Postwar Burnelli Designs

[dan_inbox]

Would it be possible to make a modern day...advanced lifting fuselage plane ?

All the Sukhoi 25...34 series ? MiG-35 ? Before them the F-14 ?
All the blended wing body concepts ? (which work aerodynamically but not commercially, not enough windows)

 

[John Frazer]

Would it be possible to make a modern day...advanced lifting fuselage plane ?

Every high-end tactical plane will be a lifting fuselage "all-wing" from now on. Not just for stealth, but for L/D and range and payload and handling.
Everyone sneered at South Korea's light fighter. Looks like stealth, but with external pylons and common materials & techniques. Because it's not stealth.

Lock-Mart has said that it's ready to start with contemporary-low-risk materials and methods to make their "hybrid wing/body" logistics plane.
Like the Boeing projections about their '70s model 754 lifting fuselage planes, they promise that with the same engines and fuel load as a normal plane they get x 1.5 to 1.7 the range and payload, onto shorter runways.

Russavia was showing their "Frigate Ecojet" with only a squashed tubular fuselage.
They say that with the power & fuel loading and in the footprint and onto the runway of a regional, they can get the payload of a jumbo.

The various versions of the Boeing 754 are markedly improved over "normal" planes, and no advanced materials or engines or technology is required.
In their patent sheets, Boeing said that the tube fuselage is scraping to get a few percent efficiency however they can, often at great expense and at the cutting-edge and often hypothetical technology, while they're nearing the end of the ability of a design to be "stretched". Every stretch requires newer taller stronger landing gear for the rotation angle required, and the wing center boxes & fuselage structure are markedly different, only adding more stress there.
Extending a lifting fuselage sideways and adding another engine and set of landing gear every few lanes of cargo you add, only increases payload and L/D while runways remain the same (shorter than a "normal" plane), rotation angle and landing gear & structure remain the same. They say you can often get more internal volume, and simultaneously less wetted area & drag and empty structural mass, than a similar footprint normal plane.

 

[riggerrob]

With the Russian frigate-ecojet, they will struggle to build an oval cross-section, pressurized cabin that is as light and as strong as a cabin with a circular cross-section (bulkheads).
One alternative is laying a series of cylindrical cabins side-by-side and over-lapping them a bit. As long as the over-lapping bulkhead exceeds 6 feet tall (2 meters) passengers will not notice when they move (side-ways) from one tube to the next. Cylinders will be joined by vertical walls (like fabric ribs in ram-air parachutes). Since the joining walls only have to carry tensile loads, they can have plenty of lightening-holes ... er doors for passengers to wander through. Adding a few diagonal tensile members will help with longitudinal bending loads.
Please note that side-by-side cylinders are impractical for military transports carrying odd-shaped cargo, but much of that weird-shaped cargo does not need to breath pressurized cabin air.

 

[Nicknick]

There is also the alternative of using spherical roof/bottom elements which are hold together by pillars on each corner where three of them (or our of them) meet. This could by lighter than using cylinders with walls and give a more open internal architecture. The spherical form reduces stresses by half compared to a cylindrical shape with the same radius, but isn’t well suited for carbon fibre’s due to its even tension in all directions along the surface. Also this shape doesn’t add a lot of stiffness against bending the fuselage.

 

[Gurvan]

Hello Everyone,

Bit of a necropsy-revival of a not so old thread, here is two informations that you may find useful...

I was trying to follow-up on the information that the December 1946 of the Mechanix Illustrated magazine had an article titled "Something New On The Wing" with a nice picture of a "projected" Burnelli aircraft. I had found the information here :

Flight 1549 and the Hudson: survival in an urban environment – Burnelli

But the link at the bottom of the page was not working anymore.

Thus, I had the idea of looking it up through the Archive.org website and I found out that this article was not in the December 1946 but 1945 ! Here is a link to the right magazine and the article :

https://ia802300.us.archive.org/10/...m_todays-homeowner-solutions_1945-12_35_2.pdf (See Page 49 and following...)

But my search was also interesting in that the December 1946 also had an article on a Burnelli project! A kind of airborne helicopter platform for rescue at sea! This article is called "Helicopter Pickaback" by Roland Cueva.

https://ia802300.us.archive.org/14/...m_todays-homeowner-solutions_1946-12_37_2.pdf (See page 83 and following...)

I have tried my best to add up two pages from that archive and here is what I came with...

I hope that you'll like it...

And now, I am wondering if that December article would also work in different years! Who know what we are missing...

 

[hesham]

From Aeroplane monthly 1980.

 

[Motocar]

Hello Everyone,

Bit of a necropsy-revival of a not so old thread, here is two informations that you may find useful...

I was trying to follow-up on the information that the December 1946 of the Mechanix Illustrated magazine had an article titled "Something New On The Wing" with a nice picture of a "projected" Burnelli aircraft. I had found the information here :

Flight 1549 and the Hudson: survival in an urban environment – Burnelli

But the link at the bottom of the page was not working anymore.

Thus, I had the idea of looking it up through the Archive.org website and I found out that this article was not in the December 1946 but 1945 ! Here is a link to the right magazine and the article :

https://ia802300.us.archive.org/10/...m_todays-homeowner-solutions_1945-12_35_2.pdf (See Page 49 and following...)

But my search was also interesting in that the December 1946 also had an article on a Burnelli project! A kind of airborne helicopter platform for rescue at sea! This article is called "Helicopter Pickaback" by Roland Cueva.

https://ia802300.us.archive.org/14/...m_todays-homeowner-solutions_1946-12_37_2.pdf (See page 83 and following...)

I have tried my best to add up two pages from that archive and here is what I came with...
View attachment 684372
I hope that you'll like it...

And now, I am wondering if that December article would also work in different years! Who know what we are missing...

Next retouched...!

 

[m94x]

Could a bigger Burnelli have filled the B-36 niche ??

In fact, Burnelli did have plans to compete against Convair’s B-36, but had largely been sidelined by the US government by that time.

 

[hesham]

From Aviation Age 1950.