DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet
theregister.com
theregister.com
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you! I'm also happy that we use taxpayer money to subsidize corporate R&D, but let's not suddenly sugarcoat that fact (or forget it entirely) the instant our thoughts shift to economic policy.
In the VC world, your one huge success needs to cover the cost of the other nine failed bets. When taxpayer-funded research gets "commercialized," this rule is quietly forgotten. That's the biggest subsidy giveaway right there.
Smith didn’t claim that an “invisible” hand was a sole or even predominant mechanism, just that it could apply to specialization. In fact at a microeconomic level Coase’ “Nature of the firm” says the opposite is true, and he’s as mainstream as you can get.
In general (this is not a comment about you, schiffern) most people who exalt Adam Smith have never read his book and would be shocked that he was such an enthusiast for welfare, regulation, and government intervention and support.
When you remove the need for a person to sit in the aircraft, you'd think it would create the opportunity to generate entirely new design profiles.
But this still looks like most planes.
There is emerging consensus that the F-35 is the last manned fighter America will produce.
But if you look at most UCAVs, they mostly have 'broadly normalish' looking shapes. XQ-58 for example is relatively conventional looking.
I think the reality is that there are a lot of advantages of the 'normal' airplane shape that removing the pilot doesn't drastically change. Warplanes are going to have some pretty high mass, kinda bulky thing to manage (especially engines and radar). Keep those close to the center of mass is just... sensible. Since your flying forwards, that biases you towards either a tube with wings or flying wing.
Pure flying wings are apparently kinda annoying to deal with - especially when what you're working on is trying to innovate in autonomous systems, maybe you don't want to spend extra effort trying to conquer too unconventional structural layouts.
But the plane likely still needs to have a shape similar to "normal" planes. One reason would be to experiment with one thing at a time. A classic fuselage + wing + tail arrangement is well-studied and understood; what remains to study is the unusual actuator system. But getting something non-traditional like B2 to fly is a challenge in itself; with experimental actuators, it's even harder.
For subsonic planes, the traditional airplane shape is likely close to optimal, since birds, especially gliding birds like eagles, use a very similar arrangement for millions of years.
Supposedly, this could already be in production.
I'd worry the failure modes of a pressurised air system, which are surely more numerous than a simple mechanical flap. Any failure would be catastrophic to the airplane.
Of course, there's bound to be a caveat or ten, since else why wasn't it tried earlier? It doesn't look technologically advanced, doesn't look like it couldn't have been done decades ago.
2. Aircraft control surfaces are quite a bit more involved than being "a simple mechanical flap".
They're amazing but they violate the intuitive moving-parts-to-risk count.
I'm general, moving cog is potentially lossless, putting control surfaces into the airstream will always add drag.
Otherwise it doesn’t seem like much of a win if you always need both systems.
I think so? Of course you still need steering control on the gears, but I don't think you mean that.
Maybe you are thinking similar to how I was thinking about airplanes before I started learning to fly. I was thinking that taking off is surely some deviously hard trick, since you go from non-flying to flying. But in reality airplanes are designed to "want to" fly. You just apply throttle and it kinda happens almost on its own. In fact you need to push the nose down a bit so it doesn't fly up before you picked up enough speed to do safely. (I understand that this description might not be true for every airplane, but the general idea that take off is not that hard is usually true for all of them.)
In short I don't see why it couldn't work.
I doubt DARPA would commission this aircraft without having already established that it is likely to work, and it will have conventional control surfaces as a backup.
I am curious as to whether they intend to keep conventional moving surfaces for trimming in pitch, especially if they are going to give it flaps.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are even control forces at zero airspeed, with just the air jets acting like reaction control thrusters.
Or it might be more like active boundary layer control, just nudging the passing air stream one way or the other with the air jets.