I have always been quite taken with the idea of autogyro aircraft. The advantages of shorter take off and landing distances; stall avoidance, and general ease of flying, have made them very attractive to me.
These days, of course, you see them only as light personal flyers, unlike days gone by when at least one mid sized transportt made good use of the technique. The question in my mind has been why some clever aerospace engineer hasn't done a more modern adaptation. So, in the spirit of open source inspiration, I wanted to put a suggestion out into the info-sphere as to how one might approach a new type of autogyro aircraft. Hence the picture you see below (crude though it is, and missing a rudder):
The idea here is to put the lift blade into a blended wing, ducted fan enclosure, setting things up so that you could power, or free spin the lift fan as desired. If it was done right, it seems to me, you could get a great deal of near VTOL lift this way for a given amount of thrust capacity, while reducing cruise drag significantly. There might even be an advantage to putting an iris like closure system at the top and bottom of the ducted fan to decrease drag once you attained cruise speed, despite whatever added weight this might entail.
Just something interesting to ponder on a Sunday morning.
F-35 marine variant?
ReplyDeleteSince we're talking transports here I would have to say no, this would not be an F-35 marine variant.
DeleteThat is not to say, however, that a close air support, ground attack platform could not be based on this concept.
It does seem to me, however, that applying the concept to that problem might be a bit tricky. Especially when you need a big wing to have hard points enough to provide for a carrying capacity that would rival an A-10 in loiter ability.