Revolutionary Aircraft Innovation

Expeditious cargo deployment is crucial to meeting the needs of military and disaster-relief organizations. When supporting military objectives, it can mean life or death for our troops. In disaster relief activities, it can potentially save the lives of thousands of innocents, and circumvent the loss of millions of dollars in damages. Both objectives can be hindered by geographic isolation and weather fluctuations, which can greatly diminish or eliminate the efficiency of operations. Emergent world tensions and events may have influenced DARPA's recent Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) solicitation for revolutionary airlift innovation in their ST14B-004 topic last year. This solicitation laid out a performance objective for unloading ships in the littoral zone that called for a brand-new way of thinking. This led me to lead a team of underGraduates, university experts, and local industry partners to develop a proposed technology that offers promise of meeting or beating this challenging objective. The proposed technology utilizes an inexpensive cargo container mounted to a traditional military 463L cargo pallet, which is then quickly-converted into a compact glider structure, lifted off-deck by bolt-in-place Solid Rocket Motors (SRMs), and autonomously transitioned to glide configuration, which enables a rapid unpowered glide to unimproved targets as much as 100 miles inland. This research discusses the technology, the estimated capability, and the challenges remaining for bringing this design to market