39. Pilotless Aircraft Weight Problems
$20.00
SAWE Members get a $200 store credit each year.*
*Store credit coupon available at checkout, click the button in your shopping cart to apply the coupon.
Not applicable to SAWE textbooks and current conference technical papers.
Paper
Abstract
In the comparatively recent past the rise of pilotless aircraft in the field of military tactics has necessitated many changes in the thinking of designers and engineering organizations. The technical vocabulary has been forced to accept new nomenclatures, new applications have been discovered for old laws of physics, and personnel has had to adapt itself to new and often startling concepts of design. These innovations have created the need for highly trained personne1 from related fie1ds – mathematicians for computation of optimum launching ang1e and trajectories, thermodynamicists for heat and airflow problems, chemists for investigating fuel efficiencies, electronics experts for telemetering and guidance equipment, physicists to conduct research into the upper-air strata, and many other students of the applied sciences. Together with this introduction of personnel heretofore more distantly related to the aircraft industry has come an accompanying step-up in the pace of those designers, aerodynamicists, structural and weight control engineers normally considered an integral part of the engineering organization. It is with the latter group only that this discussion will be concerned, and an attempt will be made to point out some of the problems confronting the weight engineer, together with suggested solutions as dictated by actual experience covering a period of the last four or five years. This analysis will study first, estimating procedures, second, the weight control program, and, third, the special problems of actual weight and balance.
