Northrop N333/N336/N340 Dorsal inlet fighters - ATS / ATF / VATOL

[Stargazer]

Inboard profile from same PDF appears to depict N336-7

After going over the same document, I think that the caption looks more like N336-2. What do you think?

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

I think so.

There's a vestigial dot between the dash and the 2 that *might* be the traces of a 1, in which case its N336-12 (which would make sense)

 

[allysonca]

From my collection looking a bit aged... but cool design.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

So the ATS design designation is N333-14. Nice!

We have


N333-14 - ATS, horizontal tail planes, AllysonCA's model
N336-12 - VATOL, single tail
N340 - no details
N3xx-14 - ATS, horizontal tail planes, in BillRo's photo of a model. Possibly N333-14?
N3xx - Twin tail VATOL design in BillRo's artist's impression.

I don't think the NASA Langley design is related though, Pyhrric Victory

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Top Mounted Inlet System Feasibility for Transonic-Supersonic Fighter Aircraft
T. L. Williams, W. P. Nelms and D. Smeltzer
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19810015531_1981015531.pdf

Better version of this article -



TOP-MOUNTED INLET SYSTEM FEASIBILITY FOR TRANSONIC-SUPERSONIC FIGHTER AIRCRAFT APPLICATIONS
T.L. Williams and B.L. Hunt
Northrop Corporation, Aircraft Division
D.B. Smeltzer and W.F. Nelms
NASA Ames Research Center

in

AGARD CP-301 AERODYNAMICS OF POWER PLANT INSTALLATION

AGARD

 

[Maury Markowitz]

The Saab design had good high AOA performance too. The main objections were difficulty of placing a second seat without disrupting airflow into the inlet, and possible problems with combined high AOA and yaw.

That would be my concern in general - I suspect one could make an inlet that worked well at high-AOA, but I find it very difficult to believe you could make one that worked at high AoA *and* a reasonable degree of yaw. All those images show straight-line AoA, which is great until you start to get near the stall boundaries.