In the future, we will have incredible materials which we can use to make our future aircraft, and personal flying vehicles. Yes, I am speaking about a flying car in your driveway in the future. Yes, now you are smiling. Perhaps this car might even have all the Google autonomous car features, meaning it will drive itself, fly itself, and never crash into anything. Sounds good so far right? Okay so let's talk about this for a moment shall we?
If you have a flying car, you are probably going to wish to retract wheels once you get airborne so we can fly more efficiently through the slipstream, and cruise through the relative wind without any extra parasite drag. Meanwhile, even though your vehicle will be lighter due to these new materials, it will need more airfoils surfaces to get airborne. In that case, why couldn't the landing gear doors become little wings while your vehicle is on the ground, as you get up to speed to fly away? Once you fly away the landing gear doors can then go back into the shape needed to cover the hole once the wheels have been retracted.
As long as we are considering all this, why don't we do this for modern-day aircraft? Well, up until now this technology has not readily been available, but I believe it is coming very quickly, and it is something we should start to look at now. Some engineering students at some of the top aeronautic engineering schools have already developed leading edge camber morphing strategies to allow aircraft the maximum amount of lift for take-off in increased payload, but then the wing will become thinner once in flight to reduce the amount of drag allowing the aircraft to fly faster and more efficiently using less fuel.
The strategies used for morphing the camber of a wing so far are much different than the material memory manufacturing techniques we might use in the future to reshape landing gear doors for dual purposes. This doesn't mean that the other strategy for the leading-edge is a bad one, some of those designs actually will work fine, and also remain light weight. Expandable wings using very thin sheets of graphene/carbon nanotube composites might also be an interesting engineering feat to solve some of these problems.
Let's not take any of these ideas off the table, let's funnel research and development money into each one, and perhaps several others, because what we learn today will shape the future of our flying machines tomorrow. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Future Aircraft Concepts. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/
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