This Week’s Hints to help you along:
- The wing really is elliptical and it flies!
- Little wingtip vortices improves performance 30%.
- Structurally more sound than conventional designs.
- Made for civilian usage where there is little.
So do you know what this aircraft is?
Post a REPLY below with your best guess!
Click here to check out the previous What’s That?
It’s a cropduster.
I thought I’d never see something like this again. That oval or closed elliptical wing design is easy to recognize, if somewhat unconventional. I remember seeing photos of this aircraft a while back and if memory sserves me right it was an Eastern Block design, Belarus maybe. Don’t remember much about it, name, manufacturer, numbers produced, etc. But I remember hitting the books to find out more about the efficiency of such wing design and decided the aerodynamic data was best reserved for aeronautical engineers.
It is the Narushevich ring wing
The Custer wing
What’s that? CRAZY!
So far, no correct answers, though one of the above is close.
I don’t know what plane it is, but I found several other pictures of it at:
http://sfw.so/1149043937-ohvachennye-krylom.html
I will have to leave it to someone else to translate!
The paper, NASA CR 172529, ‘Aerodynamic-Structural Study of Canard Wing, Dual Wing and Conventional Wing Systems for General Aviation Applications’, by Bruce P Selber and Ronald L Cronin, deals with something similar.
The answer is in the thread by RAB, and searching for: ‘Annular Wing Airplanes’, it’s the Ring Wing airplane built by Mr. Arkady Narushevich, an image of Aug 29, 2004 is shown at this link: http://www.airplane-pictures.net/photo/732374//