no I don't think plasma weapons are possible or practical. You need to create an electromagnetic field that encases and follows the plasma to it's target, which is just ridiculous
@@pleaseenteranamelol711 US Army has an Electrolaser operational and I'm gonna be 'that guy' and say that the ionized path to the target being plasma counts as a plasma weapon. And If you use a positively charged capacitor or + DC power supply the ion drift is opposite to the flow of electrons in the air, which accelerates it to the target as a dense ion wind.
Yeah the US military is said to be 30 years ahead of its civilian tech. But that was in the 60’s imagine how far ahead they are now. US military had internet in the 60’s and civilians got it and thought it was brand new in 1988/1990’s it’s crazy . I wonder what the, I think it’s black box project has now. It may not be called that but the project where they spend more money then some other nations do on their normal military . The project is super secret stuff . Area 51 and more secret then that .
@@pleaseenteranamelol711 maybe not like a bolt or bullet shape field but possibly a long narrow pipeline being solidly projected. Almost like a beam of light. Then maybe sling the plasma through that beam.
This "Flying Saucer" was created where I worked for many years in Malton Ontario as a sister project to The Avro Arrow. You can see footage of the building where I manned a toll crib in the background of this footage. it was actually more of a hovercraft, but who can say what it may have morphed into had it not been cancelled.
Give it rotary engines and a computer controlled system and it will work. But who wants inebriated teenagers crashing into their second story bedroom at 250 mph?
@@dancingwiththedarkness3352 No, it would not work. They failed to determine the airflow coming out of the bottom of the craft would become turbulent and the amount of lift would be disrupted. They incorrectly thought the vehicle could achieve controllable flight, I.e. become a "flying saucer". In zero gravity it would, but not the world we live in.
And the fact that the central fan system was exhaust driven only, three jet engines exhaust in this case. At it been designed using shaft driven (like a turboprop), the overall performance of the central fan would have been far superior. But the control would still have been crap once you lost ground effect.
You are misunderstanding how this worked. The thrust from the engines was originally emitted out the edge of the saucer and would induce airflow over the upper surface to generate lift using the coanda effect. The entire upper surface of the saucer was basically a wing. Having thrust come out the center was a bandaid to try and make it stable but stole thrust used to generate coanda effect lift and prevented it from being able to get out of ground effect anyway. In recent years people have built similar small drones that utilize coanda lift and the idea has been proven to actually work. The problem was that it needed computer stabilization that hadn't been invented yet. These days a commonly available flight controller with an electronic gyro can do the job easily.
It is a mystery to me how anybody with even the most rudimentary understanding of aerodynamics and engine technology could believe this design would ever fly, reach any significant speed, let alone go supersonic.
@@lostvayne104 ok, the Canadians spent a considerable amount of time and money researching this and then we spent even more money trying to get it working!!. If they wanted a decoy they'd just have to do like they do at Area51 and allow the conspiracy theorists run riot about non existent alien technology! That cost them nothing!!
at that time he was a genius. you cannot compare with a modern technology today. It is still a good concept and human just gotto keep up with a better engineering that's all. TR-3B was a success. This is just a history of technology. One day we will be reached to the speed of Alien spaceship for sure.
Pretty sure they only declassified this in 2012 because one could easily relate this technology to the one used on the hovercrafts the US marines and NAVY use ;) By the late 50's they already had all their efforts towards reverse engineering of real space crafts. Even in 1960, 2 million for a military program is nothing. Peanuts literally. They paid even more for a pencil in space. People think all that money was stolen, some of it, most likely, but back than everything was of quality and not cheap if you wanted precise engineering. Today we can build 3d models and virtualizations, back then you had to build the model before even beginning to think. Today a thousand dollar computer can replace possibly millions and millions in materials, work hours, calculations, etc. Back then everything, EVERYTHING almost was men powered. We only had tools.Not AI. This is why our technology growth is so exponential since the discovery of computers and we will most likely see that future we all dreamed of, possibly before dying of old age. If so.
@@エネ-n1c Well just the fact his military "challenge" was to pass a 18 inch ditch, shows they had other interests in his technology than mach 3.5 flight. lol. Dark docs is like a 15 yrs old kid with braces man. He sensationalises stuff and puts music on shet thats been collecting rust in museums for half a century than calls it a day. LOL
My Drafting highschool teacher (last year before the school bought their 1st dedicated CAD machines). Worked on that project, he was a draftsman at Avro in Canada in the 1950's. He brought in some old blueprints in the classroom for us to look at.
More footage of the Avrocar than i have seen before! Another good story is the AVRO Arrow. Built in Canada but cancelled for political reasons.Great history, thanks!
@@Justanotherconsumer Lots of excuses, what-ifs, politics, etc. USA and Britain were developing their own interceptors. Thus there were no markets. The Uncle SAM said " Buy the BOMARC and we will help protect you". Cheaper for Canada. They also had the CF-100 to do the work in the meantime. So with CF-100s and BOMARCs, and no cash paying customers for the CF-105 it was canned. Same issues happened years before with C-102 jetliner. USA and Britain in competition, no cash paying customers, and we need to concentrate on the CF-100, thus the C-102 goes into the can. Today they have interceptors with guided missiles for defense. They are the offspring of the CF-105 concepts. However politics was the main reason, a good way to gut the competition and snatch all that great talent from the brain bank to work in your aircraft and aerospace industry.
Feelzbad CHAI Bomarc was definitely not the greatest thing slice sliced bread. Reality was that there wasn’t enough of a market for multiple interceptors in NATO, and the performance of the Arrow wasn’t anything unusual compared to the existing F-106 (introduced 1959, the year the Arrow was canceled) and the proposed XF-108 (canceled the same year as the Arrow).
ME: "Run of the mill failed dream aircraft..." Dark Skies: *Scary Music Intensifies, Dark Voice Begins* "in 2012, a memo titled 'project 1794'..." Me: "This is terrifying..!"
I have been a Dark 5 sub for a long time and I am loving the new channel additions. I am a huge aviation fan, so these videos are amazing, keep it up and thank you for the years of entertainment and quality content.
