Unusual aircraft designs

[Elwyn Aud]

I never even heard of this company but some of their design concepts certainly grab your attention. Some of their projected performance specs seem to be a little extreme which I guess is not unusual for a company to make when trying to grab some good press. Several designs are claimed to be under construction. Some of these type of concepts usually don't go far without some serious government funding behind them. Time will tell.

https://www.stavatti.com/wp-content/uploads/STAVATTI-AEROSPACE-BRIEFING-FEB-2021.pdf

[Dave Hull]

Developing a military aircraft is an enormous task, and you have to build up to each project using data that many startups will not have available. Every successful company was once a little guy, however doing it with modern performance levels means you basically have to raid technology and engineers from other companies. We'll see how good they were at that. The whole deal appears to be a startup by a child prodigy--who by now should have substantial chops.

They are going into the hanger just down the ramp from Calspan. I worked on a project with them a few years back. The airport was begging for more activity. The Air Reserve Station is across the airport, but I doubt they are real busy either.

Stavatti (Beskar) seems to have married themselves to 3-surface architectures. That may be ok, but it is more complex to design and develop. In the case of their CAS design, it may or may not be more tolerant of battle damage. That is a huge issue. They give up on powerplant redundancy with their SM-28 CAS design. Again, a liability. They gain in fleet commonality. The most unlikely performance claims I saw were the empty weight and the top speed. And of course, the flyaway price. Note that the flyaway price is without the avionics to fight; they do apparently include in the pricing the avionics to fly. The price upper to equip it to do more than fly around will be substantial.

When you see forward swept wings and certain shapes, you know you are going to need composite structures. Despite all the progress in manufacturing, these are still really expensive. And the analysis and testing required for military qualification is huge. I assume that any kind of FAA testing would be pretty rigorous, but probably nothing like the military. And you just can't get around it--with some exceptions if it is unmanned.

I would not like to bet on the acoustic noise and structural issues associated with their machete "lite", the SM-27. They are quoting some big airspeed numbers and if you've ever heard a howling Piaggio, you see the concern. Might be reminiscent of the trumpets of Jericho?

The claims for the 5th Generation fighter are a real big stretch. I won't even get started on that discussion....

But it was fun reading about their proposed designs.

Dave

[Elwyn Aud]

The estimated top speed of the Razor design is Mach 4. Look at the effort it takes for one of the big  aeronautical firms to design and build something even approaching that kind of performance, It leaves you doubting a lot of their projected claims. Reminds me a lot of one of those websites showing all of the German aircraft design concepts that were just on paper in WW ll. Some looked fairly do-able.
http://www.luft46.com/

[Howard Rush]

There seems to be a proliferation of companies like this.  I figure there’s an opportunity to evaluate their claims for investors— maybe just an induced-drag calculator on a phone.

[Dave Hull]

I'd look at profile drag....

There was no real point in looking too far into Stav's future project and plans. They won't get that far unless they can earn some kind of contract funding from much more near-term projects. So as far as any Mach 4 claims, I'd like to hear how they create a "6th Generation" fighter, presumably with LO characteristics, with the stagnation temps associated with that flight regime. And specifically, do they have a fiber/resin system that will get them there, or are we talking about another TRL 2 pitch?

Dave

[Steve Helmick]

Government Grants empower a lot of BS like that, IMO.  Steve