![]() Powered parachutes are mostly recreational machines, offering flight experiences that are hard to duplicate with other types of flying. The carts can be either three-wheeled or four-wheeled and the engines vary in power from roughly 40 horsepower up to as much 190 horsepower. I think it was more of a visual warning, saying these pilots are acting all kinds of crazy, and we best get out of here before we lose a $30 million dollar drone.A powered parachute is a personal aircraft with a propeller-driven cart suspended from a parachute, which acts as the wing. So perhaps the fuel cloud can disrupt communication just long enough to cause it to crash. It is possible that they were trying to block communication, by disrupting the antenna direction, this is why the feed cuts out when the drone is buffeted, the antennas need a perfect line of sight. Pouring some jet fuel into a jet engine isn't gonna do much. it IS a jet engine but instead of producing thrust, it uses the rotation of the turbines to drive the propellor, allowing for a much smaller engine to drive a prop, which means the drone is more efficient an capable of flying at slow speeds, such as those speeds best for taking pictures/video. Some people are suggesting it could be to upset the sensors in the piston engine, the drone is through the cloud so fast that it is pulling in fresh air almost immediately, also, the MQ-( does not use a Piston engine, it is a TurboProp, which is a gas turbine engine. The idea of lighting the drone on fire is really more of a joke, just because it isn't a feasible method, as you said, it would change state to a gas really quickly at high speed and altitude. However, this contrail theory was ultimately rejected. in this source) and has led to crashes in the past of smaller aircrafts flying behind larger ones. This is a well known effect (see point 7-4-3. ![]() In this scenario the intention of the SU-27 pilots would have been to generate a strong enough wing vortex near the drone to cause either structural damage directly or induce large roll angles leading also to a crash. Another theory proposed by JPE61 in his (now deleted) answer, is that they did not dump fuel at all, but merely added power resulting in the sudden onset of a contrail which only looks similar to a "fuel dump". It should be noticed that the exact intentions of the pilots is of course unknown, I also do not believe that they will tell anyone, but they succeded.Įdit 2: The US-military claims that fuel was dumped over the drone, discussion below pointed towards the unignited afterburners could have been used for this purpose. I do not believe that the fuel of the SU-27 is enough to bend exactly one propeller, therefore I believe a collision occured. In the end, the SU-27 pilots chose option d), bending the motor shaft and propeller of the drone by virtue of a direct collision. Therefore it would not explode from ingesting fuel-rich air, but it could still starve from fuel-rich air.Ĭ) The SU-27 pilots wanted to blind the optics of the drone by applying jet-A1 fuel. ![]() Edit after the very good comment of 757toga: The reaper features a turboprop engine. However, it cannot be ruled out that the engine simply would starve due to the fuel-rich air being ingested. With its extremely high flash point, jet fuel, in essence, creates a detonation that will cause a gas-based engine to misfire and eventually fail. I read about three possibilities which the SU-27 pilots wanted to enforce:Ī) Covering the drone in fuel and then igniting it with the afterburners which should have lead to a fire and subsequent malfunction of the droneī) Injecting jet-fuel into the piston engine of the reaper, leading to a catastrophic failure of the engine due to misfire.
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