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Liberty Lifter Aims to Revolutionize Heavy Air Lift
- LunarCamper 4y agoSo the Caspian sea monster, but make it American by adding words like "liberty" and "freedom" to the name? Got it.
- renewiltord 4y agoConsidering they mentioned the ekranoplans in the linked article this seems like just a low quality regurgitation. American naming schemes tend to be like this. It's just branding.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI wasn't aware of that pattern. Can you give some examples of Americans doing this more than other peoples?
- jitl 4y ago> doing this more than other peoples I don’t think a pattern needs to be exceptional to be notable. The first example that comes to mind is Freedom Fries (lol) https://www.google.com/search?q=freedom+fries&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.google.com/search?q=freedom+fries&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT...
- rst 4y agoThe depicted images didn't show a ground-effect vehicle, which seems odd -- it fits the job and is much more economical than the winged plane shown.
- jhgb 4y agoThere's the mention of "sustained flight at mid-altitudes". Perhaps the intention is for this to be able to fly over land as well? Maybe by sacrificing some cargo capacity in mid-altitude flights?
- Gimpei 4y agoSpruce Goose 2?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI sincerely wish them luck with that. It would definitely be cool, if they could get it to work, but this part: > highly controlled flight close to turbulent water surfaces Has been a "heavy lift" for ekranoplan designers for decades.
- bell-cot 4y agoYep. I've never heard "batting average" figures for DARPA, but they are the government's "pie in the sky" long-shot research folks.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI've always enjoyed The Register's view on DARPA. They treat them as if they were Frankenstein's Playpen.
- detritus 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31479578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31479578
- aquaphile 4y agoOh the irony. This is the Pelican program restart. Circa 2005. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Pelican https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Pelican Pelican was a ground-effect heavy lift aircraft, too. DARPA refused to fund any Pelican developmental work 20 years ago because the “Technology has been demonstrated already” (by the Russians). I had the privilege of working for the people who did the concept of operations work.