Still makes me wonder how much of NASA's experience with keeping these critters even remotely stable later benefited the development of the Apollo program's "Flying Bedstead".
Honestly, the effort put into this thing is really impressive. Sure it was a failure, but I feel that that has more to do with the technology available back then than the concept itself. We could probably make it MUCH better nowadays if we tried.
Considering it only got up to 39 knots and 3 feet off the ground... You could practically jam whatever surplus jet engines are laying around up the ass of a VW Bug and get a "MUCH better performance" out of it... I'd hate to think we couldn't do better by now with a proper focus on the airframe in question... Still doesn't necessarily make it a great idea, though... ;o)
There's a great book that partly covers this aircraft's development - 'The Hunt For Zero Point' by Nick Cook. They basically nicked a German design that was being tested in Czechoslovakia during the war. Now you can see where all those 1950s UFO sightings came from .... I think someone came up with a more refined version that has remained classified. It strikes me that all the failures they had that are described here were the kind of engineering problems that modern CAD would have partly helped to accelerate, but back then they had trail and error.
My Dad, who was a United States Army officer, found this craft in a junkyard and had it brought to Fort Eustis in Virginia and put on display in front of the base's museum, which is the last place I saw it during the 70's.
The real flying saucers we made after getting Nazi scientists with Operation Paperclip were using electromagneticgravitic propulsion instead of thrusters. This is a way to use the saucer shape with conventional propulsion systems. We need a video on the TR-3B triangle craft that uses the “anti gravity” propulsion system, I was up close and personal with one 15 years ago. It’s about time we got more info on the real game changing craft that are still classified till this day. But you can see exactly what I saw by googling “triangle spacecraft patent”.
"Suddenly ahead of me, across the mountainside... a gleaming alloy air-car shoots towards me--two lanes wide." - Red Barchetta / Rush: Moving Pictures, 1981
I got to see this thing on display in Ohio when I was in college. Being a total sci-fi nut (and the fact that it looks cool as hell) I immediately went over to investigate, but was disappointed to learn from it's display plaque that it was considered a failure. I wonder what could have come of it if the military had decided to continue the project; we might have had some gnarly-looking scout vehicles or light hover tanks by now. :)
I'll swear on a stack of bibles that I saw the same airframe (no engines or control surfaces) on said frame parked in a display and open to the public at a patch of beach near Myrtle Beach SC approximately 1968-70. It was parked on a high (6 foot tall) 45 degree inclined frame, sort of like it's operational flight profile was supposed to be. All the other aircraft were current and very dilapidated (think scrapped and stripped for parts non-flyable stuff) and there amongst the other junk was this thing. Like spotting the Batmobile in a junkyard.
This vehicle was not a flying saucer it was the first attempt at an air cushion vehicle. Its max altitude was about 10 ft and was abandoned because it was almost uncontrollable at that altitude. It used to be mounted on the root of the army transportation museum at Ft. Eustis VA before it was returned to Canada (Where it was manufactured).
I'm glad to see that you did cover the Avro car in one of your videos! I spent the last 4 years I was in the US Army at Fort Eustis Virginia which is home of the United States Army Aviation logistics school. It is or was also home to the US Army Aviation Museum. From the time I went there as a trainee in 1984 until the time I left as an instructor at the school in 1993 in a back corner of the aviation museum they had one of the avrocars on display. It was certainly a sight to behold. And sure all the naysayers will say anyone can see that thing is not capable of flight.. and hindsight is 20/20, but a lot of experimental aircraft start out that way as things that aren't supposed to fly.
A true friend of mine retired after 35 years of service in the U.S.A.F.I had known him for years and one day I got up the nerve to ask him about flying discs.His one and only reply was yes,there are flying ships,but we ourselves are doing the flying!
EXACTALLY the type person that these "...in the name of war..." projects attract. It is hard to believe that engineers, or should I say "management" who dictate the work of engineers, thought this concept could FLY. Does that mean young students in today's engineering colleges are smarter then the post war engineers??? Or, was something discovered and kept secret? The time spent on this project is hard to justify otherwise.
@@rogerc.roberts4705 It should be noted that this occurred during the early 1950s, where Jet engines themselves where incredibly new, and Helicopters hadn't been around for that long either. You can get your slide rule out, and do a whole lot of math which should tell you something aught to preform a certain way, build it, and find out you misjudged how air was going to behave with this. *Now* we have computers that could have told you something like this was going to have problems, but it took a lot of money and not a few dead test pilots to drive the creation of Computational Fluid Dynamics software. That said, in the Avro-Car's case, there was some sunk-cost-fallacy going on. But there where lessons learned that where later applied to other Vtol aircraft, such as the Harrier and F35B. Modern technology has allowed a few folks to make small ground effect vehicles that out-preform this thing by leaps and bounds (the human-sized quad-copters floating around the internet come to mind)
DFX2KX the area rule is definitely one of those “we didn’t understand the physics” situations. The F-102 is another example of the “didn’t do what the math claimed” situation.
Indeed. What I don't understand is could they not have made a small model - proof - of - concept version? Like 2/3ft in diameter *before* actually trying to build a full sized saucer? Any modelling would've proved they were flogging a dead horse.?
Frost was a brilliant engineer, but made too many revisions, cut-backs and short cuts to appease goal post shifting DOD goons who never wanted the project in the first place, but had to justify to select committees their Budgets. The initial design was quite a large vehicle utilising LFTR engines and computational assisted flight controls, the precursor to F117 flight controls, thanks to the pressure to deliver ‘a product’ Frost binned everything, decreasing airframe by 60% accepting traditional aviation fuel engines, and fly by cable, ultimately confining the concept to the dustbin, but then all it had been was a 2nd approach to the ‘Flux Liner’ question; anti-gravity technology.
I just learned 3 weeks ago that my grandfather worked on this in Malton (I knew he worked for Avro but always assumed/believed it was working on the Arrow). Crazy.
This is definitely what most U.F.O. sightings are : a riveted together aluminium bowl that can barely lift off the ground,which makes phenomenal noise and has uncontrollable pitching and rolling movements.I remember these things being mentioned along with the crude 'rollover loops' to protect the pilots head in the event of it turning turtle.
