This sounds like something straight out of a James Bond movie but no, it's real and it's your government: Those way out engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to build an aircraft that's as capable of zipping through the sky as it is underwater.
The agency's Submersible Aircraft research project is exploring the possibility of making an aircraft that can maneuver underwater with the goal of revolutionizing the US Department of Defense's ability to, for example, bring warfighters and equipment to coastal locations or enhance rescue operations. DARPA said that the concept being evaluated here is for a submersible aircraft, not a flying submarine. It is expected that the platform will spend the bulk of its time in the air and will only spend short periods of time submerged according to the agency.
According to DARPA: "The difficulty with developing such a craft come from the diametrically opposed requirements that exist for an airplane and a submarine. While the primary goal for airplane designers is to try and minimize weight, a submarine must be extremely heavy in order to submerge underwater. In addition, the flow conditions and the systems designed to control a submarine and an airplane are radically different, due to the order of magnitude difference in the densities of air and water."
There are some major requirements of such a craft, DARPA said, including:
DARPA acknowledges the difficulties in designing such a craft and said that prior attempts to demonstrate a vehicle with the maneuverability of both a submersible and an aircraft have primarily explored approaches that would endow flight capability to platforms that were largely optimized for underwater operation. Unfortunately these prior attempts have been unsuccessful largely because the design requirements for a submersible and an aircraft are diametrically opposed.
Interestingly there was a patent issued in 2007 to Gennady Ploshkin, for a disc-shaped aircraft that could take off like a helicopter and submerge like a sub. There have been other sub-plane designs as well. Probably the most famous flying sub was in the TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Layer 8 in a box
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Very nice - they haven't
Very nice - they haven't tried this one in a few years. But what are warfighters? Is that like newspeak for soldiers?
someone must be pulling our leg
Vehicle in video is a dead ringer for the flying sub in the mid-sixties tv show "Voyage to the Bottom of te Sea"...Hmmm
http://graffititable.blogspot.com/2007/06/pete-best-is-in-heaven.html
Wasn't this the "sky diver"
Wasn't this the "sky diver" from the show UFO?
Anyone tried thinking this thing all the way through FIRST?
Whoever thought of this needs a severe beating. Let me explain.
Though I don't care for them, the Mythbusters did an episode where they fired bullets into water. They discovered that no matter how powerful or large the round was, they would disintegrate/come to a complete stop in under 3 feet. Bullets are designed to be extremely aerodynamic and yet they couldn't make a sudden change from air-to-water.
Do the math there. That's an object travelling over 700mph in the air that comes to a complete stop in under 3 feet. The human body will disintegrate far faster than those bullets did even if they're strapped down and in a protective shell.
Hint, water is over 800 times as dense as air which means that this "plane" will suddenly have to displace 800 times more mass than it had to do a split second before. I'm not going to attempt to do the calculations but that's the equivalent of hitting a brick wall.
Sooo, maybe, just maybe it's not so scientific to think that someone is just going to move from air to water without stopping first.
Unless I missed a key part
Unless I missed a key part of the spec, it isn't required to go instantaneously from aerial operations to subsurface operations, right? Couldn't it land like a seaplane and then go under? (I fully agree that hitting water at any kind of speed would annihilate any kind of vehicle, there's no argument there.)
Great explanation, but the
Great explanation, but the project doesn't say anything about the vehicle going directly from a flying state to a submersible state. In fact, it says there is a third sea-surface mode. It will likely land on water like a sea plane and then take a little prep to submerge.
macross/robotech
a veritech would work!
As others noted,
As others noted, air-to-submerged isn't a necessary transition for the craft. However, if it were, there are projectiles designed to do such a thing much better than an ordinary bullet. The US Navy's RAMICS system uses one such, and (Mythbusters notwithstanding) has reportedly achieved 140 foot stable underwater trajectories from an airborne weapon.
A search for the term "supercavitating" will give much more information.
That's not the real problem.
The translation isn't really much of a problem as long as the sea state isn't too high, you can land on top of the water, and then submerge. Bouyancy isn't too great an issue as most of the airframe is floodable, and you can use it as a positively bouyant dynamic sub using forward motion across the foils to generate the down force. The powerplant, now that's gonna be tricky.
Admiral Nelson Woulld Have Approved
But where's the Seaview?