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| airborne vehicle is asking for failure level fatigue loads that simply cannot be solved. Rip it off USAF or replace it with something neat, you can’t flip the bonnet on a supersonic jet fighter. There is a long tradition of this kind of engineering in air weapons integration – the F1-11 fighter was rumoured in the US military to never just drop munitions. It was almost guaranteed that during the opening of the stores, or bomb bay doors to you and me, there would always be some debris from inside the plane falling out; bits of systems that kind of thing.
An excellent and necessary presentation on turbulent air flows in bomb bays or internal ‘stores’ was given by Professor Kevin Knowles, Head of Aeromechanical Systems Group, Defence Academy of the UK MoD. In essence, modelling air flows in complex geometries is not so widely undertaken but in terms of the air flows for a simple rectangle there are conclusions which can be drawn from the ratio of width to depth to guide designers. Still, this is more post mortem as the munition sizes and the available space within the platform tend to guide the design of the internal spaces from which munitions egress. On the control surfaces of the vehicle in the case of the F-35 there can be as little as 5mm between ordinance and plane. At this scale, knowledge of the exact forces at play in the first few seconds of flight become
extremely useful. Still, modelling remains a complex art given the array of assumptions and dare I say, simplifications, which are employed.
The stars of the show therefore have already being mentioned with the F-35, Eurofighter and UAI. UAI has to be the odd one out as it is developing into a consortium based methodology between; Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. Despite many of the UK delegates having had sabbaticals in the
US military during their tours of duty, even so far as to have participated at Pentagon level there remains too much skepticism in the UK regarding the future of UAI. The Universal Armament Interface tends to do exactly what it says. Despite this, there is no consensus of support in the UK to see it integrated ahead of time onto platforms like the awesome and oft maligned Eurofighter, just to see the combat manoeuvrability of this plane in air shows gives an impression of the future this plane has ahead. If they can avoid ripping off the sunroof of the F35 joint strike fighter then that too will become legend like the Harrier, this time hopefully for its ease of use. Finally, multi-government defence projects
might not suffer the fate many hold as inevitable. These are good planes that would not exist without collaboration.
UAI: presented to British companies attending the inaugural Conference in 2006 as an industry based standard to remove much of the repetitive integration work with a software interface, the methodology has grown leaps and bounds in the intervening |
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