I'd like to see what became of the project and why it was apparently canceled.
I disagree however with the last statement of the article: "If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial setting."
Just because flying saucers aren't used commercially doesn't necessarily imply that they are inefficient. It just means that the flying saucer technology we have at the moment is more inefficient than the fixed wing technology. Fixed wing technology could simply be ahead because it has seen a lot more iterative development.
Endeavors of this kind, that carry a huge upfront investment in the initial technology compared to what's on the market now, tend to be things where a free market really performs badly.
Nearly infinite odds are that it was canceled because it didn't work.
From TFA:
One declassified memo, which seems to be the conclusion of initial research and prototyping, says that Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of "between Mach 3 and Mach 4," (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150mi, 1850km). [...] According to the cutaway diagrams, the entire thing would even be capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL).
VTOL, Mach 3++, 100,000ft - the only thing it was missing for it to be the perfect military aircraft is a Romulan cloaking device.
If the "flying saucer" could meet those specifications, it would still be classified. Q.E.D. it didn't work.
I'm inclined to agree. This is the answer that Occam's Razor would give us. Especially given the fact that this aircraft was designed so long ago.
It would be one thing if we were reading leaked documentation about an experimental aircraft designed 10 years ago. But we're not. We're reading declassified info about an aircraft designed some 50-60 years ago. If it actually worked, a half-century would be a pretty reasonable timeframe from experiment to slightly more mainstream application. If not commercial application, than certainly military or scientific application. And its existence would have turned up by now. Alternatively, it would be so effective and groundbreaking that it would remain classified to this day, and nobody would have declassified any of this documentation.
EDIT: From the (extensively documented) Wikipedia article on the very similar Avrocar:
"In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performance flight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961."
Additionally, if the "saucer" had any reality to it, the F-35[1] program would not be the mess that it is. It's performance is half the "saucer's" purported performance[2]: short takeoff / vertical landing (STOVL), half the maximum speed, slightly more range (which it is struggling to achieve), approximately half the service ceiling (and the range and service ceiling are probably for the conventional "A" model, not the STOVL "B" model).
Consider the contemporary development programs RAINBOW and GUSTO and these specs don't seem so far out. Rainbow was to add radar stealth the to U2 (cloaking). Lockheed started development of what became the A-12 in the late 50's. It flew reconnaissance 10 years later. The A-12 could fly at mach 3.35 at 75000 ft. and had a range of 2200 nm.
Those specifications were achieved in that era on other programs. I think the answer requires a deeper look.
A saucer wing has a very low aspect ratio, which has very low aerodynamic efficiency in cruise. The high-aspect trapezoidal wing we commonly see today is used because it produces much less drag while providing sufficient wing area to lift the aircraft. This has been understood since the 1930s, if not earlier.
I can't see why a saucer airframe would be desirable unless it spent a lot of time in backwards and sideways horizontal flight, where it might have better stability than a traditional wing. The complexity of the controls and thrust arrangement wouldn't seem outweighed by this though.
Actual test performance of Avro's saucers never exceeded altitudes of a few feet and speeds of a few mph.
Not fixed wing like the Avro you're talking about. From the article it sounds like a different craft entirely:
"...Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4,” (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles ...
...the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coandă effect. Maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge of the disc ..."
Seems like it'd be a fun project to hack together a scale model with someone who understood the physics. Computer control of flight surfaces would probably go a long way towards negating the difficulty of controlling it, and RC jet turbines could power it.
Sometimes I think the people who designed these kinds of saucer crafts actually believed in extra-terrestrial UFOs and were on a mission to try and duplicate what they envisioned their technology would be.
Or, our government has witnessed said technology and tried to recreate/reverse-engineer it? Makes you wonder why they would build something like this just on a without a valid reason behind doing so.
The US government seems to be quite ready to try out a lot of fringe stuff if it provides military applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project). They may as well just have gotten their inspiration from the general flying saucer hype.
I think far more likely, they thought "Saucer? How would that even fly? But wait, what if it was spinning really fast? Hmm... let me get my slide rule...".
Technology moving from the military to the private sector is rarely a free market activity. It's much more common for the Pentagon to have bankrolled the upfront R&D costs of a defense contractor, who first provides it to the military and then transitions it to commercial use.
