Tsk Tsk Tsk, Someone Forgot Their Data.

Last week Baldwin Technologies gave a presentation to the rotorcraft folk at NASA and some Army higher-ups. It was the usual presentation: "Here's my really neat idea, I hope you think its useful, please give me money." Here's a cool video of his project (the Draft CONOPS video is the one).I thought the presentation was decent, it has some flaws but I've seen worse (my Capstone Physics presentation to name one). Apparently I missed something because every engineer in the branch was "furious" at some of the claims made by Mr.Baldwin. Before I can go into how he royaly screwed up, I must first explain the concept of downforce. So when you have a helicopter rotor spinning it takes the air from the top of the rotor and pushes it downward. This is downwash, the downward moving air. When this air encounters a surface it exerts a force on the surface. So Mr.Baldwin claims that by placing the wings of his mono-tiltrotor at a 20 degree downward angle with respect to the horizontal plane it reduces the downforce. All would have been fine if he had made this claim and shown the data that backed up his claim. But alas, he comitted the mortal sin of the academic community, making a claim and not having any evidence to support that claim. So because he "forgot" to provide the evidence and the engineers here diagree with him, I get to design an experiment to test his claim. We'll see what happens but the engineers around here are pretty certain he was doing the proverbial pulling data out of their.....aether.