AviationBanter - View Single Post

John Dallman · April 27th 06, 08:54 PM posted to rec.aviation.military.naval

In article . com,
(FatKat) wrote:

What would the benefits of MagLev be?

Well, adding a whole of of weight to the plane to start with, in either
permanent magnets or electromagnets so that you could get enough repulsion
to lift the plane off the deck. You'd then have three basic strategies:

- Build said magnets into the plane, reducing its performance.
- Put them on some kind of plane carrier, which you discard overboard
like a catapult bridle. Since it weighs around the same amount as
the plane, this will be quite expensive.
- Use a plane carrier but don't discard it. Stopping it will be about
as difficult as arresting a fully-loaded plane, which is going to
push up the size of the carrier in some way or other.

The obvious "advantage" of the first is that it enables you to do without
a conventional undercarriage on the plane, thus saving some weight, and
meaning that you can only land on a correctly equipped carrier or
airfield. All you can do anywhere else is try to crash gently.

Overall, maglev for launching aircraft looks like an even more expensive
version of the "Flexible Deck" silly idea that the Royal Navy played with
in the 1950s.

On the other hand, replacing a steam catapult with a linear accelerator,
that pulls an aircraft along on convention wheels is much less silly.
That's ben discussed, vaguely, for the forthcoming cancellation of the
Royal Navy's CVF. That ship concept doesn't feature a steam plant,
replacing it with gas turbines driving electric generators, plus electric
motors turning the propellers. With that, using the electric plant to
catapult aircraft make sense. However, if they get built, the plan is to
carry STOVL JSF, and use a ski-jump rather than catapults. So the idea
hasn't been studied in much detail, to the best of my knowledge.

---
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.