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Jan 30, 2020 · "By the late 1950s a small group of National Air and Space Administration (NASA) engineers and pilots were designing oddly shaped, wingless aircraft known as lifting bodies.
Wingless Flight tells the story of the most unusual flying machines ever flown, the lifting bodies. It is my story about my friends and colleagues who committed a significant part of their lives in the 1960s and 1970s to prove that the concept was a viable one for use in spacecraft of the future.
- R. Dale Reed, Darlene Lister
- 1997
Feb 28, 2014 · In 1962, Flight Research Center Director Paul Bikle approved a program to build a lightweight, unpowered lifting body as a prototype to flight test the wingless concept. It would look like a “flying bathtub,” and was designated the M2-F1.
- The Mind Behind The Bizarre Aircraft Projects
- The Concept of Tailless Aircraft
- Welcome The Rocket-Powered Ente
- Delta Wings Get Off The Ground
- The Creation of The Famous Lippisch-Dornier Aerodyne
- The Legacy of Lippisch-Dornier Aerodyne
Alexander Martin Lippisch (1894-1976) was a known aeronautical engineer, a pioneer of aerodynamics in Germany. Lippisch marked himself into the history of aviation by making essential contributions to the knowledge of tailless aircraft, deltawings and the ground effect. Image by Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13690 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 His early interest in aero...
After the war, Lippisch followed his dream ‒ aviation and started to work for Zeppelin Company, where he was introduced to the concept of tailless aircraft, which is defined as an aircraft that does not have tail assembly and another horizontal surface besides its main wing. Lippisch’s passion sparked into action and together with Gottlob Espenlaub...
During the period of 1920-1930s, Lippisch mostly worked on the research program that contained 50 different tailless aircraft designs. In 1928, the “father of tailless aircraft” presented the world’s first rocket-powered full-size aircraft named Ente, meaning duck in German. The idea of rocket-powered aircraft covers planes that have a rocket engin...
Through 1931-1939, Lippisch succeeded in the delta wing creation by developing five aircraft: Delta-I to Delta-V. Delta wings are defined as a triangle-shaped form of aircraft wings. Here, Lippisch again made history by creating Delta I, the first tailless, delta wing aircraft to fly.
World War II shut down most of Lippisch projects. During 1950-1963, he was working for the aeronautical division of the Collins Radio Company in Iowa. In 1963, Lippisch had to stop its project because of a sudden diagnosis of cancer. Luckily, he recovered after three years and came back to the creation of the aerodyne prototype. Lippisch designed a...
The weird, strange and unusual design of the aircraft marked Lippisch’s name as one of the aviation geniuses. Lippisch-Dornier Aerodyne was built to have a conventional tail unit at the rear that allowed for control of the pitch and yaw. The main principle of the Aerodyne system combined the production of lift and thrust utilizing a single unit and...
Eight different lifting body configurations were flown at the NASA Flight Research Center (FRC) at Edwards, California over a 12 year period from 1963 to 1975. These wingless wonders were...
- R. Dale Reed, Darlene Lister
- 19
Jul 15, 2014 · Most lifting bodies, or "flying bathtubs" as they were called, were so ugly only an engineer could love them, and yet, what an elegant way to keep wings from burning off in supersonic flight...
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Feb 20, 2013 · Wingless Flight tells the story of the most unusual flying machines ever flown, the lifting bodies. It is a story about friends and colleagues who committed a significant part of their lives in the 1960s and 1970s to prove that the concept was a viable one for use in spacecraft of the future.
