Skewed Data

摘要

It was a frankenstein of an aircraft. The remotely piloted vehicle, flight-tested by NASA in the 1970s, was built to evaluate the aerodynamic characteristics of the oblique wing. At the time, it was thought that a supersonic transport with a wing rotating on a center pivot would get twice the fuel economy of conventional supersonic aircraft. The information gathered from the drone's three test flights led to the development of the piloted, oblique-wing Ames-Dryden-1. Test pilots flew the AD-1 almost 80 times before abandoning the prototype because of its "unpleasant flying characteristics."