Liberty Lifter Aims to Revolutionize Heavy Air Lift | Hacker News Reader

Liberty Lifter Aims to Revolutionize Heavy Air Lift

darpa.mil

32 pointstaubek12 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31479578

Oh the irony. This is the Pelican program restart. Circa 2005. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Pelican

Pelican was a ground-effect heavy lift aircraft, too. DARPA refused to fund any Pelican developmental work 20 years ago because the “Technology has been demonstrated already” (by the Russians).

I had the privilege of working for the people who did the concept of operations work.

I sincerely wish them luck with that. It would definitely be cool, if they could get it to work, but this part:

> highly controlled flight close to turbulent water surfaces

Has been a "heavy lift" for ekranoplan designers for decades.

Yep. I've never heard "batting average" figures for DARPA, but they are the government's "pie in the sky" long-shot research folks.

I've always enjoyed The Register's view on DARPA. They treat them as if they were Frankenstein's Playpen.

So the Caspian sea monster, but make it American by adding words like "liberty" and "freedom" to the name? Got it.

Considering they mentioned the ekranoplans in the linked article this seems like just a low quality regurgitation.

American naming schemes tend to be like this. It's just branding.

I wasn't aware of that pattern.

Can you give some examples of Americans doing this more than other peoples?

> doing this more than other peoples

I don’t think a pattern needs to be exceptional to be notable.

The first example that comes to mind is Freedom Fries (lol) https://www.google.com/search?q=freedom+fries&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT...

The depicted images didn't show a ground-effect vehicle, which seems odd -- it fits the job and is much more economical than the winged plane shown.

There's the mention of "sustained flight at mid-altitudes". Perhaps the intention is for this to be able to fly over land as well? Maybe by sacrificing some cargo capacity in mid-altitude flights?

Spruce Goose 2?

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