Another artist impression of the North American Aviation FX design, the NA-335. This time in glorious ExtraColor.
If you want to read more on the NA-335 or see a three-view, I can’t recommend highly enough Tony Buttler’s “American Secret Projects: Fighters & Interceptors 1945-1978.”
Shuttle and external tank boosted by a recoverable low-cost pressure fed booster, using propane for fuel.
The Vought F8U-3 Crusader III was mentioned in the comments in a recent post, so I figured I’d throw out some images of it. This was a beast of a plane, looking like little more than a giant afterburning turbojet engine, a plethora of blade-like control surfaces, an afterthought of a cockpit and a whole lot of attitude. A competitor to the F-4 Phantom II, the Crusader III was able to get to about Mach 2.4 and probably had the radar cross section of a small moon. The large ventral stabilizers would fold horizontal for ground clearance during takeoff and landing.
And of course… there are detailed drawings of the F8U-3 available!
The Shuttle and external tank, boosted by a manned glideback version of the Saturn V S-IC first stage.
Artwork depicting NAA’s design for the F-15.
While taking photos up near Mantua a week ago, a Grumman HU-16 Albatross flew over. The photos I took of it are admittedly horrible, as it was at a great distance, but you just don’t see these planes all that often. Given that the Albatross is a seaplane and this is Utah, it seemed even rarer.
I can’t be certain, due to the low resolution, but it sure looks like the Albatross shown at the top of the Wikipedia page.
Alexander Lippisch, arguably the inventor of the delta wing, spent most of his post-war years in the US working on advanced or just plain odd aircraft concepts. One concept that seemed to fascinate him was the “aerodyne,” where most of the fuselage served as a duct for the propulsion system, and through the use of louvers the thrust could be directed either aft for forward thrust or down for vertical thrust. The bulk of his aerodyne concepts were devoid of wings, relying instead on directed thrust for lift at low speed and fuselage lift at higher speeds. Wind tunnel tests proved that the concept was viable, if not entirely practical… and certainly not exactly the safest designs in the event of an engine-out situation.
While all of the aerodyne concepts were unusual, this one pretty much takes the cake: not only wingless, but the planform shows that it’s not only an elongated teardrop, but a teardrop with a great big hole in it. The vehicle was something of a twin-fuselage design, but one where the fuselages are curved and join together at nose and tail.
The design features conventional inlets alongside the nose, with a long “slot” along the fuselage. This slot served as the exhaust for the engine(s), using the Coanda effect to increase thrust at low speed. The twin fuselage layout would, at least theoretically, serve as a duct, with the Coanda effect increasing thrust a little more. It seems probable, though, that the added thrust would be more than offset by increased weight.
A few years back I got to poke around a little bit in the NASM Garber facility. Lighting was not the best and some areas were photography-discouraged, but there were a few things that I got some photos of. One was a large model of an early Boeing Dyna Soar configuration. It may have originally been a wind tunnel model that was repurposed into a display model, or it may have been a display model from the get-go (kinda big, though).
The idea of nuclear powered aircraft has been around since shortly after WWII. Since nuclear reactors of the time were massive items requiring many tons of shielding, any aircraft based on a nuclear powerplant would necessarily be fairly big. Additionally, a larger aircraft would provide greater distance from the reactor for the crew, using space as shielding to help reduce the radiation dose the crew would get.
A USAF brochure from 1951 presented a number of preliminary configurations for nuclear powered bombers. One of them, the N-1 design, was a half-million-pound plane with a span of 225 feet and a payload of only 10,000 pounds. It would be capable of cruising at Mach 0.9 at 60,000 feet. Other designs were smaller with greater payload, but designed to fly at lower altitudes. The cost of high speed at very high altitude was extremely long wings with high sweep; the result was a plane that would have made the B-36 look like a pipsqueak.