There is an interesting design of aircraft, but they rarely talk about it, because this thing is secret. The topic of pulsed plasma thrusters has been developed since the early 60s (see PPT - Pulsed plasma thruster) - they are usually designed for spacecraft. But we will talk about a little-known design - these are plasma propulsion panels for aircraft, where the same Pulsed plasma thruster, but reduced to the size of a pencil and stacked in the form of cells in the panel. The design resembles a conventional plasma TV screen, where there are also discharge cells that activate the glow of pixels on the screen. And plasma propulsion panels have long discharge cells, the arrester has a railgun architecture (just rail contacts or coaxial), and the ionized discharge air is accelerated there by the Lorentz force to enormous speeds - a kind of ramjet engine is obtained. Just imagine! - tens of thousands of small ramjet engines assembled in a panel and firing plasma synchronously with a huge frequency (hundreds of kilohertz). Thus, plasma propulsion panels create lift by pulsed emission of plasma jets from railgun cells. There are tens of thousands of cells in the panel, they shoot at a frequency of hundreds of kilohertz, a huge pulse is obtained, and the plasma swirls the air into toroidal rings - the aircraft is held on this air cushion. Horizontal acceleration is created by the same plasma panels on the sides of the device (they glow, from the side they look like "portholes"). Such devices like "triangle" or "disk" have been observed for a long time, they are mistaken for alien ones - but these are terrestrial devices. They are classified and used for espionage and secret actions. Pulsed electromagnetic technology generates microwave radiation, therefore it is harmful to health. They rarely fly - only military missions. Therefore, they are not suitable for a citizen. This maintained the secrecy. Now they are already declassifying - many people know about this secret technique. When declassified, they will be used for cargo airships. But there is a danger that they are now going to be adapted to deliver small nuclear charges to decision-making centers - such means of delivery are not specified anywhere, are not conventional. This lowers the threshold for starting a war. It would be necessary to declassify them as soon as possible. That's why I'm writing about it. However, I have written before - starting with the book "The Elimination of UFOs" and many articles. There are also videos on my RUclips channel - "Declassified UFO" and "UFO Anatomy".
I remember going to the Dayton Air Force Museum when I was little and saw the flying saucer, and then the next time I went it was gone and I thought I went crazy. Funnily enough, when I took a trip to the experimental hanger it was there. I knew I wasn't crazy
The X29 from DARPA had several computers making hundreds of corrections per second. A similar computer system and modern construction materials would make control and stability much more manageable.
Interestingly enough, the design flaw that made it unstable was its method of lift. It’s central fan was powered by 6 jet engines dumping exhaust into a tooth wheel that caused it to spin. But had they done something like the F-35 by directly hooking up the turbine to the fan then this aircraft may have been able to over perform what was intended
imagine if they were still working on it, with the way we've figured out thrust vectoring and improved jet engine tech, this idea can potentially work now
The Avro car was just of proof of concept of the hoover capability for the saucer. Work after that concentrated on the 1794 and some variations.I happened upon the documents for the 1794 back around 1984. Copied some of it and gave the rest to a historical society. I'm guessing they didn't do much with it because I gather the US government didn't declassifed it until 2012. A friend who worked on it told me a funny story about it. work was being done in an old ( I think wooden)building and this engineer was up on the roof looking down on it when they tried a first start up. The design involved dump cans around the perimeter as you can se in some of the drawings. When they started it up it set fire all around the building with the guy i knew in the middle on the roof. They couldn't get past the flames to turn it off until someone thought to turn the fuel off which was piped into the building from the ourside.
Lots of people in the comments section don't really understand what they are looking at with this aircraft or how a coanda effect lifting body works. The way this was supposed to work as originally designed was that thrust was emitted from the rim of the saucer which induced airflow over the upper surface and created coanda effect lift. They designed a special "pancake" jet engine for this purpose that emitted thrust around the perimeter of the engine rather than axially (the "fan" in the center is actually the compressor for this engine). In effect the whole upper surface of the aircraft was a wing that could generate lift without moving through the air. Problem was it was unstable out of ground effect so they attempted to correct this by bleeding thrust through vents in the underside of the saucer, but this only reduced the thrust available for creating the coanda effect lift and it still couldn't get out of ground effect. The problem really was that this thing needed computer stabilization that did not yet exist. In the last few years people have started experimenting with small drones that utilize coanda lift and some of these have actually been successful.
I always wanted the Mythbusters to answer why this project lasted as long as it did. It's failure seems so predictable. Your video explains many of my questions.
Some thoughts on other projects that might be worth covering - The “man eater” F-107. The XF-84H “thunderscreech.” The XF-103 and XF-108 exotic super-interceptor projects. Might cover them with the Avro Arrow, as they’re part of the same “what if.” The XP-79 Flying Ram (the most wtf design for an airplane I’ve seen). The Ryan FR2 Fireball (such a bad name for a plane).
Avro also produced a full scale mock-up of a shovel-shaped tail sitter design. I have a photo of an unidentified craft with the exact same profile in flight.
Thanks for the upload of Canadian aerospace tech, the special projects group was eventually transformed into SPAR aerospace that built the Canadarm for the shuttles.
The Avro manufacturing plant went on to build wings for the CF-18 Hornet back in 1980. When that project was done, the plant was used to build wings for the McDonnell-Douglas aircraft. In 1997 Boeing bought the plant and made wings for their aircraft. In 2005 they closed down the plant for good. It is now an empty field.
Awesome video as always. The official stats for this vehicle are ridiculous. For example it never got off the ground higher than 3 feet and it was massively unstable then. Nowadays with our computer control technology we could probably make one of those and have it work but it would have no additional benefits other than vertical takeoff. And traditional fighter craft would out perform it in every other way massively.
In sci-fi movies the flying saucer doesn’t use a fan it uses anti-gravity engines or a core like the Enterprise allowing flying saucers heavier than our aircraft carriers and armed with photon torpedos. once we discover a world with the rare substance used by the starship Enterprise, we’ll make a real one.
