The Pelikan tail is an experimental tail design for fighter jets. It was originally conceived by Ralph Pelikan,
who was hired by
McDonnell Aircraft
The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation was an American aerospace manufacturer based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company was founded on July 6, 1939, by James Smith McDonnell, and was best known for its military fighters, including the F-4 Phantom II ...
, later worked for
McDonnell Douglas
McDonnell Douglas Corporation was a major American Aerospace manufacturer, aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own ...
after the merger of McDonnell with Douglas and, after another merger, retired from
Boeing
The Boeing Company, or simply Boeing (), is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support s ...
. However, it has been considered or included in design specifications in the McDonnell Douglas BAE Joint Strike fighter (JSF) design which was eliminated before prototype stage
Advantages and disadvantages
The Pelikan design differs from the typical layout of
flight control surfaces
Flight control surfaces are aerodynamic devices allowing a pilot to adjust and control the aircraft's flight attitude. The primary function of these is to control the aircraft's movement along the three axes of rotation. Flight control surfaces ...
and
empennage
The empennage ( or ), also known as the tail or tail assembly, is a structure at the rear of an aircraft that provides stability during flight, in a way similar to the feathers on an arrow.Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms, third ed ...
(incorporating
aileron
An aileron (French for "little wing" or "fin") is a hinged flight control surface usually forming part of the trailing edge of each wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. Ailerons are used in pairs to control the aircraft in roll (or movement aroun ...
s on the wing, a
horizontal stabilizer
A tailplane, also known as a horizontal stabilizer, is a small lifting surface located on the tail ( empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed-wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyroplan ...
with
elevators
An elevator (American English) or lift (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) is a machine that vertically transports people or freight between levels. They are typically powered by electric motors that drive tracti ...
and a
vertical stabilizer
A vertical stabilizer or tail fin is the static part of the vertical tail of an aircraft. The term is commonly applied to the assembly of both this fixed surface and one or more movable rudders hinged to it. Their role is to provide control, sta ...
with a
rudder
A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, airship, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (usually air or water). On an airplane, the rudder is used primarily to counter adverse yaw ...
), in that it uses only two moveable surfaces in order to achieve control of
pitch, yaw and roll. When evaluated by Boeing engineers in October 1998 while designing what became the
X-32, they found advantages of greater pitch control at high angles of attack and that two tail surfaces would have a lower radar signature than the four surfaces eventually adopted.
However, they also found that using two larger control surfaces instead of four might actually make the aircraft heavier. The bigger hydraulic pumps and cylinders needed to operate the larger surfaces would add of weight to the design.
This and other factors made them use a four-surface tail instead.
Tests by Virginia Tech students
Virginia Tech
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States ...
students built a model aircraft with a Pelikan tail and got positive results for its viability using a
wind tunnel
A wind tunnel is "an apparatus for producing a controlled stream of air for conducting aerodynamic experiments". The experiment is conducted in the test section of the wind tunnel and a complete tunnel configuration includes air ducting to and f ...
.
[Paper on the 42nd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit explaining the construction of a Pelikan tail model](_blank)
The analysis by the students found several advantages
[Virginia Tech on building An Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle for the Navy](_blank)
(explains technical details of the Pelikan tail)
See also
*
Cruciform tail
The cruciform tail is an aircraft empennage configuration which, when viewed from the aircraft's front or rear, looks much like a cross. The usual arrangement is to have the tailplane, horizontal stabilizer intersect the vertical tail somewhere ...
*
T-tail
A T-tail is an empennage wikt:configuration, configuration in which the tailplane of an aircraft is mounted to the top of the vertical stabilizer, fin. The arrangement looks like the capital letter T, hence the name. The T-tail differs fr ...
*
Twin tail
A twin tail is a type of vertical stabilizer arrangement found on the empennage of some aircraft. Two vertical stabilizers—often smaller on their own than a single conventional tail would be—are mounted at the outside of the aircraft's ho ...
*
V-tail
The V-tail or ''vee-tail'' (sometimes called a butterfly tail or Rudlicki's V-tailGudmundsson S. (2013). "General Aviation Aircraft Design: Applied Methods and Procedures" (Reprint). Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 489. , 9780123973290) of an aircraf ...
References
{{Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech
Aircraft tail configurations