Feasibility of Triebflugel and Wespe/Lerche

anw_rev

OK, one of them is this:

The Focke-Wulf Fw Triebflügel (Triebfluegel if the ü-umlaut is not used), or Triebflügeljäger, literally meaning "thrust-wing fighter", was a German concept for an aircraft designed in 1944, during the final phase of World War II as a defence against the ever-increasing Allied bombing raids on central Germany. It was a Vertical Take-Off and Landing tailsitter interceptor design for local defense of important factories or areas which had small or no airfields.
The Triebflügel had only reached wind-tunnel testing when the Allied forces reached the production facilities. No complete prototype was ever built.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-W...iebfl%C3%BCgel


tr16.jpg



Also, this:

The Heinkel Lerche (English: Lark) was the name of a set of project studies made by German aircraft designer Heinkel in 1944 and 1945 for a revolutionary VTOL fighter and ground-attack aircraft.
The Lerche was an early coleopter design. It would take off and land sitting on its tail, flying horizontally like a conventional aircraft. The pilot would lie prone in the nose. Most remarkably, it would be powered by two contra-rotating propellers which were contained in a donut-shaped annular wing.
The remarkably futuristic design was developed starting 1944 and concluding in March 1945. The aerodynamic principles of an annular wing were basically sound, but the proposal was faced with a whole host of unsolved manufacture and control problems which would have made the project highly impractical even were it not for the materials shortages of late-war Germany.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_Lerche

le100.jpg


No need of Axis-wank world. Even if Third Reich just held Europe, could these two aircrafts out of design phase and into operational one? Are they really able to fly?:eek:


Thanks in advance!:)
 

TofuTanker

Probably expensive as hell, and I don't see the need for a VTOL aircraft in 1940s Europe. I'm not an expert on this, though, so I'll just wait for Calbear to give the formal rebuttal to these insane (but cool) designs.
 
The Kiat

The Kiat

Taking off an flying seems simple enough, but how are rookie pilots suppose to land a plane on its tail... backwards? It takes a skilled pilot to fly modern fixed-wing VTOL aircraft even with computer assistance. Back in the 1940s, with a Luftwaffe starved for good pilots... they could build them, but they better build them cheap since they'll probably only be functional for one mission.
 

anw_rev

Hello?
For the sake of realism, let's assume that the prototypes would be built in ATL 1960s-70s, so the computation and electronic tech development would suffice the complex landing system
 

dgharis

anw_rev said:
Hello?
For the sake of realism, let's assume that the prototypes would be built in ATL 1960s-70s, so the computation and electronic tech development would suffice the complex landing system
Click to expand...

Moving the goalposts, eh?

The Triebfluegeljaeger has two main faults. First, given the arrangement of jets, damage to the wings is almost certain to result in a catastrophic loss of control and possibly to the aircraft breaking up in midflight. Given that the aircraft is intended as a fighter, such damage is all too likely. And forget about bailing out; that giant rotating prop behind you is instant death. Secondly, without computer control landing vertically is nearly impossible; it is impossible to accurately judge rate of approach and distance to the ground by eye when moving backwards toward the ground.

The Lerche is a little more practical, in that only the enclosed propellers are rotating. The problem here is that the annular wing blocks the pilot's view to the rear; anyone coming up from behind him is going to be very hard to see. That also makes the problem of vertical landing even worse than with the Triebfluegeljaeger, the Lerche's pilot can't even see the ground underneath him, let alone judge how far he is from it.

Now, move it forward to the 1970's. Computer guidance and control are still in their infancy, so landing these things is still difficult. And by now we have jet aircraft in common use, with performances which vastly exceed anything these designs can muster; they're obsolete.

If these things were practical they would have been pursued after the war by the US or the Soviets; they were not, precisely because they were impractical.
 

zoomar

Only in IL-2 Sturmovik 1946. The problem is not so much the rotating blades but the tail sitting (although the Treibfluegel looks like a disaster waiting to happen even if the idea of tip mounted ram jets worked). At least two nations (France and the USA) experimented in the 1950's-60's with a variety of tail-sitting aircraft and found that it was extremely difficult for even highly trained test pilots to transition from horizontal flight to vertical and land. Taking off was a bit easier, but even then the transition was tricky. Because of this the USN came up with the concept of having its tailsitters land in a big net, rather than try to touch down safely on its tail casters. Imagine that on the USS Enterprise, would you. As was pointed out by others, the idea lost any value when other VTOL concepts were perfected.
 
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