I wonder if the ion lifters could be used for this. They can't lift weight but maybe at the bottom, a series of ion lifters and with enough power, something stable and a little more silent. Don't know about the 'mock speed capabilities' but it would be a great use for scouting and getting wounded troops out of a combat situation quickly.
I watched a lengthy documentary once that included this one, it was a part of a ground effect program testing various kinds of hovercraft vehicles to see if they could replace jeeps (results were negative for all entries). Didn’t mention anything about flight much less supersonic.
This hover vehicle is no doubt much more advanced now. Circular spacecraft were common in 1930s comics. This is what they were trying to copy with the design, although the first genuine report of a similar craft in the air by private pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947. The newspapers called his sighting a flying saucer
This story is an excellent demonstration of a powerful fact: it's more important to get funding for a project than to succeed. This was an idiotic idea, but look how many people got paid.
I'm from australia Absolutely incredible, as I kid I thought it was foreign life forms transportion, the American airforce and Canadian did a good job with covering up the truth i'm happy bob lazar can out and went public about this subject
Remember, this is just a prototype which we found out about over 50 years later. If you think they abandoned this completely, you are delusional, who knows what they have today...
Britain really were the pioneers of vertical take off aircraft, at the same time the British Short SC.1 became the first to transition between vertical and horizontal flight modes. Mad to think this was only because nuclear war was a real threat and they presumed they would have no airfields to take off from, now just 60 years later you have the F-35, goes to show how quickly technology progresses.
I think it missed its calling as it would have made an excellent lawn mower. Hole football fields mown in a matter of minutes. I believe the Germans were working on such a project during the war. Though whether or not they got passed the drawing board stage I do not know.
Kinda disappointed that they didn't make an unmanned version with a higher thrust to weight ratio and just stopped here. They really should revisit it. Think about how cool it would be to have a plane that can fly in any direction!
This airframe belongs on Dark Runways, since it never really flew higher than 3ft.
Exactly as it had no lift, only ground effect. The turbine engine probably could have flown on its own without the VZ-9 Avrocar, however...
They made one being able to go to Mach 3
Pate Livid on paper...
how do they deduce on paper this thing will fly mach-3 and 100k + feet.
seems like someones calculations were just a bit off lmao
@@coleomo Let's imagine it was a good excuse to build some kind of -dark- black project...
New meaning for UFO...
Unflyable Faulty Object.
🥙
Yes. It is a taco 🌮
Unsold Frustrating Oreo
Haha! Good joke
Unwanted fkedup Object!
On a subject, it cut the grass on the test range, and the backyard never looked better.
@Derek Xie At the end it cost over 10 million USD. And it did not even come with a spare cutting blade.
I hear they are adapting the long lost technology for unmanned commercial use to maintain parking lots. It will be marketed as the Broomba.
@@garfieldsmith332 pretty cheap compared to the billions spend on B2....
@@hansjorgkunde3772 True. And the final total for all the failed projects of the 1950's would be in the tens of billions.
Omg, those YT comments... 🤣🤣
about 70 years ago. imagine what they tinker with now....
Rail guns, plasma weapons, lasers... all in development or in a few cases operational.
no I don't think plasma weapons are possible or practical. You need to create an electromagnetic field that encases and follows the plasma to it's target, which is just ridiculous
@@pleaseenteranamelol711 US Army has an Electrolaser operational and I'm gonna be 'that guy' and say that the ionized path to the target being plasma counts as a plasma weapon. And If you use a positively charged capacitor or + DC power supply the ion drift is opposite to the flow of electrons in the air, which accelerates it to the target as a dense ion wind.
Yeah the US military is said to be 30 years ahead of its civilian tech. But that was in the 60’s imagine how far ahead they are now. US military had internet in the 60’s and civilians got it and thought it was brand new in 1988/1990’s it’s crazy . I wonder what the, I think it’s black box project has now. It may not be called that but the project where they spend more money then some other nations do on their normal military . The project is super secret stuff . Area 51 and more secret then that .
@@pleaseenteranamelol711 maybe not like a bolt or bullet shape field but possibly a long narrow pipeline being solidly projected. Almost like a beam of light. Then maybe sling the plasma through that beam.
This "Flying Saucer" was created where I worked for many years in Malton Ontario as a sister project to The Avro Arrow. You can see footage of the building where I manned a toll crib in the background of this footage. it was actually more of a hovercraft, but who can say what it may have morphed into had it not been cancelled.
In effect this was a hovercraft that needed a skirt to make it practical.
LCAC, I am your father.
Give it rotary engines and a computer controlled system and it will work. But who wants inebriated teenagers crashing into their second story bedroom at 250 mph?
@@dancingwiththedarkness3352 No, it would not work. They failed to determine the airflow coming out of the bottom of the craft would become turbulent and the amount of lift would be disrupted. They incorrectly thought the vehicle could achieve controllable flight, I.e. become a "flying saucer".
In zero gravity it would, but not the world we live in.
And the fact that the central fan system was exhaust driven only, three jet engines exhaust in this case. At it been designed using shaft driven (like a turboprop), the overall performance of the central fan would have been far superior. But the control would still have been crap once you lost ground effect.
You are misunderstanding how this worked. The thrust from the engines was originally emitted out the edge of the saucer and would induce airflow over the upper surface to generate lift using the coanda effect. The entire upper surface of the saucer was basically a wing. Having thrust come out the center was a bandaid to try and make it stable but stole thrust used to generate coanda effect lift and prevented it from being able to get out of ground effect anyway.
In recent years people have built similar small drones that utilize coanda lift and the idea has been proven to actually work. The problem was that it needed computer stabilization that hadn't been invented yet. These days a commonly available flight controller with an electronic gyro can do the job easily.
It is a mystery to me how anybody with even the most rudimentary understanding of aerodynamics and engine technology could believe this design would ever fly, reach any significant speed, let alone go supersonic.
Because it wasn't, it was a decoy ... probably
@@blakeperdue3706 the Grand Canyon had a UFO crash there about a hundred years ago
@@blakeperdue3706 decoy for what?
