Ryan "Rogallo wing" concepts

In the early 1960's, Ryan Aeronautical sought to develop applications for the Rogallo wing, developed by NASA's
Francis Rogallo. In addition to use in recovering returning space vehicles, see here :-

http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=4269

Ryan also sought to exploit the flex-wing, as they called it, on the battlefield, with a range of craft, from reconnaisance drones to remotely controlled cargo gliders, and powered cargo aircraft.
They also designed a replacement for the parachute, which would allow a downed airman to control the path of his descent, effectively inventing the hang glider.

Some of the programs they initiated include the Flex Bee recon drone,
Individual Drop Glider (the 'hang glider' above),
Precision Drop Glider, a remotely controlled air dropped cargo delivery device,
Air Cargo Glider, an unpowered towed glider,which could also be remotely piloted,
Towed Universal Glider, a variation on the previous system,
the 'Flex Wing', a manned, powered flexible winged aircraft, and the XV-8A 'Fleep',
a piloted cargo carrier developed from the Flex Wing.

Here's what I've been able to find from the Web, and elsewhere :-

(there are some more reports available from DTIC, but as they're not in PDF form, they're effectively not
accessible to me.)



'Ryan's Triangular Umbrellas',
Aeroplane Monthly, September 1975, pp. 454-458

From DTIC :-

AN EVALUATION OF FLEX-WING AIRCRAFT IN
SUPPORT OF INDIGENOUS FORCES INVOLVED IN
COUNTER-INSURGENCY OPERATIONS

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD477482



Flexible Wing Air Cargo Glider Delivery System

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA318114


XV-8A FLEXIBLE WING AERIAL UTILITY VEHICLE

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD461202


Pilot's Handbook for the Flexible Wing Aerial Utility Vehicle XV-8A

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADB252433


OPERATIONAL DEMONSTRATION AND EVALUATION OF THE FLEXIBLE WING
PRECISION DROP GLIDER IN THAILAND, MARCH-JULY 1963

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD431128



FLEXIBLE-WING CARGO GLIDERS. VOLUME 1

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD297437


FLEXIBLE WING CARGO GLIDERS. DESIGN CRITERIA AND AERODYNAMICS, VOLUME 2

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD297214


From NTRS :-

TECHNICAL NOTE D-1946
FULL-SCALE WIND-TUNNEL INVESTIGATION OF A
FLEXIBLE-WING MANNED TEST VEHICLE

http://hdl.handle.net/2060/19630009859


From FlightGlobal :-

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1963/1963%20-%201346.html?search="flex wing"

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1963/1963%20-%201347.html?search="flex wing"

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1963/1963%20-%201885.html?search="flex wing"

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1962/1962%20-%200998.html?search="flex wing"



[the images are from the Aeroplane Monthly article, or unrecorded (sorry) web sources]



cheers,
Robin.

more images, of the 'Flex Wing',




cheers,
Robin.

last set, XV-8A 'Fleep' images,


cheers,
Robin.

Hey Robin, I can see you've done your homework extremely well... ;D

Now I can see why you said you were to post something on the subject soon. Never realized it was THAT soon!!! Glad you did.

Excellent - let me see what I can add from some image I obtained out of the San Diego Air & Space Museum collection.

Thanks for posting! Mark

Not all such parawing-equipped designs were meant to fly slow. The HI-HICAT (High-High Altitude Critical Atmospheric Turbulence) research rocket was meant to cruise between 70,000 and 200,000 feet altitude at up to Mach 6, after launch from an F-4. It would, as the name suggests, be used to research clear-air turbulence at those altitudes. At the end of the mission the wing would pop out, allowing a subsonic glide to an air-snatch recovery.

Wow. Was that a Ryan design? Never heard of it before.

Stargazer2006 said:

Wow. Was that a Ryan design? Never heard of it before.

Click to expand...

Whoops, forgot some data. Lockheed-California, 1966.

