Vulture-Liked Aircraft

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of United States Vulture is yet another of the agency's blue sky programs, this one maybe more than others. Vulture is intended to fly for periods of up to five years unattended at 65,000 feet.

Here's what DARPA requested:

The VULTURE Air Vehicle Program is an exploratory development program with the overall goal to develop and demonstrate the ability to deliver and maintain an airborne payload on station for an uninterrupted period exceeding 5 years using a heavier-than-air platform system ... The government is not interested in approaches that use either radioactive energy sources or employs any form of buoyant flight for this application. 

Officials of DARPA has revealed that this aircraft will be known as VULTURE due to its Persistent Pseudo-Satellite Capability . It means that this aircraft will be able to fly over a single area, communicating or performing analysis for years at a time.

Even this project looks appealing to many of you, but there are some serious problems or you can say obstacles in achieving this project.

1) First challenge in front of designers is to figure out some Way to Supply Power to this aircraft during long missions.

2) Another problem is that this aircraft will carry a 1000 pound (450 kg) payload in winds at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet.

3) Designers have also to sort out the problems regarding Deterioration of Materials during their long-time exposure to stratospheric flight.
In addition to this there may be many challenges during designing of this aircraft.

Daniel Newman is the Project Manger of this ambitious project of NASA. In his words: "We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think of aircraft. Aviation has a perfect record - we've never left one up there. We will attempt to break that record". It looks that its time to get out of the traditional "launch - recover - maintain - launch cycle of aircrafts."

Basically Aircrafts operates just like satellites, but the major difference is that these are not regulated by orbital mechanics. You can understand Vulture as a Pseudo-Satellite, which operates in the stratosphere and not in the low Earth orbit. This would provide a 65 dB upgrading in communications capability and will increase onboard sensor resolution.

Well, right now NASA has not mentioned any time table when the aircraft will be ready. But for now NASA has worked on the probable design of Vulture .

People who read this post also read :