@@hugostiglitz6914 for the USSR duh
@@lostvayne104 ok, the Canadians spent a considerable amount of time and money researching this and then we spent even more money trying to get it working!!. If they wanted a decoy they'd just have to do like they do at Area51 and allow the conspiracy theorists run riot about non existent alien technology! That cost them nothing!!
This Frost guy was a genius in securing funds, to waste them.
And officials, really bad at managing budgets. What a joke.
Mach 3.5 =)))
Yes but thats the official public account.
Not what may have been possiblity achieved and kept secret?
at that time he was a genius. you cannot compare with a modern technology today. It is still a good concept and human just gotto keep up with a better engineering that's all. TR-3B was a success. This is just a history of technology. One day we will be reached to the speed of Alien spaceship for sure.
Pretty sure they only declassified this in 2012 because one could easily relate this technology to the one used on the hovercrafts the US marines and NAVY use ;) By the late 50's they already had all their efforts towards reverse engineering of real space crafts. Even in 1960, 2 million for a military program is nothing. Peanuts literally. They paid even more for a pencil in space. People think all that money was stolen, some of it, most likely, but back than everything was of quality and not cheap if you wanted precise engineering. Today we can build 3d models and virtualizations, back then you had to build the model before even beginning to think. Today a thousand dollar computer can replace possibly millions and millions in materials, work hours, calculations, etc. Back then everything, EVERYTHING almost was men powered. We only had tools.Not AI. This is why our technology growth is so exponential since the discovery of computers and we will most likely see that future we all dreamed of, possibly before dying of old age. If so.
@@エネ-n1c Well just the fact his military "challenge" was to pass a 18 inch ditch, shows they had other interests in his technology than mach 3.5 flight. lol. Dark docs is like a 15 yrs old kid with braces man. He sensationalises stuff and puts music on shet thats been collecting rust in museums for half a century than calls it a day. LOL
@@PatTheRiot yes I agree with your statement.
My Drafting highschool teacher (last year before the school bought their 1st dedicated CAD machines). Worked on that project, he was a draftsman at Avro in Canada in the 1950's. He brought in some old blueprints in the classroom for us to look at.
That's some ominous music for an overpriced frisbee.
Social Pariah exactly
Frisbees are faster
@@TShepard Maybe that's the secret to the stability issues. Spin the whole thing like a frisbee.
One of these is currently on display at the Aviation Museum in my hometown of Winnipeg, MB. I've touched it myself
Was it stable when you touched it?
@@randym9147 it was. Cause it was sitting flat on the ground lol
One very important point you left out , that is in other avrocar videos, The avrocar FLEW OVER A TEN FOOT HIGH FENCE.
More footage of the Avrocar than i have seen before! Another good story is the AVRO Arrow. Built in Canada but cancelled for political reasons.Great history, thanks!
Cancelled because technology moved on and they needed a dedicated interceptor aircraft about as much as they needed a new pattern of cavalry saber.
Justanotherconsumer wasn’t it replaced with a SAM systems what was lacklustre sold by the USA?
@@Justanotherconsumer Lots of excuses, what-ifs, politics, etc. USA and Britain were developing their own interceptors. Thus there were no markets. The Uncle SAM said " Buy the BOMARC and we will help protect you". Cheaper for Canada. They also had the CF-100 to do the work in the meantime. So with CF-100s and BOMARCs, and no cash paying customers for the CF-105 it was canned. Same issues happened years before with C-102 jetliner. USA and Britain in competition, no cash paying customers, and we need to concentrate on the CF-100, thus the C-102 goes into the can. Today they have interceptors with guided missiles for defense. They are the offspring of the CF-105 concepts. However politics was the main reason, a good way to gut the competition and snatch all that great talent from the brain bank to work in your aircraft and aerospace industry.
@@jazzhandsparten Yeah a US cast-off decided by their president and agreed too by our Prime-minister....pathetic....
Feelzbad CHAI Bomarc was definitely not the greatest thing slice sliced bread.
Reality was that there wasn’t enough of a market for multiple interceptors in NATO, and the performance of the Arrow wasn’t anything unusual compared to the existing F-106 (introduced 1959, the year the Arrow was canceled) and the proposed XF-108 (canceled the same year as the Arrow).
ME: "Run of the mill failed dream aircraft..."
Dark Skies: *Scary Music Intensifies, Dark Voice Begins* "in 2012, a memo titled 'project 1794'..."
Me: "This is terrifying..!"
Yeah the tone of voice the narrator uses and music are a bit ridiculous.
Try synchronizing Bennie Hill song, has opposite effect.
@@nautdead3197 Yeah he sounds like he's either nervous or a little dyslexic so he just fires it out at super luminal speeds he needs to relax.
I have been a Dark 5 sub for a long time and I am loving the new channel additions. I am a huge aviation fan, so these videos are amazing, keep it up and thank you for the years of entertainment and quality content.
That's so awesome they made a video. My great uncle Walt was one of the test pilots. This is awesome.
At 3:19 the guy on the left is scratching his nuts lol
seems more like wankin ;-)
Someone got crabs
🤣🤣🤣🤣👍👍
🤣🤣😂 Nice catch!
Lol 😂 I had to rewind , howed you catch that ?
Still makes me wonder how much of NASA's experience with keeping these critters even remotely stable later benefited the development of the Apollo program's "Flying Bedstead".
My grandfather used to talk about flying saucers, guess he wasn't so crazy after all!
Do you call this flying? This was failing saucer, at best.
@@voornaam3191 Slightly-hovering saucer
Definitely explains ALL or most of the UFO reports
Honestly, the effort put into this thing is really impressive. Sure it was a failure, but I feel that that has more to do with the technology available back then than the concept itself. We could probably make it MUCH better nowadays if we tried.
IKR I mean I might just be obsessed with the idea of psychological warfare. And also I love the idea of a flying saucer.
Considering it only got up to 39 knots and 3 feet off the ground... You could practically jam whatever surplus jet engines are laying around up the ass of a VW Bug and get a "MUCH better performance" out of it... I'd hate to think we couldn't do better by now with a proper focus on the airframe in question...
Still doesn't necessarily make it a great idea, though... ;o)
who says we haven't?
