Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 19, 1992 TAG: 9202190177
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEORGE KEGLEY BUSINESS EDITOR
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
VA. TECH PROFESSORS TO SEE IF IDEA WILL FLY
The largest flying machine in history - a wing ship almost as long as two football fields - could soar out of Virginia Tech, provided two university engineers prove the project feasible.Two Tech professors are evaluating a huge wing ship that would carry 2,000 passengers plus another 1,200 tons of tanks, helicopters and guns for a range of 10,000 miles.
Estimated to cost $400 million, it's a much larger version of a plane that was developed in secrecy behind the Iron Curtain. Now, with that curtain lifted, Russian scholars are cooperating in development plans and one of them is coming to Virginia Tech soon.
The airplane-flying ship is designed to fly more efficiently than a conventional airplane. That's because it skims across water to take advantage of the ground effect - an increase in lift from a cushion of air between the plane and the surface.
Virginia Tech has a $54,000 subcontract for an in-depth evaluation of the concept. That was matched by $60,000 from the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology. The CIT grant gave the project a needed boost, according to Ali Nayfeh, a Virginia Tech professor of aeronautics and mechanical engineering.
Virginia Tech also will be involved in the wing-ship research and development, said Wayne Thiessen, a spokesman for Aerocon Inc., the Arlington contractor for the project. The company has a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The wing ship as planned would be 577 feet long and the span across its wing tips would be 330 feet. It would be much larger than a 200-300-passenger wing ship the Russians have been working on for 50 years. They call their model an ekranoplan. "Ekran" is Russian for ground effect.
The wing ship is expected to fly within the next decade. A civilian model could carry 2,000 passengers to Europe or the Orient at fares kept low because of revenues brought in from cargo.
"You would make money on the cargo and take the people for gravy, maybe $25 each" for a transoceanic flight at 500 miles an hour, Nayfeh said. He and Dean T. Mook, engineering science and mechanics professor, are doing the evaluation.
The wing ship is being developed as a Virginia project. Newport News Shipbuilding Co. is projected as the builder because the manufacturer needs knowledge of both seafaring and aerial technology, Nayfeh said. Several eastern Virginia companies have helped in the preliminary design.
The Russians have tested their smaller ekranoplan for years. When an odd-shaped plane was seen in flight, western observers called it the Caspian Sea Monster.
Stephen Hooker, president of Aerocon, once analyzed the secretive Russian wing ship for the Defense Department.
Nayfeh said he and other U.S. engineers hope to use the Russian wing-ship experience, now freed from communist restrictions, in their research.
K.V. Rozhdestvensky, dean of the St. Petersburg Shipbuilding Institute and one of the veteran students of the wing-ship technology, is coming to Blacksburg soon to confer with Nayfeh and Mook on their evaluation. Rozhdestvensky has been using Nayfeh's books in his classroom.
This is a perfect time to study the wing ship, said Aerocon's Thiessen, because its use could eliminate the need for U.S. troops to be stationed overseas. They could be flown from the United States to critical areas of the world.
"If we can put this together," he said, there may be a need for a major load center, perhaps in the Tidewater section of the state. Overseas passengers could fly from other parts of the country and travel overseas on the wing ship. "The cost would be so small that it would make the system less expensive," Thiessen said.
From initial study, the wing ship is "aerodynamically sound," Nayfeh said. Traveling with the cargo capacity of a small ship and the speed of a transport plane, the wing ship can fly at higher altitudes of several thousand feet but at a loss of efficiency, the Tech professor said.
The larger the wing ship, the closer it appears to be to the surface of the water, he said, so the key to efficient operations is size.
The Russian model uses the air-cushion technology which sets it apart as a new kind of flying cargo and people carrier, according to Fortune magazine. The Russian plane can transport 50 percent more weight than a conventional cargo plane with the same amount of power, the magazine said.