Aircraft project update, and urgent question

[Andrew Lockley]

Hi All,

I'm writing in a personal capacity, to give you a quick update on my fixed-wing SAI aircraft project. 

We currently have two jet drones:

* a large distributor, ~500kg payload, ~20km

* a small sampler, ~40kg payload, ~13km 

The small sampler UAV is designed to be affordable for university departments to operate. It can be used for background measurements immediately, as well as to study the effects of a later SAI testing or deployment program. 

Before I give you the full update, here's my urgent question:

Could your research team use this small UAV? To lock down the specification, we need to know promptly what demand there may be for a civilian version, and what payload requirements exist (size / weight / power / temperature). If we don't get clarity on what's needed immediately, we may subsequently need costly re-certification to accommodate your team's equipment. 

Now, for some more meat. For our main aircraft, the numbers you'll care about are:

- 433 L liquid payload capacity

- 2 × 85 kg gas capacity

- 19,883 m altitude attained with reheat

- 17,455 m altitude attained without reheat 

These altitude readings are photographed from the ground display - so they're unlikely to be a hangar tale exaggeration. 

Although these aircraft are quite small in terms of payload, they climb like homesick angels - meaning the potential flight cadence is likely to be a lot higher than for the larger, slower aircraft proposed by other teams. Accordingly, the tonnage per day isn't as limited as you might imagine from the payload. At this stage, we haven't got clarity on what discharge rates per day actual flight operations could achieve. Nevertheless, we've tested the chemical discharge systems on the ground, and demonstrated that we can get the material out at useful rates.  

In case you're wondering: this project currently doesn't have a name. The previous balloon project was called the Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation project (SATAN) - which seemingly put me on the geoengineering naughty step on a semi-permanent basis. This new work is all fundamentally within the same project concept, but we probably need a new name for this phase - ideally something that can offend absolutely no one. I don't want to call it something unpronounceable like GTKFSBA, and I haven't been able to make an informative backronym from FLUFFY BUNNIES (or anything similarly inoffensive) - so it presently remains nameless. One prominent academic started calling it "Son of Satan" - which is witty enough to merit a mention, and may now prove hard to shake off. Do feel free to suggest your own ideas. 

Both of these aircraft are going through certification at the moment, so we'll have more to say in due course. Because the platforms are also designed for defence use, I can't go spamming engineering drawings, technical specifications, or photographs around. If you're desperate for plane pics to illustrate an article, other teams do have pretty renders - but, sadly, they don't seem to have any actual aircraft. NB Please don't imagine the U2-style aircraft we showed at DEGREES Cape Town - our supersonic aircraft don't look like anything you'll have seen elsewhere. 

I'd love to have announced this all more formally to the academic community, but my attempts to do so have been repeatedly thwarted. We haven't published anything recently in journals, and we don't plan to. There are of course defence industry restrictions to worry about. More importantly, my long and frustrating personal experience of publication attempts suggests that the journal ecosystem is selectively hostile to this kind of research. The original SATAN paper was desk-rejected numerous times, then finally rejected after review (because apparently a balloon is not an aircraft - a point on which the ICAO disagrees). Out of exasperation, the SATAN study was ultimately released on this list - which is probably a pretty reasonable place for various informal announcements (like this one).

I've also not been to many conferences recently - partly due to spending all of my money on planes, and partly due to lack of acceptances. (Ironically, I'm writing this email while I would otherwise have been polishing a conference presentation.) I'd have thought that an actual SAI aircraft was the kind of thing conference delegates would want to see or hear about - but I don't control who gets an invite. Feel free to raise this matter with your friendly local conference organiser - others certainly have robustly communicated their views on invite policy in the past. It's a sad situation when the main players in hardware and testing are rarely welcomed on the conference circuit. Maybe I'm biased, but I think the community needs to hear from those with practical involvement as much as from those who theorise and commentate. You don't have to like someone's work - or even like them - for their presence at a conference to be important. 

Nevertheless I'm not trying to hide, so I thought this update was in order - and you can contact me with further questions, suggestions, or offers of support. In case you're wondering, the project is self-funded by the design and engineering team. We don't have any grants or equity investors. While we're not doing any formal fundraising, we're naturally open to conversations with any potential financial backers.  

More formal announcements will come when we've done something worth formally announcing. Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing from you with your questions, requests, offers and views. You can respond privately or publicly - but please do keep group replies polite, as personal attacks aren't tolerated here.

Thanks for your interest.

Andrew Lockley