Flight without flaps

An innovative pilotless aircraft with flapless wings has completed a test flight in the UK.

The model aeroplane was developed by a cross-disciplinary team from UK Universities as part of a £6.2m programme, funded jointly by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and BAE Systems.

The five-year programme, called FLAVIIR (flapless air vehicle integrated industrial research) involves teams from Leicester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton, Swansea, Warwick, York and London. Manchester University's Goldstein Aeronautical Research Laboratory developed the model aircraft and the programme is managed by Cranfield University.

"The overall programme is aimed at developing new technologies for future generation uninhabited air vehicles, so called UAVs," said Professor Ian Postlethwaite, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Engineering at Leicester.

The team involves experts from around the UK in aerodynamics, control systems, electromagnetics, manufacturing, materials and structures, and numerical simulation. The results from the different groups will be brought together in a single flying demonstrator in about 2009. The concept of a flapless vehicle, using fluidic thrust vectoring - where direction is changed with a secondary airflow - and air jets, is one important area of investigation. Another is the replacement of the pilot by sophisticated software that can autonomously fly the vehicle without collisions in what might be dangerous or remote environments.