911 & The WASP

Hi all, finally found my chosen entry for the most ridiculous aircraft design, and thought I would post this idea while it is still in my swiss cheese brain.

So, the WASP was built back in 1974, and the military rejected it. But what if some additional development work had been done, to where they got the craft into a form that could carry a pilot and a single squad of combat loaded infantrymen to 10,000 feet, or cross an impassable river/canyon? Assume the avarage infantryman + gear is => 300 lbs. 9 or 11 man squads, so 3000 lbs +/- 300 lbs.

Jump forward to 9-11 and the fall of the towers.

Could such craft, operated by fire departments in cities with building taller than the ladder trucks can reach, have been able to save the folks trapped in the towers, if they were commonplace and available in numbers?
 
I'm thinking along the lines of laws that require cities with tall buildings (taller than the tallest ladder trucks can reach), to maintain rooftop fire stations, and require all the tall buildings to have a roof purpose designed to accommodate such aircraft.

How many buildings in the NYC area would have to have had such 'Hangars' on their roofs, were such a law enacted? If a rooftop fire station was required for every "X" tall buildings, and these needed to house/base say 12 WASPs, how many WASPs could NYC have mustered on 9-11?
 
An Israeli firm proposed a larger, two-fan design post 911, but they never perfected it.
May I suggest mandatory believe-pads atop every building more than "X" stories high?
 
An Israeli firm proposed a larger, two-fan design post 911, but they never perfected it.
May I suggest mandatory believe-pads atop every building more than "X" stories high?
Thanks for the reply. What the heck are believe-pads? Any idea what they called their two-fan design, or a website link for me.

I was thinking that an improved WASP would need multi-engines, and perhaps be disk shaped. Say 6 engines, with bench seats for a pair of combat loaded infantrymen, or 3-4 civilians in an emergency, between them. If a standard for a rooftop evacuation involved a 5 minute turn around time, going from the building being evacuated to the nearest tall building or ground level, so a flight time of about a minute tops, and each improved WASP could take 18-24 folks per trip, then even a single craft could have saved 200+ folks/hour, and with a number of such "Hives" around the NYC area, could all the non-injured have been saved?
 

CalBear

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First problem is that scaling it up from a one man design, and a marginal one man design at that, is that it is close to impossible. Your thrust requirements rapidly go off the end of the table since you need better than a 1:1 ratio and some sort of usable control surfaces would need to be engineered (can't expect 10 people to be able to coordinate subtle body movements without considerable training and on-going practice, especially in a crisis, and literally one wrong move kills everyone on-board).

By the time you are done with all the requirements you find yourself with a helicopter. That isn't necessarily bad, there isn't a fire department on Earth that would turn down a few helos b ut the cost gets prohibitive for the public purse very quickly. You would have needed at least 70 helos to get the civilians out of the Towers (one Tower collapsed in 56 minutes, the other in 102 minutes). A Bell 505 Jet Ranger X rings up at ~$1,000,000 each and can carry five passengers and the pilot.

Unless the helo's (or any other sort of air transport) are on a "hot pad status" with pilots in a ready room and the aircraft warmed up it will take 25-30 minutes to preflight and launch the aircraft. You then need to manage air traffic control over the target, which is likely to have heavy smoke surrounding it, even if it is simply a conventional fire, much less an aircraft with 111,000 pound of jet fuel aboard that is the ignition source. Assuming no air-to-air collisions you would have, in ideal circumstances, time to conduct 2-3 sorties per air craft (3 minutes to load, three minutes to reach the nearest landing site, three minutes to unload, three minute to return for the next load) and space to land 10 aircraft at a time (that is, BTW, around double what an America class LHA can manage and they are 850 feet long). You can reduce the number of air craft required by going to something the V-22, which could manage 30-35 people per trip, but also prices out at ~$72M and would require around 2.5X the space for landing.

tl;dr: Can't be done.
 
I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in "True Lies" so I know it's real. I saw a demonstration video of a rocket back-pack soldier firing toy missiles in the general direction of a house, which was spliced together to make the flight look longer. The Wasp film was similarly a spliced film. I have no idea how well it works, but it is stated to be controlled by the man who is also the only thing carried. If he changes position, he moves. That's much like a hang-glider. Otto Lilienthal died because that system does not scale up well. A larger vehicle could not have this control method, and therefore is a different vehicle requiring gimballed thrust or a separate reaction jet system, like the flying bedstead. With advanced computer stabilization, it would be easier to build now than it was then, but much more expensive and complex, and still prone to catastrophic failure, particularly in operations atop burning buildings. It could also set the roof on fire. Could it do anything better than a helicopter?
 
