Why Aren't Swing Wing Aircraft Made Any More?

a big shout out goes to ground news for sponsoring this video check them out at ground. newsd Droid the link is in the description below from around the mid 1960s a new type of aircraft led the way in introducing multi-roll Fighters and bombers both in the United States and in the Soviet Union and then Europe This hybrid style of aircraft looked to combine the lowp speeed flexibility and efficient Crews of a straight WI and the high-speed capability of a swept wi and supersonic performance aircraft in one platform the first of these to reach full production would be the F-111 arvar and although it had a problematic birth it would go on to be one of the usaf's most Dependable aircraft for almost 30 years from the 1960s up until 1981 aircraft made with swing-wing designs were made by the US Soviet and European manufacturers and used on some of the most Cutting Edge Designs of that era like the F14 Tomcat the b1b bomber the panavia tornado the Mig 23 suco Su 24 tupelov t160 and some others but there was a sudden change and then from 1981 onwards no new swing-wing aircraft have been built anywhere in the world so why did swing-wing aircraft become so important in the 1960s and70s and then fall out of favor from the 1980s onwards and why did only military aircraft use this technology and not commercial ones to understand why variable geometry or swing-wing aircraft became important for the military you have to go back to Mid 1935 when the German aeronautical research scientist Adolf boosman was working on transonic and supersonic air flows and how they affected things like wings and propeller blades all production wings at the time were straight and perpendicular to the fuselage with lift and stability as their main goals aircraft speeds were still low by today's standards and supersonic performance was just a distant goal but in the mid 1930s with the Advent of the jet engine that goal began to move much closer to a practical reality though few people at the time knew that the existing straight-wing technology would not be suitable for transonic and supersonic flight adol boo when discovered if a wing was swept back it would delay the onset of wave drag a form of aerodynamic drag that increases dramatically as the wing travels at the speed of sound and led to the concept of the sound barrier this will be later reinforced by early tests where aircraft would lose control because of the severe vibrations of the wave drag created on both the wings fusal arge and control surfaces in 1935 boost presented a paper at the fifth fter conference in Rome about supersonic lift and although several important future dynamicists were at the conference his work was thought to be more of an academic curiosity because at the time aircraft speeds of over 300 mph were a rarity at the time all propell div fighter aircraft and bombers had straight Wings primarily designed to give lift and stability and even in high-speed Dives didn't go fast enough to be affected by wave drag but one Spitfire Mark 11 did reach Mac 0.89 620 M hour or th000 km an hour in a high-speed trial in 1943 during a 45 Dee dive before the propeller was ripped off due to the reduction gear failure the pilot survived and managed to Glide the Spitfire back to base but this was very much a fluke occurrence as jet engine technology was in independently developed in both Britain and Germany in the late 30s and early 40s the aerodynamics of both the fuselage and wings became increasingly important which brought busman's work which by 1936 was classified by the Lu raffer to the four up until 1942 boosman conducted a large amount of wind tunnel testing on the shape of wings and how they responded at supersonic speeds which would be put into use by the L wafer with experimental aircraft like foret powered mmid me p101 the rocket powered mmid me1 163 Comet and the jet powered m262 after the war Britain was also experimenting with potentially supersonic aircraft like the 19460 havin DH 108 and the miles m52 in 1947 Chuck Jager in the rocket powered Bell X1 which was very similar to the miles m52 broke the sound barrier although ironically it used Straight wings but it was the fact that they were very thin and more like fins rather than wings and combined with the allm moving tail plane that they got it to work now while boosman and others studied aerodynamics at least they knew where their studies were leading to but in today's 24/7 news-driven world it's difficult to know what the real truth is and who spinning it for the benefit their own agenda and this is where ground news can help you see through the clutter and noise of all the competing stories ground news is an app and website developed by former NASA engineer harleen core that shows you everything in one place so you can come to your own conclusions about the news but it also shows you who the sources are what their political leaning is and who owns them to give you an example here's a new story about NATO giving more air defense systems to Ukraine on the right you can see the coverage details the number of sources and how recent the updates are then the political biases of those sources left Center or right leaning here they are mostly left biased below is the factuality score which is quite high at about 64% and who owns the source here they are mostly media conglomerates but then equally split between government and corporations as these are ones most likely affected by this just click on any of the sources to see the article or you can look to the left of a page and skim the headlines of the Articles to see how each source is framing the news and then go to the Articles from there you can also search for the subject of Articles you're looking for be that on current news events people or politics basically any type of topic or check out the blind spot feed for stories that have little or no coverage from on side of the political spectrum and build them into your own following feed or just browse the news for what interests you in particular to find out more and access datadriven information from around the world go to ground. news/ Droid link is in the description below and if you subscribe through my link you can get 40% off the Vantage plan for unlimited access in 1945 just as the war concluded operation Lusty which was short for ler secret technology was set up by the United States Air Force to try and capture and evaluate German aeronautical technology during and after World War II this was split into two teams it was here that the second team came across boosman and his work at the brunig labs on the 7th of May 1945 and the huge amount of data he had created some of the team had actually been to the conference in Rome where he presented his paper in 1935 although they couldn't quite remember the main points that it was about on realizing the importance of the data one of a team Geor sharer immediately wrote to Boeing and told them to investigate the concept which led to the remodeling of the b47 Strat Fortress with swept back Wings instead of straight Wings in 1947 Adolf boosman moved to the United States and started work at the NACA Langley Research Center where he worked alongside Robert T Jones another pioneering aerody dynamicist to develop both swept Wings oblique wings and Delta Wings also as