Foo Fighters

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John Frazer said:
The whole question of "if they were good, where are they today" is a red herring.
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Well, it can be
Let's ask fans of he XB-70
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The XB-70 was pathologically expensive...
I think you might be referring to the XF5U, the V-173 flew fine absent some vibration (it wasn't as severe as the XF5U). The speed was limited more by having a landing-gear.
This actually was discussed in another thread which I gathered you didn't read. The bulk of the lift seemed to be produced by the slipstream however from what it would appear the degree to which the propellers affected the vortex varied with speed and AoA. At lower speeds it appeared the effect was more significant (depending on how I read the data it was either 7%, 30-50% though I could be wrong).
XF5U never was able to fly because of "Zimmerman's folly", those silly geared flapping props.
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Actually, Zimmerman wanted to put the flapping props on the design right off the bat. Vought decided it wasn't needed, so they had to graft on a feature they could have put in from the outset and would have probably seen the aircraft in the air earlier.

Part of me honestly wonders how much of the decision to cancel the XF5U had to do with jets being the wave of the future, or the post-war budget battles
  • The politicians wanted to reduce military spending funding as the war was over, and wars are economically ruinous when there's no conquest and plundering.
  • With only limited amounts of money available, each service wants the biggest piece of the pie it can get
  • The US Navy in demolishing the IJN basically left it with no counterpart that wasn't an ally, so there was a desire to scale it back into what would amount to a glorified coast-guard and submarine service.
  • The US Army argued that there would be no need for any amphibious invasions in the future (i.e. no need for the USMC), and it's air-arm could achieve all the basic things the USN could achieve, eliminating much of it's use (basically, it stood to be scaled back to a relatively small surface, and submarine force).
  • The USAAF/USAF wanted to gobble up all aerial assets they could, including the USN's: They roundly disliked carriers because they couldn't control them and sought to gut carrier aviation. They did this by claiming that carriers could not defend against nuclear equipped bombers (which wasn't entirely true), and could not deliver nuclear ordinance.
  • The USN countered these arguments by pitting the F2H against the B-36's as soon as they could, and developing a new super carrier to field a jet-powered bomber with a nuclear armament (They did field P2V's with nuclear ordinance, but they couldn't land; the AJ Savage was propeller driven and could probably used to be faster).
A plane like the XF5U would have been an aircraft that didn't really need a carrier and could have easily been gobbled up by the USAAF/USAF. Of course, it wouldn't have made a difference for a jet-powered nuclear-bomber that was designed to operate off a carrier, and jet-fighters though (which I'm not going to take an anti-jet stance of course).
 
Aside from UFOs that aren't aerodyne-craft (don't use forward motion & airflow to make lift), there are a few observations about other things lumped into the term "UFO" and into the counter-culture surrounding them.

One of the first modern reports was the Arnold sighting over Washington, Near Mt Ranier.
He did not report seeing discs or hovering objects. 8 were nearly circular "horse-shoe shaped", and one was a parabola all-wing, nearly the size of a DC-4.
It could be the spitting image of the Cheranovsky BICh-3 and 7a which flew fairly well, over a decade earlier. Cheranovsky felt sure it could work without the tail, but given the day and budget, the fin was added. The 3 had an engine of 18hp, and maintained level flight on only 16hp. Both were fairly fast, and the 7a earned a flightworthyness certification and several pilots who flew it proved that it handled fairly conventionally.
We also know that the Arup planes flew very successfully in the early-mid-30s, showing that a nearly circular planform could work, and the Nemeth plane had a tailed circular wing and flew very well. Arup had designs for tail-less planes. With jets, they would have looked very eerie. (Perhaps turned around so that round edge was the nose, it leads us to the later Avro project Y)
Any of these, if worked up to 1947 technology, might have been mach-2 secret planes. But who, and why weren't they anything to history but curiosities and funny stories about aliens? By throwing the Arnold sighting in with various "ET alien" discs, it might lead us astray from investigating what they might have been.

