Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
The design of a vehicle with cruise capability which can be packaged in a volume limited space, such as a cylindrical tube, centres around the problem of folding the lifting and control surfaces in such a manner that their deployment is simple and reliable. Several folding schemes are illustrated in Fig. 1. A wing fabricated of a flexible material and suspended by lines from the fuselage (parawing, Fig. 1a) can be folded to occupy only a small volume. These wings, however, are difficult to deploy at high forward speeds and have characteristically poor lift/ drag ratios unsuitable for high performance cruise capability. Another concept which allows storing the wing in a volume-limited space is the “scissor” wing (Fig. 1b) which, when deployed, swings out from a cavity in the fuselage.