part of operation Lusty a jet powered mmid me p101 was discovered at the mmi's Bavarian Ober ragal complex along with the jet engine the me101 which was unfinished at the time also featured a variable sweep Wing although this could only be changed on the ground and not during flight it was brought back to America and studied in detail by B aircraft which recreated and flew their own version and this became the basis of a 1951 Bell X5 the first aircraft to be able to change the sweep of its wings during flight with three preset settings of 20° 40° and 60° of sweep even though the idea worked the X5 had a flawed aerodynamic layout in particular the poorly positioned tail and vertical stabilizer which in some Wing positions could lead to an irrecoverable spin this led to PL by the USAF to modify the design into a lowcost tactical Fighter for NATO to be cancelled but it wasn't just for Germans would have been interested in supersonic flight the jet engine had been patented in England by Frank Whittle in 1930 and first flown in Germany in 1934 bringing supersonic flight to the mind of one of Britain's greatest wartime inventors Barnes Wallace who had created The Bouncing bomb and the massive earthquake bombs tall boy and Grand Slam the largest non-nuclear bombs dropped of World War II after the war he started researching to creating a new type of aircraft with a fully operational swing Wing at its heart in the late 1940s he designed the Vicar's Wild Goose an unmanned aerial vehicle which he created to research a tailess variable sweep aircraft which will be control by moving the wings in flight and avoided the need for conventional control surfaces or a tail this led to development of the vica's type 010 swallow a Mac 2.5 swing wi controlled aerodine with no tail or control surfaces and which was a proposed replacement for the vica's Valiant V4 Barnes Wallace's team would later go on to create the swing wi technology used by aircraft like the panavia tornado and during the 1960s and into his retirement he developed ideas for an allspeed aircraft cap of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to Hypersonic Wallace's swing-wing technology which was shown to NASA in the swallow designs would later go on to influence along with work from the Bell X5 the 1964 f111 arar the world's first swing-wing aircraft to be put into production this aircraft was also an attempt by the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to create one aircraft that would be suitable for both the USAF and the Navy and Hope y cut costs but things didn't quite work out that way for the Navy seeing how well the F-111 combined the qualities of both low-speed flight economy of cruising and supersonic capabilities the Soviets soon set about creating their own versions and ended up making far more than the US producing 10,922 swing-wing aircraft to Americas 1,379 the Soviets took a slightly different approach in creating two different systems which varied in the distance as a percentage of a total wingspan between the wing pivots this could also be adapted to fit existing airframes without a complete redesign such as the suco su17 in 1966 this will be supplemented by the more advanced design of the Mig 23 and 67 the tupelov tu22m bomber of 69 and the suco Su 24 of 1970 in the US after the failure of a Navy to to get the f-111b to work for them Grumman produced the F-14 Tomcat in 1970 which went on to be one of the finest aircraft not only the 70s but the 80s and up into the '90s but it wasn't just fighter aircraft which benefited from variable geometry designs large bomber aircraft such as the 1974 b1b Lancer the prospective replacement for the B-52 and in 1981 tupf created their even larger Soviet version of the B1 with the tu60 however the TF tu60 would prove to be the last aircraft to use swing wi technology by the 1970s in the US advances in Wing design knew more powerful and fuele efficient engines and computer controlled or flyby wire flight regimes for aircraft with relaxed stability started with the 1974 General Dynamics F16 this new type of aircraft was basically aerodynamically unstable and could not fly without the aid of a computer but this made them far more agile and that eroded away what advantages for swing-wing designs had back in the 60s advancements in materials computerated design computer control of slats flaps and spoilers meant that the new Wing designs could do much of what the swing wi designs could do without most of the disadvantages swing Wing designs were a product of their time but they were also heavier were more complex and cost more in maintenance and lost valuable space to the swing wi mechanisms issues which the new designs had little to none of and soon the emphasis would be on the ability to fly into a theater of war without being seen by radar this was exemplified by the new stealth technology of aircraft like the f117 and the B2 Spirit bomber no matter how well swing-wing designs might have been tweaked the one thing they were poor at was being stealthy stealth designs relied upon extremely complex Fus lar and Wing shapes to reflect as little radar energy as possible a swing Wing design on the other hand because of the constant changing of the wing profile could never be made truly stealthy although the B1 Lancer did a fairly good job considering its size with a radar cross-section of 10 squ M but that was nothing compared to its successor the B2 with a radar cross-section of. one square m about the same size as a bumblebee so the simple answer to why swing WIS stop being made was that we found better ways of doing the same job without the mechanical complexity and the requirement to be stealthy excluded a moving Wing design although commercial aircraft have never used a variable geomet design right back at the beginning of the race to create an American supersonic transport aircraft to rival Concord the original 1960 design of the Boeing SST did feature a swing Wing however the tanium mechanism became too big and heavy at 2,100 kg which reduced the range and also reduced the space in the cabin so it no longer made economic sense as a commercial aircraft and they switched back to a deltawing design like the Concord but that was before it nearly sunk Boeing financially and it was eventually cancelled leaving the subsonic Boeing 747 to rebuild the company fortunes swing wings were never used in commercial aircraft because unlike military Fighters and bombers they only ever needed to do one job from the beginning and variable geometry design was just not needed swing-wing manufacturer May well have stopped in the 80s but there are still many in service today with two of the most prominent being the b1b Lancer and the tupv tu60 and in a strange twist in 2022 a new Tu 160m highly modernized version took to be air and production restarted with two planned for delivery in 2022 and 10 more on the order books so I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did then please thumbs up share and subscribe and a big Thanks goes to all of our patrons for their ongoing support

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 239,386

Keywords: swing wings, f-111, f-14, b-1b lancer, tu-160, mig-23, swept wing, no ore swing wings, paul shillito, curious droid

Id: Xf3zsIAnqqU

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024