This and the CF-105 are more or less what sunk Avro for a long, long time.
avro canada was ruined by the avro arrow cancellation
With today's technology in thrust vectoring and computers, I'll bet we have one of these flying somewhere.
I was thinking fly by wire would solve instability.
With advances in VTOL technology this could be made to work.
GrOuNdZeRo7777 Dangerous Things Channel ufos has overflown on more than 1s. I think that weird. cough cough
For what purpose though?
None of the design features of this thing have any benefits over modern known systems.
How much fuel does the proposed re-engineered vehicle burn?
What is the lift capacity of said vehicle with computer-controlled thrust vectoring?
@@rifleshooterchannel208 propoganda
You realize that, with today's electronic control systems, powerplants, and lightweight composite materials, we could probably get this to fly today
They probably have these things flying around but just havnt told the public lol
Die Glocke 2- Disk Igloo
There's a great book that partly covers this aircraft's development - 'The Hunt For Zero Point' by Nick Cook. They basically nicked a German design that was being tested in Czechoslovakia during the war. Now you can see where all those 1950s UFO sightings came from .... I think someone came up with a more refined version that has remained classified. It strikes me that all the failures they had that are described here were the kind of engineering problems that modern CAD would have partly helped to accelerate, but back then they had trail and error.
My Dad, who was a United States Army officer, found this craft in a junkyard and had it brought to Fort Eustis in Virginia and put on display in front of the base's museum, which is the last place I saw it during the 70's.
The real flying saucers we made after getting Nazi scientists with Operation Paperclip were using electromagneticgravitic propulsion instead of thrusters. This is a way to use the saucer shape with conventional propulsion systems. We need a video on the TR-3B triangle craft that uses the “anti gravity” propulsion system, I was up close and personal with one 15 years ago. It’s about time we got more info on the real game changing craft that are still classified till this day. But you can see exactly what I saw by googling “triangle spacecraft patent”.
Jack Frost: We need a name for this saucer project.
Jeff: Why a saucer?
Jack Frost: “Why” is good, but a bit on the nose. We’ll go with “Project Y”
"Suddenly ahead of me, across the mountainside... a gleaming alloy air-car shoots towards me--two lanes wide." - Red Barchetta / Rush: Moving Pictures, 1981
RIP Professor on the Drum Kit
0:31 already the best footage of this I have ever been able to observe thanks
I’m in the Air Force and I seen something more refined flying over our heads the day I shipped out. It was a realization
People in the 1950s and 1960s were doing some pretty insane experiments with aircraft. Most failed but I give them credit for trying.
I got to see this thing on display in Ohio when I was in college. Being a total sci-fi nut (and the fact that it looks cool as hell) I immediately went over to investigate, but was disappointed to learn from it's display plaque that it was considered a failure. I wonder what could have come of it if the military had decided to continue the project; we might have had some gnarly-looking scout vehicles or light hover tanks by now. :)
I saw it at the transportation museum at Fort Eustis Virginia. I think the frame they had it on was probably the highest altitude it ever achieved.
I'll swear on a stack of bibles that I saw the same airframe (no engines or control surfaces) on said frame parked in a display and open to the public at a patch of beach near Myrtle Beach SC approximately 1968-70. It was parked on a high (6 foot tall) 45 degree inclined frame, sort of like it's operational flight profile was supposed to be. All the other aircraft were current and very dilapidated (think scrapped and stripped for parts non-flyable stuff) and there amongst the other junk was this thing. Like spotting the Batmobile in a junkyard.
This vehicle was not a flying saucer it was the first attempt at an air cushion vehicle. Its max altitude was about 10 ft and was abandoned because it was almost uncontrollable at that altitude. It used to be mounted on the root of the army transportation museum at Ft. Eustis VA before it was returned to Canada (Where it was manufactured).
It didn't use air cushion or lift jets of ducted fans. It used Coanda effect.
I'm glad to see that you did cover the Avro car in one of your videos! I spent the last 4 years I was in the US Army at Fort Eustis Virginia which is home of the United States Army Aviation logistics school. It is or was also home to the US Army Aviation Museum. From the time I went there as a trainee in 1984 until the time I left as an instructor at the school in 1993 in a back corner of the aviation museum they had one of the avrocars on display. It was certainly a sight to behold. And sure all the naysayers will say anyone can see that thing is not capable of flight.. and hindsight is 20/20, but a lot of experimental aircraft start out that way as things that aren't supposed to fly.
A true friend of mine retired after 35 years of service in the U.S.A.F.I had known him for years and one day I got up the nerve to ask him about flying discs.His one and only reply was yes,there are flying ships,but we ourselves are doing the flying!
Great as always
I think the "Flying Flapjack" would have done better than this one, but this one looks a lot more like an actual flying saucer. It's so pretty.
The avro jetliner was something to marvel at ,even Howard Hughes test flew it
Sounds like frost wasn't much of an engineer at all, more of a travelling salesman!
EXACTALLY the type person that these "...in the name of war..." projects attract. It is hard to believe that engineers, or should I say "management" who dictate the work of engineers, thought this concept could FLY.
Does that mean young students in today's engineering colleges are smarter then the post war engineers???
Or, was something discovered and kept secret? The time spent on this project is hard to justify otherwise.
@@rogerc.roberts4705 It should be noted that this occurred during the early 1950s, where Jet engines themselves where incredibly new, and Helicopters hadn't been around for that long either. You can get your slide rule out, and do a whole lot of math which should tell you something aught to preform a certain way, build it, and find out you misjudged how air was going to behave with this. *Now* we have computers that could have told you something like this was going to have problems, but it took a lot of money and not a few dead test pilots to drive the creation of Computational Fluid Dynamics software.
That said, in the Avro-Car's case, there was some sunk-cost-fallacy going on. But there where lessons learned that where later applied to other Vtol aircraft, such as the Harrier and F35B. Modern technology has allowed a few folks to make small ground effect vehicles that out-preform this thing by leaps and bounds (the human-sized quad-copters floating around the internet come to mind)
DFX2KX the area rule is definitely one of those “we didn’t understand the physics” situations.
