Huge Ekranoplan-Like Airlifter Design Teams Selected By DARPA
February 2nd, 2023As ever larger swaths of the United States look like they have been carpet bombed…
The horrifying maw of the Military Industrial Complex says, “More.”
Via: The Warzone:
The Pentagon has selected two teams to further develop their designs for a full-scale demonstrator of the Liberty Lifter X-plane. Aurora Flight Sciences (working with Gibbs & Cox and ReconCraft) and General Atomics (working with Maritime Applied Physics Corporation) are pursuing two very different designs for phase 1 of the project, as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) press release distributed on February 1 shows.
You can read more about the launch of the Liberty Lifter project in this previous War Zone feature from May 2022.
The Liberty Lifter X-plane project aims to deliver a long-range, low-cost X-plane using a wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) ekranoplan-like concept. Artwork released by DARPA shows that the Aurora Flight Sciences concept, which has not been seen before, resembles a more traditional flying boat. The concept features a single hull, high wing and eight turboprops for propulsion. It also looks somewhat similar to Boeing Phantom Works’ Pelican WIG concept from two decades ago.