A blended wing body and flying wing configuration have been flown. There are similarities to the saucer in that they use lifting body effects. They benefit from high lift-to-drag ratio.
However, the other handling qualities of these designs make them difficult to fly. Stability can be a real problem. I would guess that air handling problems were the issues that cancelled the saucer program. Perhaps the modern fly-by-wire computer control systems used today might make it easier to fly a saucer.
personally, i like swipe. If i see it start loading, i know that there's virtually no chance of interesting content on the pages that follow, so i can back out quickly. It seems as though the only sites that use it are terrible blogspam sites like extremetech.
What's with the Extremetech mobile site for iPad? There's nothing but black and a slow moving "ring of death" for like 30 seconds. Then I can see the page, but nothing responds for forever. Then after about a minute, the page is all there but then has to refresh again. What is this? Completely incompetent. Does anyone even test this? I'm on wired connection over 802.11n. There's no excuse for this dial up modem like performance!
That would be onswipe [http://onswipe.com/]. They offer a plugin/integration that makes your site "mobile ready" and optimized, meanwhile displaying ads and getting revenue from that.
Except they don't. They just overrule scrolling and cut off content and bombard you with ads. There is a lengthly bashing of them here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610.
"OnSwipe has become a perfect tool for preventing me from viewing content I'd otherwise happily read."
On mobile sites, I'm glad for the Stop button. Once I can see what I want to see, if the page is still trying to load something I just hit stop and in many cases, the content displays just fine without their layover ads or extra JS bullcrap.
so from what I understand, the air bends around a surface the way water sticks to the side of a teapot. The nozzle design has a "step", a little cutout at the top of the curve closest to where the air is exiting from. This little step causes a small vortex, or eddy, like in a river. The vortex causes an area of lower pressure which bends the stream of air. You can clearly see the exhaust nozzles on "fig-1" of the declassified documents:
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-1-...
I'm calling it as a fake. The drawings are in the too-good-to-be-true category, and the Flying Saucer logo is hilarious. No updates since Sept 20, and published with only 4 pages scanned? Is there any evidence for this other than the Wordpress blog on which it appears?
So with a top speed of 2,300-3,000 mph and a range of 1,000 miles, it could sustain top speed for what, 20-25 minutes, assuming no fuel required to achieve altitude or for landing?
It's hard to imagine the mission profile such a vehicle would fit.
...other than doing a short-range, high-speed insertion of a bomb delivered from high altitude. In the 1950s. Oh, nevermind.
I don't understand where the Coanda effect is coming into play here. From the first cutaway drawing (http://goo.gl/QKOJy), it appears that the outer disk rotates independently of the main hub--possibly powered by the central turbines forcing air outward to the wing? It also shows the air in-take port(s) where you would expect outward thrusting air. And, it seems, like the Coanda effect relies on a more spherical shape, as opposed to the very flat sketch shown. How would that design produce the Coanda effect?
I am basing my questions on what I could glean from Wikipedia and a couple Youtube videos:
I think the most likely explanation is some combination of a) the Pentagon wanted to throw money at some Canadian aircraft firms, and b) they wanted some authentic uselessness to leak to the Soviets.
It stands to reason that if I'd spent millions of public dollars on several failed black funded secret military projects trying to get a flying saucer in the air, then I'd also hide that fact from the public.
Logically, if they were successful, they would have been spun off into a massive private corporate venture by now.
To be honest I'm surprised they declassified it. Does anyone know if the the US military have a requirement to do so?
The upshot is that when a classified document is created, it comes with a declassification date. They can be 10 to 25 years in the future. There are also specific exemptions that come with 50 or even 75 year timers. After that it's automatically declassified unless a review determines that it's still sensitive.
So you can generally expect to see declassified documents on a 50-, 25-, and 10-year delay.
If you're worried about information being classified to prevent embarrassment, though, that's illegal:
Sec 1.7
(a) In no case shall information be classified,
continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to
be declassified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency,
or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person,
organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of
information that does not require protection in
the interest of the national security.
While that doesn't make it impossible that it happens, it does mean anyone with access to the information has a duty to report that sort of fraud to legal authorities if they encounter it.