It's interesting that a few years later, Avro was working on their circular car which was an early testing model for an airjeep, but also for better versions called variously Project-Y (photo of a mock-up shown (wikipedia and many other mentions of it), and with circular wing by the USAF as Project 1794 and Project 606.
Some of these used the VTO effect to shorten take-off as well as ducting power-plant jet exhaust aft for thrust and hovering tail-down. Rather than VTOL either nose-up or level, assisting it in just being STOL might have been less of the sort of problem that made the Avrocar unworkable. 606 minimized the importance of this arrangement and worked toward fairly normal, if round, STOL planes; a large departure from the Avro Project Y or the aerocar. We've seen that various iterations of circle can fly, and maybe fly well, though they'd be far from anything that hovers silently.
Project Y is almost the exact silhouette of 8 of the things Arnold saw, a few years earlier, as well as the photo from the '47 sighting in Arizona.

Several images follow. Last groups are from various sites about the Avro
.
 
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John Frazer said:
Aside from UFOs that aren't aerodyne-craft (don't use forward motion & airflow to make lift), there are a few observations about other things lumped into the term "UFO" and into the counter-culture surrounding them.
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It's important to remember that words have meaning: UFO means Unidentified Flying Object, so it doesn't have to be an alien vehicle, just something you can't identify at the time. I've seen lots of them, though for only a fraction of a second, as they became IFO's at that point when my brain figured out what they were
One of the first modern reports was the Arnold sighting over Washington, Near Mt Ranier. . . He did not report seeing discs or hovering objects. 8 were nearly circular "horse-shoe shaped", and one was a parabola all-wing, nearly the size of a DC-4.
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If that's based on span, whatever he saw was 115-120 feet. He said supposedly it was traveling at 1800 mph...
True, plus it would be a good way to justify world government: Claim thee's a threat from "beyond" and we all need to join together to "fight" it .
 
The real UFO's do things an aircraft can not. They most always never have any sort of aerodynamic power source either, like a prop or jet etc. and their movements are more closely related to what a magnetic device would do. Its more like they are in a field than in air. And in many cases especially in the 50's and 60's they had electromagnetic effects on electrical devices. You don't hear too many reports now about that sort of thing.
 
Actually there are some kind of piezoelectric phenomena that can produce glowing that you can see. They often look like balls flying all over the place.
 
Zipper730 said:
Actually there are some kind of piezoelectric phenomena that can produce glowing that you can see. They often look like balls flying all over the place.
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Yeah but they don't hover over a sub station tipping so you can tell it is saucer shaped for a whole night class at a school to see, and also at the same time cause effects on tv's near by and on the phone system, then take off heading south east.
 
PWR4360-59B said:
Yeah but they don't hover over a sub station tipping so you can tell it is saucer shaped for a whole night class at a school to see, and also at the same time cause effects on tv's near by and on the phone system, then take off heading south east.
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Was this a real case?
 
The Boeing Bird of Prey had a "cloaking device of sorts

PWR4360-59B said:
Yes, I don't know if any of the people reported it, I saw the electrical effects from it.
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You were there shortly after it left?
 
Zipper730 said:
What kind of electrical effects?
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Yeah but they don't hover over a sub station tipping so you can tell it is saucer shaped for a whole night class at a school to see, and also at the same time cause effects on tv's near by and on the phone system, then take off heading south east.

I mentioned it in above post. It hard to explain all the details and it was too many years ago.
 
The early Airup was VERY impressive for 36 hp. And 115 mph is enough for a Cessna 172 to have been built in numbers more than 46,000. 115 mph is NOT very impressive for a military fighter, but the projected 500 mph for the Vought XF5U would have been a nice fighter around a carrier.

I think the low-aspect ratio planes had potential that remains unexplored.

The Payen low-aspect ratio planes had very good performance for the installed power. The PA-22 achieved 224 mph from 180 hp.



A Cessna 172 RG can only WISH it could do as well, and it has retractable gear. The Payen Pa 49 Katy. is shown below.



It managed 311 mph in 330 lbs of thrust. If any modern fighter could do that, we all jump up and down. To achieve the same sped to thrust, an English Electric Lightning would have had to go 30,157 mph, or faster than the Space Shuttle. To be fair, the F-15 would have to go 45,085 mph to get the same effeciency.

It is possible we have overlooked the desirable characteristics of low aspect ratio planes for many years. It is also possible that low aspect ratio layouts have been explored and found seriously wanting in areas that cannot be overlooked. However, I'd say the F-105 and Mirage-type fighters have shown the layout CAN be useful. I'd like to see an Airup-type design with a modern look and powerplant before dismissing it out of hand.

Aerodynamicist Barnaby Wainfan designed a low aspect ratio plane called the facetmobile. See below.



It goes 110 mph on 50 hp. Not too shabby.
 
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