The F-102 is another example of the “didn’t do what the math claimed” situation.
Indeed.
What I don't understand is could they not have made a small model -
proof - of - concept version?
Like 2/3ft in diameter *before* actually trying to build a full sized saucer?
Any modelling would've proved they were flogging a dead horse.?
Frost was a brilliant engineer, but made too many revisions, cut-backs and short cuts to appease goal post shifting DOD goons who never wanted the project in the first place, but had to justify to select committees their Budgets.
The initial design was quite a large vehicle utilising LFTR engines and computational assisted flight controls, the precursor to F117 flight controls, thanks to the pressure to deliver ‘a product’ Frost binned everything, decreasing airframe by 60% accepting traditional aviation fuel engines, and fly by cable, ultimately confining the concept to the dustbin, but then all it had been was a 2nd approach to the ‘Flux Liner’ question; anti-gravity technology.
I just learned 3 weeks ago that my grandfather worked on this in Malton (I knew he worked for Avro but always assumed/believed it was working on the Arrow). Crazy.
its ahead of its time and this proves time travellers
This is definitely what most U.F.O. sightings are : a riveted together aluminium bowl that can barely lift off the ground,which makes phenomenal noise and has uncontrollable pitching and rolling movements.I remember these things being mentioned along with the crude 'rollover loops' to protect the pilots head in the event of it turning turtle.
no.
There is an interesting design of aircraft, but they rarely talk about it, because this thing is secret. The topic of pulsed plasma thrusters has been developed since the early 60s (see PPT - Pulsed plasma thruster) - they are usually designed for spacecraft. But we will talk about a little-known design - these are plasma propulsion panels for aircraft, where the same Pulsed plasma thruster, but reduced to the size of a pencil and stacked in the form of cells in the panel. The design resembles a conventional plasma TV screen, where there are also discharge cells that activate the glow of pixels on the screen. And plasma propulsion panels have long discharge cells, the arrester has a railgun architecture (just rail contacts or coaxial), and the ionized discharge air is accelerated there by the Lorentz force to enormous speeds - a kind of ramjet engine is obtained. Just imagine! - tens of thousands of small ramjet engines assembled in a panel and firing plasma synchronously with a huge frequency (hundreds of kilohertz). Thus, plasma propulsion panels create lift by pulsed emission of plasma jets from railgun cells. There are tens of thousands of cells in the panel, they shoot at a frequency of hundreds of kilohertz, a huge pulse is obtained, and the plasma swirls the air into toroidal rings - the aircraft is held on this air cushion. Horizontal acceleration is created by the same plasma panels on the sides of the device (they glow, from the side they look like "portholes"). Such devices like "triangle" or "disk" have been observed for a long time, they are mistaken for alien ones - but these are terrestrial devices. They are classified and used for espionage and secret actions. Pulsed electromagnetic technology generates microwave radiation, therefore it is harmful to health. They rarely fly - only military missions. Therefore, they are not suitable for a citizen. This maintained the secrecy. Now they are already declassifying - many people know about this secret technique. When declassified, they will be used for cargo airships. But there is a danger that they are now going to be adapted to deliver small nuclear charges to decision-making centers - such means of delivery are not specified anywhere, are not conventional. This lowers the threshold for starting a war. It would be necessary to declassify them as soon as possible. That's why I'm writing about it. However, I have written before - starting with the book "The Elimination of UFOs" and many articles. There are also videos on my RUclips channel - "Declassified UFO" and "UFO Anatomy".
I remember going to the Dayton Air Force Museum when I was little and saw the flying saucer, and then the next time I went it was gone and I thought I went crazy. Funnily enough, when I took a trip to the experimental hanger it was there. I knew I wasn't crazy
The X29 from DARPA had several computers making hundreds of corrections per second. A similar computer system and modern construction materials would make control and stability much more manageable.
Interestingly enough, the design flaw that made it unstable was its method of lift. It’s central fan was powered by 6 jet engines dumping exhaust into a tooth wheel that caused it to spin. But had they done something like the F-35 by directly hooking up the turbine to the fan then this aircraft may have been able to over perform what was intended
Wow ........ futuristic
Some would say that Frost was one of the many Soviet plants in Avro. The money time ad skills wasted by this fellow were extremely strategic
This thing was so top secret, back in the late 80s a Discovery Channel program Wings did a detailed episode on it.
The late Rob Rich, CEO of Lockheed Martin Skunkworks stated in '86 "we have mastered the technology to send ET back home" .
This video and channel popped up in my suggestion list. Well I am now subscribed and enjoying it! Great work, great videos, great topics!
Loving the new channel
imagine if they were still working on it, with the way we've figured out thrust vectoring and improved jet engine tech, this idea can potentially work now
wouldnt be surprised if the original plane was shelved only to be remade like the b2 bomber
My mother was a chief engineer of this device when it was developed by AVRO
The Avro car was just of proof of concept of the hoover capability for the saucer. Work after that concentrated on the 1794 and some variations.I happened upon the documents for the 1794 back around 1984. Copied some of it and gave the rest to a historical society. I'm guessing they didn't do much with it because I gather the US government didn't declassifed it until 2012. A friend who worked on it told me a funny story about it. work was being done in an old ( I think wooden)building and this engineer was up on the roof looking down on it when they tried a first start up. The design involved dump cans around the perimeter as you can se in some of the drawings. When they started it up it set fire all around the building with the guy i knew in the middle on the roof. They couldn't get past the flames to turn it off until someone thought to turn the fuel off which was piped into the building from the ourside.
Lots of people in the comments section don't really understand what they are looking at with this aircraft or how a coanda effect lifting body works. The way this was supposed to work as originally designed was that thrust was emitted from the rim of the saucer which induced airflow over the upper surface and created coanda effect lift. They designed a special "pancake" jet engine for this purpose that emitted thrust around the perimeter of the engine rather than axially (the "fan" in the center is actually the compressor for this engine). In effect the whole upper surface of the aircraft was a wing that could generate lift without moving through the air. Problem was it was unstable out of ground effect so they attempted to correct this by bleeding thrust through vents in the underside of the saucer, but this only reduced the thrust available for creating the coanda effect lift and it still couldn't get out of ground effect. The problem really was that this thing needed computer stabilization that did not yet exist. In the last few years people have started experimenting with small drones that utilize coanda lift and some of these have actually been successful.
