Hey guys, I know I hardly post here but that shouldn’t stop any answers coming in on this one!
You know how you watch some show on the box and you start thinking, hmm that’s a good design- I wonder if it’s possible. Well it happened to me just now, I was watching a show and I saw something that made me think.
Now what I want to know is, is it possible for a Corperate jet/Feeder liner, with a learjet layout (fuel tanks on the wings, T tail, pointed nose), to carry 24 passengers plus luggage, yet have one engine mounted in the base of the tail with the intakes mounted on the sides at the wing roots?
What puzzles me most is not so much the engine (which would have to be powerful (possibly a military one as it did have an after burner in the show), but is it possible to have the engine in that position? I mean given the noise the thing would make both in it’s aft running and the intakes with their high pitch scream, would that provide some level of interior noise that would ruin the ride?
Thanks for any help guys.
By: mike currill - 11th March 2007 at 06:22
Given enough money and someone with the patience to sit and figure it out most problems are solvable but that’s the bind, getting both together is not always as easy as it sounds.
By: Mark A - 8th March 2007 at 21:29
Quite a while back I was working on the Lockheed Tristar installation.
It had a tail engine fed through an S-duct with the intake above the aft fuselage.
One of the issues was lowish frequency structure born noise which was quite noticeable for the passengers in the back. It led to a technique for tweaking the fan blade selection to optimise the fan noise in this range just for the centre engine. At high power settings the fan blade tips are supersonic, and the shock waves they generate cause a rather harsh “buzz-saw” noise.
In principle there is no insurmountable problem with cheek intakes and an aft fuselage mounted engine, although cabin noise, as you rightly suggest, could be an issue.
By: BlueRobin - 6th March 2007 at 18:56
It just so happens Piper’s VLJ will have a single Williams 33 jet built into the base of the vertical fin. I would have serious concerns though about single engine ops in anything larger for redundancy reasons. Anyway pylon mounting an engine is far simpler lacking extra strutural complexity required for the tailfin.
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March 6, 2007 at 1:56 pm