Executive Summary of Cal Poly/NASA Extreme Short Takeoff and Landing (ESTOL) Work

As part of an ongoing relationship with NASA Ames Research Center, a team of Cal Poly aerospace engineering students has continued to analyze the viability of expanding current national air transportation to include Extreme Short Takeoff and Landing (ESTOL) vehicles. NASA Ames Research Center coined the Cal Poly team, Students With ATtitude (SWAT), as they were impressed with the team's ability to tackle challenging problems at a moments notice. Specific areas of analysis address extreme high lift generation, noise considerations, Simultaneous Non-Interfering (SNI) approach flight simulation, passenger ride quality, and airport operational and ground geometry considerations. In each area of analysis, the primary focus was to develop analytical methodologies that could be incorporated into modular tools for use in the assessment of new innovative ESTOL concepts. With regard to vehicle design, a standard British Aerospace 146-200 was selected as the official ESTOL baseline configuration in 2003. Several envelope-pushing vehicle concepts have been proposed by Cal Poly as viable solutions to the ESTOL SNI concept including the Model 114/EBF featuring a scaled-down C-17 wing, BAe 146-200 fuselage and empennage, and externally blown flaps (EBF); the Model 114/CCW featuring the aforementioned but with twin engines and a circulation control wing instead of EBF; and EMAX featuring a forward swept wing, distributed propulsion, and thrust vectoring. This paper represents an executive summary of the detailed technical work performed by the Cal Poly SWAT Team from 2000 to the present.