My favourite "floppy wing" aircraft is still the Goodyear Inflatoplane.

My favourite "floppy wing" aircraft is still the Goodyear Inflatoplane.

Click to expand...

You got something on that?, I've seen a couple of pictures, but that's all.

Not all such parawing-equipped designs were meant to fly slow.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that one, and then of course there are the 'inflatable blackbirds', in 'from RAINBOW to GUSTO'.

Excellent - let me see what I can add from some image I obtained out of the San Diego Air & Space Museum collection.

Thanks for posting! Mark

Click to expand...

That would also be excellent. ;D

...Never realized it was THAT soon!!! Glad you did...

Click to expand...

Been ready to go with it for a day or two, then when I found the model number reference, I thought I'd post it in the right place...


cheers,
Robin.

Forgot to add this to my first post........

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/memoriam_frogallo.html


cheers,
Robin.

Ryan factory proposal model of the Rogallo Wing Cargo Glider for the U.S. Army.

Wow! What a lovely little model! The kind of thing that's probably of interest to only a handful of us aviation buffs on the planet, the kind that you hope will pop up on eBay on occasion and no-one will get interested so you get it for peanuts! LOL ;D

Wherever you got that one from, anyway, you got yourself something really original and meaningful because it is, quite simply put, the ancestor of the modern paragliders and deltaplanes!

Stargazer2006 said:

... no-one will get interested so you get it for peanuts! LOL ;D

Click to expand...

Thank you, I was quite pleased with this one. But there was plenty of interest, so you're looking at $1100 worth of peanuts.

Oh my... Hope I did not offend you, I surely didn't mean to. Well as I said you got yourself an invaluable chunk of aviation history, so if you could afford it, it's nice!

Ryan factory proposal model of the Rogallo Wing Cargo Glider for the U.S. Army.

Click to expand...

That shows the glider in it's original form, before fins were added to reduce severe Dutch Roll and increase stability.
As shown on page 5 of the report 'Flexible Wing Air Cargo Glider Delivery System' from above, page 5

$1100 ?? :-\

what price a piece of history??

cheers,
Robin.

Thank you Robin, it's always great for a model collector to find accurate, supporting documentation like these photos! As for the market value of some vintage models, it might surprise you to find out how much many of them cost, back when they were built. Of course, this was all done with taxpayer money...

circle-5 said:

Thank you Robin, it's always great for a model collector to find accurate, supporting documentation like these photos! As for the market value of some vintage models, it might surprise you to find out how much many of them cost, back when they were built.

Click to expand...

Wouldn't surprise *me.* I know how long it can take to make even a simple model from scratch. And time costs.

robunos said:

My favourite "floppy wing" aircraft is still the Goodyear Inflatoplane.

Click to expand...

You got something on that?, I've seen a couple of pictures, but that's all.

Not all such parawing-equipped designs were meant to fly slow.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that one, and then of course there are the 'inflatable blackbirds', in 'from RAINBOW to GUSTO'.

Click to expand...

Actually, those were also Goodyear. They and the Navy were proposing the inflatable ramjet-powered recon concept. The Land Panel asked Lockheed to do an evaluation, hence the three-views by Dan Zuck.

Cheers,

Paul

Suhler said:

[Actually, those were also Goodyear. They and the Navy were proposing the inflatable ramjet-powered recon concept. The Land Panel asked Lockheed to do an evaluation, hence the three-views by Dan Zuck.

Cheers,

Paul

Click to expand...

I never thought I'd see the words "inflatable" and "ramjet" in the same sentence outside of a Wile-E-Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon........

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

A few pictures have been uploaded at SDASM Archives.
Some are artist renderings, showing a potential use of Flex Wing on fighter aircraft and rockets.
Link: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=flex&w=49487266%40N07

in 1960s Parawing aka Rogallo wing were study for several system here some Videos

Parawing as additional wing for B-70 and M-2 Lifting Body

Gemini Test with inflateble Parawing

Ryan Saturn-Booster Recovery System Test

Hi Everyone!

