Lifting Body - Body Lift

Body Lift

Some aircraft with wings also employ bodies that generate lift. Some of the early 1930s high-wing monoplane designs of the Bellanca Aircraft Company, such as the Bellanca Aircruiser, had vaguely airfoil-shaped fuselages capable of generating some lift, with even the wing struts on some versions given widened fairings to give them some lift-generating capability. The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster racing plane of the 1930s, likewise, from more modern aerodynamic studies, has been shown to have had considerable ability to generate lift with its fuselage design, important for the R-1's intended racing role, while in highly-banked pylon turns while racing. Like the earlier Bellanca monoplanes, the Short SC.7 Skyvan produces a substantial amount of lift from its fuselage shape, almost as much as the 35% each of the wings produces. Fighters like the F-15 Eagle also produce substantial lift from the wide fuselage between the wings. Because the F-15 Eagle's wide fuselage is so efficient at lift, a F-15 was able to land successfully with only one wing, albeit under nearly full power, with thrust contributing significantly to lift.

On the summer of 1983, an Israeli F-15 staged a mock dogfight with Skyhawks for training purposes, near Nahal Tzin in the Negev desert. During the exercise, one of the Skyhawks miscalculated and collided forcefully with the F-15's wing root. The F-15's pilot was aware that the wing had been seriously damaged, but decided to try and land in a nearby airbase, not knowing the extent of his wing damage. It was only after he had landed, when he climbed out of the cockpit and looked backward, that the pilot realized what had happened: the wing had been completely torn off the plane, and he had landed the plane with only one wing attached. A few months later, the damaged F-15 had been given a new wing, and returned to operational duty in the squadron. The engineers at McDonnell Douglas had a hard time believing the story of the one-winged landing: as far as their planning models were concerned, this was an impossibility.

In 2010, Orbital Sciences proposed the Prometheus "blended lifting-body" spaceplane vehicle, about one-quarter the size of the Space Shuttle, as a commercial option for carrying astronauts to low-Earth orbit under the commercial crew program. The Vertical Takeoff, Horizontal Landing (VTHL) vehicle was to have been launched on a human-rated Atlas V rocket but would land on a runway. The initial design was to have carried a crew of 4, but it could carry up to 6, or a combination of crew and cargo. In addition to Orbital Sciences, the consortium behind the proposal included Northrop Grumman, which would have built the spaceplane, and the United Launch Alliance, which would have provided the launch vehicle. Failing to be selected for a CCDev phase 2 award by NASA, Orbital announced in April 2011 that they would likely wind down their efforts to develop a commercial crew vehicle.