3 ms·

The breakthrough here was to design wings that torque and twist differently in many different places giving this machine more of the lift, propulsion and flight

• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• verisimilitude 15y ago
  If twisting wings were that advantageous for air travel, I would think they would've been adopted into a mainstream product by now, since it has been many years since the expiration of those patents.
  • run4yourlives 15y ago
    There are a lot of designs that would be highly advantageous to aircraft design that aren't for one reason or another normally incorporated in new variants. Canards come to mind right off the bat. The fact is that the design of aircraft is extremely expensive and there is little advantage to innovation. You aren't going to be able to charge twice as much as your competitor with the 737 lookalike regardless of how wonderful your new canard layout flexible control surface design is. Even military aircraft aren't pushing the envelope in design features anymore - think of how similar an F-22 is to an F-15. There is simply too much risk and not enough payoff.
    • lutorm 15y ago
      Canards come to mind right off the bat. Even military aircraft aren't pushing the envelope in design features anymore Ever seen the JAS39 Gripen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gripen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gripen)?
      • run4yourlives 15y ago
        Canards have been used quite heavily in fighter jets for the last 20 years... Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale, Kfir. All delta-winged designs with the same basic layout. For that specific example however I was thinking civilian aircraft, in which canards would be a huge step forward but are never seen.
        • lutorm 15y ago
          You are practically correct about that last thing, though I must point out that never is too strong a word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144
          • run4yourlives 15y ago
            Never as in "commercial success". Closer to reality than the 144, which was pretty much a government money pit, was the Beech Starship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship). Again though, not able to see any real success.
• lotharbot 15y ago
  The primary advantage of the Wright brothers' "wing warping" was low-speed maneuverability. The smaller the control surface, the more airspeed you need. For the Wright brothers, virtually the entire wing was a control surface, so they were able to control their aircraft; Richard Pearse [0] used ailerons for his flights earlier in the year, and had only minimal control. The reason wing warping isn't used much has little to do with the Wright's patent. While many pre-WWI aircraft used wing warping (such as the Etrich Taube [1]), as airspeeds increased, smaller control surfaces became adequate, and the lower strength of warpable wings doomed them to obsolescence. The F-22 Raptor [2], a modern highly-maneuverable aircraft, has control surfaces all over its wings, giving it all the advantages of wing warping without the disadvantage of reduced wing strength. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrich_Taube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrich_Taube [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F22_Raptor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F22_Raptor
  • yardie 15y ago
    The particular UAV in the article is a plane shaped like a seagull. I doubt speed was requirement. The fact is aircraft have gotten faster since the Wright brothers and airframes have also gotten much stronger. Ailerons with ailerons you gained high-speed maneuverability at the cost of low-speed. Since then, engineers have been trying to find more elaborate ways of regaining lowspeed flight maneuverability by adding more control surfaces. Flaps, for example extend the wing to increase the chamber. It might not be warping in the traditional context but they have definitely warped the airflow to the same effect.