trees are natural propellers that perform "auto-gyro" landings.
The Wheel:
Rocks will often get pulverized into fairly round chunks forming spheres (2-d) wheels. Dung beetles will create ball shaped collections of crap and roll them back to their dens.
Combustion Engines:
Inside the cells of most biological organisms is a chemical combustion engine capable of transforming hydrocarbons (with oxygen) into energy. The stroking piston action is very natural and can be observed in woodpeckers and other creatures.
Rocket (Jet) Propulsion:
The Squid family utilizes a form of "rocket" propulsion naturally. That is, it expells matter (water) to utilizes newtons priciple of reaction. Thus it achieves locomotion through water.
The genius of humans is to observe and replicate artificially. We gave up our physical strengths for mental strength. We are not above nature, we merely exploit it and replicate it.