Build a cargo-carrying X-plane in 18 months. That's the broad-brush goal of the Advanced Composite Cargo Aircraft (ACCA) project, kicked off last Friday by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The AFRL awarded two contracts woth a potential $47 million each, one (unsurprisingly) to Lockheed Martin - questions were referred to the company's Skunk Works in Palmdale, California - and the other, much more surprisingly, to Aurora Flight Sciences. Until now, Aurora has specialized in unmanned air vehicles, most of them small.
Aurora president John Langford says that more details of the company's design may be forthcoming in a couple of weeks. He tells DTI that the program's objective is to harvest new technologies in rapid prototyping, composites and flight control in order to build a near-full-size prototype of a cargo airplane - smaller than a C-130 and closer in size to the EADS-CASA C-295 and Alenia C-27J, the contenders in the Army-USAF Joint Cargo Aircraft project - which can use very short, austere runways.
ACCA would be Aurora's first manned aircraft, though Langford makes it clear that the company is looking at concepts that could have "a two-person crew, a one-person crew or no crew". Carrying cargo with an unmanned aircraft could potentially reduce costs and avoid the risk of a crew being captured on hazardous missions.
The project represents a school of thought in airlifter design that maintains that an airplane that can use a very short runway - 750-1,000 feet, for example, well under half what a JCA-type aircraft needs - may be almost as useful as a vertical take-off design, but would be less complex and cheaper. That was the objective of Boeing's tailless, tilt-wing Super Frog study of the mid-1990s and of Burt Rutan's DARPA-funded Advanced Technology Tactical Transport, a twin-boom prototype for a special-operations aircraft.
Phase 1 of the ACCA project, the design of the prototype, is due to be complete by the end of FY2007. Under Phase 2, the prototype itself should fly by late 2008. The USAF has not yet told the contractors whether it intends to fund both designs through Phase 2.
--Bill Sweetman
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