Bae: come over
Me: I can't i'm working on my UFO
Bae: I'm home alone
me: 0:30
I think we should invest more heavily into this “psychological war” idea with future vehicles
My Grandfather was a tool & die maker with A.V. Roe (AVRO) and worked on the project.
I always wanted the Mythbusters to answer why this project lasted as long as it did. It's failure seems so predictable. Your video explains many of my questions.
Some thoughts on other projects that might be worth covering -
The “man eater” F-107.
The XF-84H “thunderscreech.”
The XF-103 and XF-108 exotic super-interceptor projects. Might cover them with the Avro Arrow, as they’re part of the same “what if.”
The XP-79 Flying Ram (the most wtf design for an airplane I’ve seen).
The Ryan FR2 Fireball (such a bad name for a plane).
Don't forget the XF5U flying pancake.
A military or private company could make one fly with today's technology.
call Elon Musk ;-)
when you queued the sad piano music I got some heavy feels
Avro also produced a full scale mock-up of a shovel-shaped tail sitter design. I have a photo of an unidentified craft with the exact same profile in flight.
Beautiful craft. Pity about the performance.
Nice capture of a bloke scratching his balls at 3:18.
lmao he was really given'er eh?
Thanks for the upload of Canadian aerospace tech, the special projects group was eventually transformed into SPAR aerospace that built the Canadarm for the shuttles.
I don't believe the biggest problem was the loss of funding. The fact it was unable to fly sounds like a lot bigger issue to me.
I can’t help but notice the striking similarity of function of the landing gear to my son’s bicycle training wheels
The Avro manufacturing plant went on to build wings for the CF-18 Hornet back in 1980. When that project was done, the plant was used to build wings for the McDonnell-Douglas aircraft. In 1997 Boeing bought the plant and made wings for their aircraft. In 2005 they closed down the plant for good. It is now an empty field.
I like how it keeps showing The same to video clips to the whole entire presentation
Awesome video as always. The official stats for this vehicle are ridiculous. For example it never got off the ground higher than 3 feet and it was massively unstable then. Nowadays with our computer control technology we could probably make one of those and have it work but it would have no additional benefits other than vertical takeoff. And traditional fighter craft would out perform it in every other way massively.
This thing is on display at the national airforce museum on WPAFB. I've seen it and it's pretty neat.
The flying saucer that never flew
That's it? That's your "ultimate weapon"?
-General Armquist
In sci-fi movies the flying saucer doesn’t use a fan it uses anti-gravity engines or a core like the Enterprise allowing flying saucers heavier than our aircraft carriers and armed with photon torpedos. once we discover a world with the rare substance used by the starship Enterprise, we’ll make a real one.
Glad they decided to keep them instead of scrapping them. Interesting part of aviation history persevered for future generations
I wonder if the ion lifters could be used for this. They can't lift weight but maybe at the bottom, a series of ion lifters and with enough power, something stable and a little more silent. Don't know about the 'mock speed capabilities' but it would be a great use for scouting and getting wounded troops out of a combat situation quickly.
My family had one of those when we lived in Canada. It sucked.
I believe it was called a Flymo.
I watched a lengthy documentary once that included this one, it was a part of a ground effect program testing various kinds of hovercraft vehicles to see if they could replace jeeps (results were negative for all entries). Didn’t mention anything about flight much less supersonic.
A movie on this would be awesome
you guys HAVE !!! to do a video on the CF105 Arrow. That plane alone is a Dark Doc/Skies worthy subject !
This hover vehicle is no doubt much more advanced now. Circular spacecraft were common in 1930s comics. This is what they were trying to copy with the design, although the first genuine report of a similar craft in the air by private pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947. The newspapers called his sighting a flying saucer
Their design concept outpaced their technology. With thrust vectoring technology available, this might be feasible to build today.
This story is an excellent demonstration of a powerful fact: it's more important to get funding for a project than to succeed. This was an idiotic idea, but look how many people got paid.
I disagree. It was a good idea, but when it didn't pan out by 1956, that's when this project should have been scuttled.
Optimistic goals Mach 3.5 😆, damn thing never even flew more than 3 feet off the deck.
I'm from australia Absolutely incredible, as I kid I thought it was foreign life forms transportion, the American airforce and Canadian did a good job with covering up the truth i'm happy bob lazar can out and went public about this subject
Remember, this is just a prototype which we found out about over 50 years later. If you think they abandoned this completely, you are delusional, who knows what they have today...
Britain really were the pioneers of vertical take off aircraft, at the same time the British Short SC.1 became the first to transition between vertical and horizontal flight modes. Mad to think this was only because nuclear war was a real threat and they presumed they would have no airfields to take off from, now just 60 years later you have the F-35, goes to show how quickly technology progresses.
More like 40 years later but the f-35 has been one of the most over-budget and behind schedule projects in aviation history
I wonder if something like this could work with modern design and propulsion technology
Well you can by remote control drones with cameras for fliming right?
So although slightly different technology similar ideology?
Around 1960 Northrop did research on a flying saucer. It may have been part of the AVRO Car development
Since this thing had an open cockpit, I doubt they intended it to go supersonic.
A 100000 feet ... exactly. It was a joke.
That thing looks trippy seeing it fly.
I think it missed its calling as it would have made an excellent lawn mower. Hole football fields mown in a matter of minutes.
I believe the Germans were working on such a project during the war. Though whether or not they got passed the drawing board stage I do not know.
Would be referring to DIE GLOCKE by any chance?
Haunebu. Rumor has it there are many stored at the Nazi base in Anrarctica.
Kinda disappointed that they didn't make an unmanned version with a higher thrust to weight ratio and just stopped here. They really should revisit it. Think about how cool it would be to have a plane that can fly in any direction!
It looks like a hovercraft lol
This is the deep, dark cold war stuff I love to learn about.