An artists impression of one of the fairly vast number of SST designs put forward by Boeing under the designation “733,” which predated the “2707” designation. This one features angular delta wings and delta canards… and apparently no passenger windows. Dates from the early 1960’s.
A reproduction of admittedly dismal quality of a Martin Co. painting of their December 1958 Dyna Soar configuration at launch. This configuration, the product of a team-up of Martin and Bell, competed against Boeing (and other companies) and lost; what must have been grating for the Martin-Bell folks was that the Boeing design that won looked nothing like the final Dyna Soar design… which actually looked a whole lot like this vehicle.
The Dyna Soar is here being shown launched by a modified Titan I ICBM. This booster would have fallen far short of orbiting the Dyna Soar; instead it would have simply tossed it on a long hypersonic suborbital trajectory. This would have been a purely experimental aircraft, the natural follow-on to the X-15.
A three-view of the April 1962 configuration of General Dynamics’ TFX entry. This is very clearly the F-111, but with a few minor differences. The most obvious are the different inlets and the tail “cone.” Here, it appears that at least for the USAF version, the tail cone was meant to angle downwards… presumably forming a ventral fin to aid in stability (or perhaps aid in maneuverability).
Other design features that would change include the profiles of the dorsal and horizontal stabilizers.
While the December 1961 configuration of General Dynamics’ TFX proposal was quite different from what was actually built as the F-111, the April 1962 configuration was quite close, though still not final. This diagram shows both designs. The most obvious changes are for positioning of the wings further forward, and the substantial increase in size of the horizontal stabilizers.
The F-111 was one of those aircraft for which a *vast* number of designs were put forth. While General Dynamics won the contract, they went through a long design development for their final design. As of December 1961, the design was clearly *almost* the F-111 as it would eventually be built, but not quite:
An early Bell Helicopter LHX concept:
Clearly Bell had Kevlar on their mind.
The planned X-15A-3 was to be a stretched X-15 with delta wings and increased performance (up to Mach 8). As a result of the higher speeds, it would get pretty warm over most of the skin, requiring advanced high-temperature materials.
I have this artwork… and nothing else. It depicts a VTOL aircraft that apparently uses augmenter technology for vertical thrust, and has an air cushion landing system. These would seem to place the design in the late 1960’s, maybe early 1970’s. That was when Bell was pushing air cushion landing systems hard… and before the spectacular failure of the augmenter-wing XFV-12.
It seems to be armed to the teeth with guns, but doesn’t seem to have space for much of anything else.
A few years ago I found this in Jay Miller’s giant stack of stuff down in Arkansas. It was devoid of context, just a loose photocopy. Most likely it represents some Bell Helicopter illustrator having some fun spoofing the modifiability of the Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter. I’m guessing this dates to the 1980’s.
The AIAA-Houston chapter newsletter “Horizons” has published an article I wrote on a 1963 concept for a variable geometry spaceplane capable of both space station logistics and combat missions. You can download the May/June 2012 here: http://www.aiaahouston.org/