There are 9 Exemptions to that Executive Order. These exemptions allow the government to extend the declassification window indefinitely. Number 8 in particular is very broad:
(8) reveal information that would seriously impair current national security emergency preparedness plans or reveal current vulnerabilities of systems, installations, or infrastructures relating to the national security;
I don't think it would apply to this saucer as it is not a "current system" but it basically extends the time limit on any fielded system.
Considering the numerous exemptions including the one for "national security," I wonder how long it extends the time limit on actual government evidence of extraterrestrial UFO's.
I'd imagine that if there were any UFOs and they were classified it would probably be similar to the "born secret" clause that nuclear weapons research gets. So if you discovered anything it would retroactively be classified even if you didn't know it at the time and you could be prosecuted (and worse) for sharing it.
Yes and the US air force stole the designs from the Nazi's after ww2. There are a number of images floating around that showed the nazi's were testing designs with Saucers, that being said it is only really the tin foil hat crew that would believe this crazyness.
yes yes some of these links are very questionable :/ But where the hell do you find information about hese things. Personally I have always had the option that there must be grains of truths in even the oddest conspiry theorys.
tl:dr = nazi's started hte reseach, before the end of WW2 they destoryed most of it to stop the allies getting it. Allies saw it, tried to replicate it and failed badly. The Real tinhatcrew believes that the nazi's that escaped took this research to russia, how has also experimented with saucers.
if i remember correctly the usa could only get them to hover about 12ft off the ground :/
The US didn't steal the designs from the Nazis. They offered the Nazi researchers that were involved with these programs asylum if they'd help us further that research. One such program is Project Paperclip. Later, many of these scientists went on to work at Lockheed and other defense contractors. They had expertise in rocketry, turbines, and airframes that we simply didn't have at the time.
We still see their efforts in current generation aircraft (like the B-2, which I worked on). They were respected. There are memorial photos of them in the halls of places you will never see.
FYI: Those of us that worked on "fun stuff" used to get a kick out of the tin foil crowd. Do not rely on them for any remotely reliable information. Instead, pay attention to Janes and other defense aviation journalists (the DEW Line being one good example).
I dont mind people saying i got lots of facts wrong, but hte only one you pointed out that the USA offered Asylum to the nazi rather than my statement of "stole", maybe that was not the right word to use. US just threattened them with POW camps if they did not do as told.
Dont get me wrong i will never know the truth but the Allies were chasing this technically because the nazi's started researching in to it.
Well, yes. When your enemies are working on something, you want to see if their stuff is good. If it's good, then you use it yourself. This isn't "stealing" as much as it's "I really don't want the other guy to have a strategic advantage." If it doesn't work (apparently, this idea didn't), then you drop it.
As a German scientist, you had a choice: try to disappear and abandon your work, go work with the Americans in Alabama or wherever, or go work with the Soviets.
My guess is that threats weren't necessary in most cases,
I don't believe extraterrestrial spacecraft have ever visited Earth.
I'm not aware of any instance where extraterrestrial technology was used in an aircraft or to push the envelope for military flight technology.
In fact, much of it has a publicly-traceable lineage, if people would just dig. I'm thinking of low observability (stealth) technology, the latest RADAR/LIDAR tech, airframe designs, ram/pulse/pulse detonation jets, and so on. I admit some of it looks like magic on first glance, but this stuff was designed by human beings who were much smarter than me.
At the risk of wading into a pointless flame war, let's apply Occam's Razor.
First, public belief/interest in alien flying saucers has been mostly dead for decades. Performing a cover-up operation now would accomplish nothing.
Second, if the original flying saucer sightings truly were of extraterrestrial spacecraft (which I highly doubt) then nothing in these documents precludes these designs being based on those spacecraft. So, I expect this release to fuel the flames of the conspiracy theories, not cool them down.
You didn't refute one fact. You only corrected his wording and I'd actually say that the word "stole" is correct given the fact that all of this was done in secret. See definition #4 here http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/steal?s=t
"FYI: Those of us that worked on "fun stuff" used to get a kick out of the tin foil crowd."
