On Sun, 25 May 2003 10:40:18 -0700, "Ken Doyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Operationally, you'll always have to be prepared for takeoff aborts at any >point. An abort decision/event at the point where you're at rotation V on a >HT ride will be dangerous. Recall the Concord takeoff crash a while back. >They had warnings that they were on fire and had a blown tire while the >aircraft was still on the runway but they were committed to flight because >of the speed and runway remaining. Always operating only from incredibly >long runways where that isn't a potential scenario is quite an operational >restriction. Depends on what you mean by incredibly long. 5000+ foot runways are on most major airports. 10,000 foot runways are common on former SAC bases. 15,000 foot runways are less common but easy enough to find, also on SAC bases. Much longer and you're flying out of Edwards. But the Concorde had a much lower T/W than any operationally useful HT rocket. High T/W keeps the takeoff roll short, giving you lots of room to stop. High T/W also means you can climb sharply, further reducing your runway use should you need to abort. By the time you're past the point where you can safely push over, land, and stop, you've reached the point where you can turn around, land, and stop. >You HT advocates appear to be accepting of remarkable otherwise unnecessary >landing gear, brakes, and wing mass penalties all in the name of believing a >Horizontal Takeoff mode to be intrinsically safer. If that was all wings did, it would be an insufficient advantage, and VTVL would obviously win. VTVL doesn't -obviously- win. :-) -R -- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