This is slightly off-topic, but I have a very nice Parawing kite (about 30 years old), made by (and autographed by) Francis Rogallo himself, the inventor of the parawing.
Rogallo originally called the parawing a "flexikite".

The kite flies really great, and has no rigid structure in the traditional sense. The parawing kite's main body (i.e. the wing or sail) is square, and has a sharp crease on the diagonal from the nose all the way aft, to form the central keel.

Even though the parawing kite is fairly simple, it's highly critical to construct things according to specifications. Even the knots and loops in the shroud lines need to be dimensioned accurately. Even the tail has to be dimensioned accurately.

I've made several of them out of mylar, and they're a lot of fun to fly.

I'm a kitemaker, and not an aeronautical engineer, but I just thought that you might find this bit of background interesting from the kiting point of view. I do know that parawings are much more complex in constuction and applications beyond their kite origins.


Chuck

not slightly off-topic
can you post a photo of that Parawing kite here, please ?

the parawing had great future prospects, but unfortunately no big interest of Government and business
lucky it's survived as hangglider and kites, otherwise it had end up in museum.

Unmanned cargo gliders are somewhat hot again.

Among the many Rogallo-wing types developed by Ryan, I stumbled across two projects from 1964 that I hadn't encountered before: The LUG (Light Utility Glider) and the TUG (Towed Universal Glider), both to an ARPA specification.

Star, see here :-


http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,8142.msg71915.html#msg71915


cheers,
Robin.

Footage of some of the less successful test flights can be found here.

robunos said:

last set, XV-8A 'Fleep' images,


cheers,
Robin.

Click to expand...

From the USAAM archives:

Artist's impression of Ryan XV-8 Flexwing.

Source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/6335508988/in/photostream/

Looks to me like the concept was aimed at airmobile operations support. Or, alternatively, perhaps it was for highly mobile radar pickets in the more remote areas of North America?

[font=]Whilst I like the drawing presented to us, I think it is inapproriate to call it the XV-8.[/font]
[font=]The Ryan XV-8A Fleep was a flexible wing research aircraft of which one was built for the US Army and flew for the first time in June 1963. The serial was 63‑13003 whilst a second example with serial 63‑13004 was cancelled. [/font]
[font=]I would suggest the drawing presented to us it an envisaged operational development.[/font]

And then there is this concept (from the same Ryan photo archive at SDAM)...

You Circle -5 are demi-g-d for finding military parasailing donkey concept. Every hat I ever had or will have off to you sir.

jsport said:

....military parasailing donkey concept......

Click to expand...

Just as you think you've seen everything

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

Lauge said:

jsport said:

....military parasailing donkey concept......

Click to expand...

Just as you think you've seen everything

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

Click to expand...

[off-topic]
Black bears and B-58s.
[/off-topic]

Lauge said:

jsport said:

....military parasailing donkey concept......

Click to expand...

Just as you think you've seen everything

Click to expand...

Makes me wonder if it's not yet another example of the Ryan company's well-known sense of humor...

Stargazer2006 said:

Lauge said:

jsport said:

....military parasailing donkey concept......

Click to expand...

Just as you think you've seen everything

Click to expand...

Makes me wonder if it's not yet another example of the Ryan company's well-known sense of humor...

Click to expand...

Same here. Unofficial program patch?

I had never seen the air-mobile container in the first post in this thread, but I had something very similar in mind. I was searching SPF for information on flexible wings to flesh out a concept for a rugged, low-speed utility aircraft small enough to fit in an ISO 20' shipping container. Does anyone know of any good resources on the design of flexible wings? I am particularly interested in the combination of the flexible wing with more more conventional aerodynamic control surfaces rather than weight-shift control of hang gliders and microlight trikes. Thanks!

Topics merged. Thanks Robunos for the pointer.