Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are indeed subject to the same laws of physics as all aircraft and in the future with morphing and shape shifting control surfaces they may also be subject to the same physics and aerodynamic forces of both birds and flying insects? So what happens when you take a high-speed UAV and you turn it all of a sudden the maximum number of Gs possible within its structural envelope and beyond its flying characteristic envelope and it departs from flight? All new rules now, but wait; now what if, yes what if you could change the shape as it tumbled violently out of control at lets say 30 Gs and realize there is no pilot inside to get crushed to death at around 10-12 Gs, no sir and the aircraft can take it too. So what if you simply changed the shape of the wing and started flying again and regained control immediately? Can you even imagine the potential new flight maneuvers you could create? Or the speed at which you could turn if you could take the new relative airflows, re-direct them and then force them over your control surfaces to complete a seemingly impossible maneuver. Well I have imagined this in my mind and believe indeed it is more than possible. Imagine making many small departure and recover maneuvers within a second or two and appear to have changed directions at a right angle? Possible, well sure it is; consider a snap roll and what if the wing sudden changed and the airflows redirected using deflection strategies with the bending, morphing and shape shifting techniques? Once we started doing this we could put all the maneuvers and wing shape positions into a CAD CAM with a high speed computer system and all the simulator pilots and Artificial Intelligent computers to have at it and dream up any flight maneuver they could think of and test how the aircraft responds and then set tolerances and data sets for the morphing system. The future of aviation is indeed live and well my friends, can you just see it? Consider all this in 2006. |
