Electric Icarus: NASA Designs a One-Man Stealth Plane

Could the Puffin, an electric-powered flying suit, change the way we use the sky in war and peace?

A super-quiet, hover-capable aircraft design, NASA’s experimental one-man Puffin could show just how much electric propulsion can transform our ideas of flight. It looks like nothing less than a flying suit or a jet pack with a cockpit.

On the ground, the Puffin is designed to stand on its tail, which splits into four legs to help serve as landing gear. As a pilot prepares to take off, flaps on the wings would tilt to deflect air from the 2.3-meter-wide propeller rotors upward, keeping the plane on the ground until it was ready to fly and preventing errant gusts from tipping it over. The Puffin would rise, hover and then lean over to fly horizontally, with the pilot lying prone as if in a glider. When landing, the extending spring legs would support the 3.7-meter-long, 4.1-meter-wingspan craft, which is designed with carbon-fiber composites to weigh in at 135 kilograms, not including 45 kilograms of rechargeable lithium phosphate batteries.

Read more . . .

Related articles by Zemanta

• NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack (wired.com)
• NASA Believes In Single Person Electric Aircraft (ubergizmo.com)

Random Posts:

• Solar Energy Harvesting Using 1 Percent of Current Materials
• It’s All About Schools
• Eat for the ecosystem
• Tyndall National Institute create first junctionless transistor
• Media Companies Regain Appetite for Taking Risks in Tech Start-Ups

Related posts:

1. Zep’lin flying boat ponders the future of electric vehicles
2. NASA, GM Take Giant Leap in Robotic Technology
3. Stellar deal: NASA awards $2 million to X PRIZE winners for helping develop a lunar lander
4. Round-the-world solar plane debut
5. Secret Energy Turbine: rooftop wind power in stealth mode

Tags: aircraft design, carbon fiber composites, electric aircraft, electric propulsion, flying suit, jet pack, jetpack, NASA, puffin, rechargeable lithium

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 9:39 am and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Project Energy, Promising for so many reasons, Scientific American, Shape of Things to Come?, disruptive innovation, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.