Submarine Pioneer Develops Deep Flying Submarines

8Mar/090

Submarine Pioneer Develops Deep Flying Submarines

Deep Flying Submarine

There has been a major new development in submarine technology. Hawkes Ocean Technologies has developed deep flying submarine technology.

The flying submarines resemble airplanes more than submarines. They have wings, tails, all the control surfaces a machine needs to fly in a fluid medium. Best of all, these are not toys or prototypes and they are certainly not someone's build a submarine school project. These are working, flying machines and they are available now..

I was introduced to these flying submarines through a piece on CNN. There is a very good post on their website about the new submarine technology. When I saw the bit in CNN about this my reaction was, Well of course! And that really surprised me.

Submarines, especially nuclear submarines, are some of the most highly developed examples of technology we have. Yet when you think about it, the overall approach is just wrong. Not wrong in the sense that it doesn't work. Obviously it does. But it seems like the wrong paradigm for machines that are going to move through three dimensions.

The military submarine is built on the paradigm of a surface ship, shifted underwater. The basic assumption is that you will proceed straight and level at a uniform rate of speed. The idea of looping a naval vessel is absurd, and they don't roll worth a darn either. True, they have bow and stern planes to help them move up and down, but the depth is still controlled mainly by the ballasting of the ship. Their are numerous tanks that can be filled with air or water. Fill them with water to go deeper. Replace the water with air to rise. Naval submarines do not fly in any real sense of the word.

The only technology that is really able to use three dimensions is airplane technology. The paradigm that these new machines follow is the jet fighter, not the torpedo boat.

Its amazing to me that this new submarine technology developed in the private sector. This is the kind of project you would expect to be developed in some super-secret DARPA lab somewhere. I bet there's a story there.

At present, the machines that Deep flight is producing are private vehicles, and they aren't cheap. There are two versions of the Super Falcon available. One has sealed cockpits, the other leaves the users exposed to the sea. There doesn't seem to be any reason the principals used in these flying submarines couldn't be scaled to larger sizes. Who knows, someday we may see a Deep Flight 747 carrying freight or passengers from one city or one continent to another.

Could Offspring of this technology replace present nuclear submarines? Probably not. One reason for this is the size factor. How big is a trident submarine? 560 feet long, with a beam of 42 feet. They carry a lot of weight, and buoyancy is necessary for that.

One advantage of the ship paradigm is that ships and submarines can stop moving forward without sinking, ie they float. Airplanes, like sharks, have to keep moving. Their ability to maintain their altitude is dependent on lift generated by the flow of fluid over their wing surfaces. No forward motion equals no lift, and down you go.

So conventional submarines won't be replaced by flying machines anytime soon. I would still love to see this technology extended to industry level machines. For old science fiction buffs like me, submarine technology has always seemed to be more about flying than anything else. This is why SCUBA has become so popular with people everywhere. The ability to soar and swoop underwater is really what its all about.