Finally! A Real Flying Saucer Sighting
Posted by StormWarning on 10 Oct 2007 at 10:06 pm | Tagged as: Current Affairs, Future Vision, Opinions, Science, Technology
As time passes, the future comes closer to reality. A small British company, GFS Projects, has built the world’s first flying saucer…its a UAV flying saucer with applications for close quarter surveillance and intelligence gathering for military and law enforcement, mountain rescue, and farming. Farming? I guess if it can hover and fly close to and within buildings…
The aerodynamic principles of the GFS design are fully scalable. The development programme will work through a series of scaling stages over the coming months to prove this in practice. Picture courtesy of GPS Products
Applications of this flying saucer are listed here.This 60-cm-diameter flying saucer made its first flight about a month ago at a technology event at Churchill College, Cambridge and is capable of vertical take off, fully controlled flight, hovering, and landing on a specified point. Now for the science and technology part.
The flying saucer is based on what is called the Coanda Effect that was discovered in 1930 by the Romanian aerodynamicist Henri-Marie Coanda (1885-1972). He has observed that a steam of air (or a other fluid) emerging from a nozzle tends to follow a nearby curved surface, if the curvature of the surface or angle the surface makes with the stream is not too sharp.
This is our artist’s impression of a fully engineered, larger GFS craft. The aerodynamic principles of the GFS design are fully scalable. The development programme will work through a series of scaling stages over the coming months to prove this in practice.
This page has some great stuff on it…
Click here to download the US Coanda Patent US 2,108,652 (pdf)
Click here to download the French Coanda Patent FR 796,843 (pdf)
Also, if you want to watch RealVideo of the Coanda Effect in action (48kb)
And this is even better! [forgive the partial French] showing more photographs and even a video (about 1/3 of the way down the page) - I haven’t figured out yet how to embed a video. And there’s even a flight simulator!!!
Click here to download this video above in ( 3.3 Mb, WMV format )
Klaatu gives his message, while Gort looms in the background
So the next time you think that you’ve seen a UFO or a flying saucer in the sky above…maybe you have. One thing is certain, what was once science fiction is real time today…and its getting better and more exciting every day. “Klaatu barada nikto!”
Coanda Effect, flying saucer, GFS Projects, Klaatu barada nikto!, science fiction, The Day the Earth Stood Still
Cool! I loved The Day The Earth Stood Still. I have it on DVD. I was such a sci-fi fan when I was a kid, still am.
And here, I thought that you were still a “kid.”
My fascination with technology is how what was science fiction when I was growing up, is becoming scientific reality today.
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