That sounds kind of smug. Do you have the highest possible security clearance? If not, then whatever you think you know is probably hampering your perception.
Yeah sorry, that did sound smug, but I didn't mean it to be. It was internal amusement at the stuff the tinfoil crowd comes up with that probably should have stayed in my head rather than ending up in an HN comment.
Thomas,
It's smug because he has professional experience with the topic and few others here do. From previous comments: 'runjake is in his 40s, served in the military (I'm presuming the USAF)
Yep.
did EE/CS stuff with the ICBM program, and did some kind of work the UAV control system
Yep, but I wasn't in the ICBM program, rather I worked with air-launched/dropped nukes. I did not work directly on any modern UAV systems. I worked with their 1990s precursors: air-launched autonomous (conventional/nuke) cruise missiles.
It is possible that he is just making that stuff up, but it's (a) unlikely and (b) pointless and boring to debate it.
It's smug because he has professional experience with the topic and few others here do. From previous comments: 'runjake is in his 40s, served in the military (I'm presuming the USAF), did EE/CS stuff with the ICBM program, and did some kind of work the UAV control system.
It is possible that he is just making that stuff up, but it's (a) unlikely and (b) pointless and boring to debate it.
You didn't actually correct or refute any facts, which makes me rather suspicious of your authenticity. Possibly you rephrased the semantics of 'stole' in the context of strong arming the enemy at the time.
It's common knowledge that many of Braun's team ended up at US defence contractors, it wasn't just military but also space exploration that benefited from their rocketry knowledge.
It's rather amusing to see someone purporting to be one of Jack's boys commenting on the "tinfoil" crowd, especially given that the article was about flying saucers... :)
Nothing I said wasn't already public knowledge, fwiw. A lot of this info is in Ben Rich's book, amongst others. My acknowledgement of Project Paperclip (which has been a dead horse beaten) pretty much refutes the "stole" part I was referencing. But maybe I've been reading too much about Apple vs. Samsung to know what the true definition of "stole" is, anymore.
It's rather amusing to see someone purporting to be one of Jack's boys
Then they went deep underground and met some greys who killed all but hilter and then he became their king. All the while using the technology of the acients that was trapped under the ice in the pole from the orignal Arc, which is the last bit of technology from the race of people that lived on earch before the big flood 5000 years ago, which started the mayan creation story AND gave birth to Noans arc story.
No, he's saying that if the idea was viable it would probably have come to fruition within more than 60 years of research we apparently had time to do on it.
I disagree, it probably wouldn't, unless it was something very simple.
60 years is nothing. In the next 6000 years most things u can barely dream off will be ancient history.
If in last 60 years we didn't discovered something it doesn't mean in the next 600 we won't discovery something 10 times as good as it.
If you are not the author you are as narrow minded as him.
We desperately need some new ideas in aerospace. Here is one for an airship to orbit, that would use EHD thrusters to get to orbit electrically, maybe with energy beamed from the ground in microwaves:
It's all real and has been replicated numerous times. I think it's a shame that it's not covered in history books.
It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy. There's little profit in it. And people with money just don't have the vision to pull it off. It breaks my heart that geeks are getting people to click ads or working as quants on wall street instead of picking the low lying fruit that could take us into the 21st century.
"It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy."
The link wasn't to a 'green' energy site, 'over unity' is a perpetual motion machine web site. I believe simple ways to get into orbit are not funded for the same reason that perpetual motion machines aren't funded, because if they actually work there is a simple path to riches with zero dollars, thus there is no need for funding of working concepts.
The same is true for 'straightforward to the edge of space'. If you can combine free energy with easy access to high altitude you can put a cell phone repeater at 100,000' and sell phones with solid coverage in an 36 mile diameter circle for tons of money. Just putting a passive antenna up there that you could bounce UHF digital TV signals off of would get you tons of cash to fund even more 'unsexy' projects!
I'm not a conspiracy theorist and this is slightly off topic, but please bear with me. I'm just thinking out loud here.
One of the main counter points to 9/11 government conspiracy, is that a operation of that scale just couldn't be keept a secret, since to many people would be involved (and the government is all together useless). Yet here we are with a freaking flying saucer that the government did make, and apparently keept secret for over 50 years! I don't know how many people ware involved, but I'd imagine that a lot. So ... I guess they can keep big secrets?
