Flying Submarines & Swimming Drones!!
Birds have been doing it for ages; diving down from high altitude and diving into the water at speed to attack an unsuspecting victim below the water's surface and then they just surface again and fly off into the sunset.
Will people with all our brains and technology be able to do this?
The picture at the top of the page is an Russian attempt that was a draft design that was made during world war II. The project were shelved in 1953. You can read an interesting article on the Flying submarine in wikipedia. It goes into all the technical aspects on how it was supposed to work.
The main idea was to eliminate the slow and bad maneuverability of submarines and enable it to fly quickly to another point where it could be deployed quickly, for a surprise attack.
The main problem to build a flying submarine is that an aircraft should be as light as possible, and a submarine must be quite heavy to withstand the pressure of a deep dive. With today's more modern strong and light weight materials it would be more easy to build a flying submarine.
Students at the Rugters University built a drone that can fly and swim!! It can fly and land on the water and then dive under water and swim under water and then return to the surface and take off into the air again, amazing!!
This drone could be used for under water rescue missions or to inspect under water structures. It could also be used for military applications where it could detect under water mines, and do reconnaissance on the enemy.
Watch this amazing Video of swimming drone
Imagine what a flying submarine can do for tourism, people can fly to reefs, wrecks or even places where whales are spotted. When arriving they could just dive into the water and go do some sight seeing!!
If we will ever get a real full size flying submarine we will have to wait and see.
At the link you can read an article on the Pentagon that supposedly wants a flying submarine.
If you would like to read more about some cool drones visit my two previous posts Forest Planting Drones & Indestructible Drones
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the post.