As the Pentagon expands its drone packages, weapons-makers are developing with more and more outlandish concepts for unmanned autos. Boeing lately patented the science-fiction concept of a flying drone that may flip right into a submarine.
The Department of Defense introduced this week it might improve the variety of each day drone flights to as many as 90 by 2019, involving extra service branches and even civilian contractors. If engineers can translate concept drawings into actuality, a few of these flights could also be carried out by Boeing machines designed to function each within the air and beneath water.
Best identified for making jet airliners, Boeing filed a patent request for a “vehicle adaptable for both flight and water travel.” Described within the patent software as a “flying submarine,” the proposed drone would come with “one or more separable systems which are adaptable for both flight and water travel.” The automobile’s payload could embrace sensors and different devices, but in addition “another type of payload depending on the purpose of the flight.”
While it seems like one thing out of a James Bond film, the Boeing concept isn’t fairly as much as the automotive from ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, the 1976 Lotus Esprit S1 that became a submarine via the magic of particular results.
For one factor, its transformation is strictly one-way. The patent paperwork exhibits the automobile jettisoning its wings, propeller and tail stabilizers upon coming into the water, leaving in place one other set of propellers and management surfaces for underwater navigation. Both variations would use the identical engine, although, the specifics of which stay unknown.
The US Patent and Trademark Office granted the patent for a “Rapid deployment air and water vehicle” (US 9,010,678) in April. Documents present the inventor of the automobile as Nathan Hiller of Irvine, California.