I challenge YOU….

I am keen to promote self-education, innovation and imagination amongst aviation enthusiasts so I have concocted a little challenge:

I hereby challenge YOU to design a low cost stealth combat aircraft*

It isn’t a contest in the sense of winning or loosing, we can all win just by taking part and by learning from our own and other people’s solutions.

Teams and individuals welcome. Closing date for online public presentation of your solution, complete with illustrations, reasoning and how/why it is stealthy, by 1st June 2006. Post a link to your solution’s page (/forum thread) in the comments to this blog entry.


*Must be manned. How you interpret “low cost” and “combat” is entirely up to you.

Little Sneak (update)

Ok, I’ve done a cutaway illustration of the Little Sneak design. I’ve not illustrated literally very strut and rivet, just the basics:

The pilot sits in the nose behind faceted windows on a basic seat (no ejector seat or anything). Crew access is through a panel in the roof to reduce the number of edges on the faceted sides of the aircraft. Behind the pilot is the landing gear which retract behind doors. Behind that is the fuel tank.

A light non-afterburning jet engine, maybe 2,000lb static thrust, is mounted in the rear fuselage and exhausts, via a long jet pipe, through a square exhaust in the tail. The long jet pipe reduces the radar cross section from the rear aspect but would also reduce the thrust of the engine.

I’d expect performance to be poor despite the jet engine, though it would be reasonably stealthy.

Little Sneak

This is the entry-level stealth aircraft. I kept the “V” shaped fuselage of my first Cessna sketch but added new stealthy wings and tail.

The Wings are swept back about 45 degrees so that the radar has to be about 45 degrees off heading to get a good reflection from them. It’s a cheap trick and somewhat less than the optimum, but it avoids the aerodynamic problems of having an unconventional wing profile, although a sharp leading edge and a very thing (but not flexible) wing would help.

Because my wing is swept back at 45 degrees though, it means I have to place it further forward so that I can maintain the centre of lift position. It would also increase take-off speed/distance and landing speed/distance, being generally worse at slow flying than the straight winged Cessna. But performance isn’t my goal so I don’t care.

I have also done away with the conventional tail with right-angle intersections; radar would bounce around and reflect a lot, particularly from the side. Instead I have added a “V” tail of more than 90 degrees between the two sections. This is again something common on stealth aircraft.

Stealth? Piece of cake!

Stealth combat aircraft cost $$$ but just how easy would it be for a small/medium aerospace company to build a stealth aircraft on the cheap? A good question worthy of an answer I thought. So drawing from my vast inexperience of aircraft design, I have set about designing one.

OK, so I’m not qualified to actually design or build flyable aircraft, but I can draw sufficiently to illustrate my thoughts, and by applying common sense I hope I can conjure up something which, were it to ever be built, would probably be stealthy.

The initial inspiration was a Cessna 172 light aircraft. Someone on a forum jokingly suggested I try to stealth one – I tried. My first attempt of a few days ago:

The basic stealth feature I incorporated was faceted (i.e. flat) fuselage so that it only reflects radar waves from certain angles. The propeller, which is normally situated on the nose, would be very hard to stealth so I removed it and added an intake on the roof to feed air to a ducted fan type engine, situated just behind the wing and exhausting out of the rear of the aircraft.

In order to keep some impression of a Cessna 172 I left the wings, complete with strut, and tail surfaces alone. I also left the fixed undercarriage but converted it to tail dragger configuration.

These Cessna features make the overall stealth effect somewhat dubious. Clearly if you really wanted to stealth a Cessna you’d have to change it so much that it wouldn’t be Cessna at all. But it’s a start down the road of my virtual stealth project: Little Sneak