I think the argument isn't necessarily that no operation of that size could be kept secret, but rather one which involves killing thousands of innocent people would almost certainly have people deciding not to keep the thing a secret.
With something like this, it's likely that everybody involved saw their participation as a good thing, and saw no reason to break secrecy.
You're talking about two very different things during two very different times.
9/11 was an event witnessed by the public on a massive scale. This was a private development only witnessed by those who needed to know.
You didn't have the internet in 1950s, so even if somebody did know about it and told their friend or grandchild, would that person have found it interesting enough to tell more people.
Lastly, is the attempt to make a UFO really a conspiracy?? It didn't work, so there is very little to report.
There's no indication that they did make it (at least at a level above wind tunnel mules), and at least a little bit of data suggesting that they didn't. Avro Canada was stuck on two visions at the time: the saucer concept and the Arrow. Toward the end of Avro Canada there were concept illustrations of a Mark III Arrow, which had a "saucer section" embedded in an oversized Arrow fuselage in place of conventional (delta) wings. (The illustrations lived on into the '60s, if I remember my "How and Why Wonder Books" correctly, since they didn't fall under the "destroy all Arrow data" decree, being substantially dissimilar to the CF-105.) That would seem to indicate that there were terminal stability/control issues requiring at least a rudder and conventional directed thrust, given the technology of the day -- but with, perhaps, enough promise that there was some genuine fear that the Soviets could make something of it. The MiG 15 had come of something of a shock not long before, and Sputnik was, I think, foreseeable by then. Putting the 50-year stamp on the project may have seemed very reasonable at the time, even if nothing viable came of it.
We don't know how secret this was?
Did the KGB / other spy orgs know? It's possible many UFO saucer sightings were test flights of this or similar craft. Also, I've heard of the Avro saucer car before.
An another explanation for those sorts of conspiracies (9/11, JFK...) is that the conspirators were not the perpretrators. Instead, they were people who 'left the door open' and allowed an attack that otherwise would have been easily prevented by the security services. That would require far fewer people.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it very cool that people actually looked at alternative design of aircraft and stuff like Project Orion. Yes, it's a waste of money. But at least it's a fairly creative waste of money that could have produced some interesting technologies.
Project Orion was only a waste of money in the short-term. Long-term nuclear pulse propulsion will probably be put to practical use. Potential Earth impacting asteroids are fairly easy to protect against, you spend a lot of effort cataloging them and then you find the ones that could hit Earth 50, 100, even a thousand years in the future and then you go and you nudge those asteroids just enough to put them onto a non-impacting course.
But there are also long period comets that come in from the oort cloud. We may never have the technology to fully catalog all those objects (out to thousands of AU up to a light-year distant from the Sun). Which means that even our very much more technologically advanced future selves will almost certainly still be faced with the potential problem of having to intercept and divert an Earth-impacting oort cloud comet that has wandered into the inner Solar System. And to do so not with a century of lead time but with only a few years. And, worse yet, to have to trudge out to the outer Solar System in the first place just to have a chance to divert the thing in time.
This calls for a vehicle with a stupendous amount of thrust and delta-V capability. Precisely what nuclear pulse propulsion excels at. More so, the "pulse units" can do double duty by being used to divert the comet (using thrust generated by ablation from stand-off explosions).
So ultimately research into nuclear pulse propulsion is likely to be key to preventing the destruction of human civilization on Earth.
People would generally only call it a waste of money when things don't work. If this had produced (or is producing and we don't know about it) great advances --- even the greatest advances, we could call it "the greatest use of money".
It's strange how usefulness is sometimes defined as the end-result usefulness ... something they had no way of measuring until it was done, especially with something new.
I disagree however with the last statement of the article: "If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial setting."
Just because flying saucers aren't used commercially doesn't necessarily imply that they are inefficient. It just means that the flying saucer technology we have at the moment is more inefficient than the fixed wing technology. Fixed wing technology could simply be ahead because it has seen a lot more iterative development.
Endeavors of this kind, that carry a huge upfront investment in the initial technology compared to what's on the market now, tend to be things where a free market really performs badly.