Posted on 04/07/2007 10:41:27 PM PDT by Lorianne
The age of the British amateur inventor toiling away in his humble garden shed lives on - and Geoff Hatton is proof of it.
The former hovercraft engineer has designed and patented a flying saucer from his workshop in Peterborough that has grabbed the imagination of the American military establishment.
My son said it was a bloody silly idea,' said Mr Hatton. "Now I've proved it works, he says sorry, he was wrong."
The 68-year-old has won a contract with the US government for his 3ft-wide contraption, a cross between a hovercraft and a helicopter. It is being considered for surveillance sorties.
"Unlike a helicopter, though, this is aerodynamically neutral and you can bump into walls and not smash the rotor,' said the inventor.
"And, unlike a hovercraft, you can fly it as high as you want."
The dome-shaped object is powered by an electricity-driven propeller on top that pushes air over the outer surfaces, and has controllable flaps.
The device, which was rejected by the Ministry of Defence, was funded partly by a £43,000 development grant from the Department of Trade and Industry five years ago.
The Americans are convinced that it has potential.
"It's a unique approach which lends itself to a surveillance platform,' said Sal Gomez, of the US army's International Co-operative Programs centre. "It could be useful in urban areas because if it bumped into walls it could recover. This is just the earliest of days, like the Wright Brothers."
Mr Hatton built his first model hovercraft for a church fete in 1964 and later helped build them in Britain and Canada.
Divorced, he returned to England in 1979 and spent ten years as a market trader in Clacton.
"I was always going on to people about how hovercraft could become flying saucers," he said.
"They got fed up with it and said, "Get on and make one then!" So I did."
He set about turning his workshops into his own mini-Area 51s - the secret US military testing sites in the Nevada desert.
Mr Hatton won backing from friends, including business consultant David Evans. He said: "It's an idea that you look at and say to yourself, "Do you want to be like the first record producers who turned down The Beatles?"' Dr Holger Babinsky, an expert in aerodynamics at Cambridge University, also offered his expertise.
Geoff's Flying Saucers - the original name for his GFS Projects company - are based on an aerodynamic principle that has been around for nearly 100 years.
Known as the Coanda Effect, after a Romanian jet-engine pioneer, the principle is today used primarily in helicopters that have no tail rotors.
Patents covering Mr Hatton's design were filed in March 2005 and the first controlled flights took place that year.
Mr Evans said: "We can see a lot of prospects besides the military. Farmers in America already use unmanned aerial vehicles to inspect crops. Then there's search-and-rescue, aerial surveying and getting close to roofs."
Fascinating.
Hmmm... Caractacus Potts of the 21st century?
... And that’s Uncle Joe he’s moving kinda slow at the Junction!” WHOO-WHOO!
Huh. Interesting.
Ping
Aha! I think I found the culprit to all those mysterious crop circles...
Good for Mr. Hatton! It's good to see little innovative companies come up with cool stuff. Just make sure the *#!& mainland Chinese don't steal it!
ping
Or 15 million years - Our Martian ancestors had it first! /s
This is deliberate theft! Bush knows about UFOs!
Ah, the Coanda Effect. The fan draws air over the dome-shaped body, which acts as a circular wing. As wth any wing, airflow over the circular wing surface produces a differential in air pressure over the wing surface, with the air pressure on top of the dome becoming less than the air pressure below it, generating lift. Directional control is created by spoling the lift with flaps, thus lessening the lift on the side of the dome where the flap is located; the dome dips in that direction, the thrust vector becomes unbalanced, and the craft moves in the direction of the spoled lift.
Couple two of these together, rig throttles to allow steering by differential thrust = flying car.
But can it fold up and be put in your pocket like on “The Jetsons?”
What provides the counter rotation to the rotor?
You are too late. I already made my tin foil hat...
I’m not sure. From the look of the thing, I’d guess the thrust is vectored in a direction counter to that of the impeller’s spin. Or maybe there’s a flywheel we can’t see. I’d need to examine it close up to have any real idea.
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