August 14, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Kelsey D. Atherton
This may be a flying saucer, but don't call it a UFO. Carefully named, the All DIrections Flying Object, or ADIFO, is instead a saucer-like contraption, a flying prototype built at exploring the aerodynamic potential of an alien craft. It is, at its core, an omnidirectional flying wing built around a quadcopter with jets attached. Its designers see a future for the airframe as an unmanned combat aerial vehicle.
In a video posted July 1, a narrator discusses the design process and aerodynamics of the craft. Like many VTOL tools built on a quadcopter frame, ducted fans provide initial lift and mobility at low altitudes and low speeds. The addition of vectored jets on the rear of the craft, combined with four vertical vents and four side-facing vents, promising greater maneuverability at high speeds.
The ADIFO is the invention of Romanian engineer Razan Sabie in conjunction with Iosif Taposu, a scientist with a long career in aerospace research for the Romanian government.
“The aerodynamics behind this aircraft is the result of more than two decades of work and is very well reasoned in hundreds of pages and confirmed by computer simulations and wind tunnel tests,” Sabie told Vice, in the pair's first American interview. That story explores both the specific nature of the ADIFO, and the long and mostly failed history of flying saucer design.
Like many other ideas for the first decades of aviation, the possibility of operating the craft without a human on board opens up greater potential in what an airframe can actually do. Human pilots are subject to the limitations of a body and perception, and a flying disk changing directions suddenly at high speed is not the ideal place for a human to be.
Uncrewed craft can take on novel forms, and execute turns and twists beyond those human limits. While maneuverability is likely the primary selling point for a future role as combat aircraft, the smooth and fin-free form could easily have stealth characteristics built in, and could be further adapted by a dedicated team to fully realizing that stealth flight.
What might a military planner or designer do with such a machine? The proof-of-concept offers little in the way of information about storage space or sensors. With wide enough lenses, a handful of cameras could match the circular symmetry of the vehicle and provide and omnidirectional surveillance presence. The high speeds and potentially low radar profile suggest a role akin to earlier, Cold War spy planes, taking specific pictures in contested space and returning before anti-air systems can act.
And as with any aircraft, the potential is likely there for it to release an explosive payload, taking the flying saucer from an extraterrestrial fear to a terrestrial threat.
ADIFO might not be the future of anything. The project's home page says the team is still attracting partners, and aviation history is littered with proofs-of-concept that failed to materialize in a meaningful way.
Yet there is something to the idea of a flying saucer working the moment it no longer has to transport a human. It is an old aviation frontier that likely warrants further exploration.
February 24, 2023 | International, Land
The HMT platform vehicle has also proven itself internationally and is in service in Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Estonia
June 11, 2018 | International, C4ISR
Officials say the Defense Department's multibillion Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract is expected to be bid out in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year. Much of the oxygen in the federal contracting community has gone to the Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract in recent months, but the Pentagon is very close to bidding out a second major cloud contract that may rival it in size. Defense officials said last month that the Defense Enterprise Office Solution acquisition, valued at approximately $8 billion, could be bid out later this month, with an expected award issued by the second quarter of 2019. The contract will have a five-year base period with five one-year options. DEOS is the Pentagon's attempt to “unify and modernize” some of its legacy systems, including enterprise email, collaboration services, voice and video services, messaging, content management and other productivity capabilities for more than 3.5 million users. Brian Herman, the Defense Information Systems Agency's unified capabilities portfolio manager, said the Pentagon isn't interested in developing new capabilities but rather wants to take advantage of existing commercial capabilities in use across industry today. “Our goal is to take the capabilities that are available now, change the way we work to take advantage of these commercial services, and receive all of the upgrades and improvements that industry brings to their commercial customers,” said Herman, speaking at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium in Baltimore May 16. In the commercial world, many companies have opted for cloud-based delivery of collaborative and email services. Delivered at scale across the Defense Department's massive enterprise, Herman said the approach could significantly reduce costs and improve security and efficiency. DEOS could eventually replace the Defense Enterprise Email, Defense Collaboration Services, and Defense Enterprise Portal Service, and potentially other legacy systems currently maintained by the Pentagon's IT wing. “We've had feedback from the DOD management, financial, and technical leaders. They've looked at the services used by [DOD agencies] and said, ‘You need to change the way you use these services. It's no longer necessary for every application to be on your desktop. Perhaps you can have web-based access to some of these capabilities and both improve the security and reduce the cost of these capabilities,” Herman said. DEOS will offer services through the Pentagon's unclassified and classified networks, meaning potential bidders must have provisional authorization to operate at Impact Level 5 to bid on it. Currently, only a few cloud service providers, including Microsoft, IBM, Amazon Web Services and General Dynamics, have achieved this status. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has not yet released a final solicitation for JEDI, which some industry estimates have pegged at $10 billion. The contract has drawn scrutiny from industry and Congress because of the Defense Department's decision to award it to a single cloud service provider. Initially expected to be released in mid-May for industry consideration, it has been delayed indefinitely. https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/06/pentagons-second-multibillion-cloud-contract-be-bid-coming-months/148733/
February 8, 2024 | International, Land