First problem is that scaling it up from a one man design, is close to impossible. Your thrust requirements rapidly go off the end of the table since you need better than a 1:1 ratio and some sort of usable control surfaces would need to be engineered (can't expect 10 people to be able to coordinate subtle body movements without considerable training and on-going practice, especially in a crisis, and literally one wrong move kills everyone on-board).
The Bolded part is likely to be the closest thing to impossible to get right, without a very large and expensive training program, that likely far exceeds the cost of the equipment itself, let alone the infrastructure needed to implement this idea, and wasn't something I even thought a moment about, darn it.

The Wasp film was similarly a spliced film. I have no idea how well it works, but it is stated to be controlled by the man who is also the only thing carried. If he changes position, he moves. A larger vehicle could not have this control method, and therefore is a different vehicle requiring gimballed thrust or a separate reaction jet system, like the flying bedstead. With advanced computer stabilization, it would be easier to build now than it was then, but much more expensive and complex. Could it do anything better than a helicopter?
By the time you are done with all the requirements you find yourself with a helicopter. That isn't necessarily bad, there isn't a fire department on Earth that would turn down a few helos but the cost gets prohibitive for the public purse very quickly. You would have needed at least 70 helos to get the civilians out of the Towers (one Tower collapsed in 56 minutes, the other in 102 minutes). A Bell 505 Jet Ranger X rings up at ~$1,000,000 each and can carry five passengers and the pilot.
Ouch! So $70 million just for the choppers, and then their training and upkeep, plus everything else. And there is no telling what a much more specialized (and far less mass produced) craft like my posited Improved WASP would cost, so...

Unless the helo's (or any other sort of air transport) are on a "hot pad status" with pilots in a ready room and the aircraft warmed up it will take 25-30 minutes to preflight and launch the aircraft. You then need to manage air traffic control over the target, which is likely to have heavy smoke surrounding it, even if it is simply a conventional fire, much less an aircraft with 111,000 pound of jet fuel aboard that is the ignition source. Assuming no air-to-air collisions you would have, in ideal circumstances, time to conduct 2-3 sorties per air craft (3 minutes to load, three minutes to reach the nearest landing site, three minutes to unload, three minute to return for the next load) and space to land 10 aircraft at a time (that is, BTW, around double what an America class LHA can manage and they are 850 feet long). You can reduce the number of air craft required by going to something the V-22, which could manage 30-35 people per trip, but also prices out at ~$72M and would require around 2.5X the space for landing.
Hmmm. I also had not thought even a little bit about the above bolded part, and that also would reduce the number of sorties that each craft could attempt, as they orbit around the burning towers, helplessly watching while the other craft load as quickly as they can and clear out for the next ones, knowing that time is growing short.

As far as the "hot-pad status" goes, I would think that normal fire house staffing would take care of the pilot part, and for the craft to be useful at all in such a time sensitive mission type, I would assume that a portion of each stations wing would indeed have to be kept 'hot around the clock', which in turn would increase the costs, and reduce the life span of the craft, meaning earlier replacements would need to be figured into the program, once again increasing the costs.

Can't be done.
I disagree. It could be done, but shouldn't.

So, with all of the above, could any such plan, with whatever type of craft, be workable? For instance, the big high rises are big cash cows for their owners, could a "Vertical tax", shared among all the tall buildings, provide all the funding needed? Or would this fall very short of the mark?
 
First problem is that scaling it up from a one man design, and a marginal one man design at that, is that it is close to impossible. Your thrust requirements rapidly go off the end of the table since you need better than a 1:1 ratio and some sort of usable control surfaces would need to be engineered (can't expect 10 people to be able to coordinate subtle body movements without considerable training and on-going practice, especially in a crisis, and literally one wrong move kills everyone on-board).

By the time you are done with all the requirements you find yourself with a helicopter. That isn't necessarily bad, there isn't a fire department on Earth that would turn down a few helos b ut the cost gets prohibitive for the public purse very quickly. You would have needed at least 70 helos to get the civilians out of the Towers (one Tower collapsed in 56 minutes, the other in 102 minutes). A Bell 505 Jet Ranger X rings up at ~$1,000,000 each and can carry five passengers and the pilot.

Unless the helo's (or any other sort of air transport) are on a "hot pad status" with pilots in a ready room and the aircraft warmed up it will take 25-30 minutes to preflight and launch the aircraft. You then need to manage air traffic control over the target, which is likely to have heavy smoke surrounding it, even if it is simply a conventional fire, much less an aircraft with 111,000 pound of jet fuel aboard that is the ignition source. Assuming no air-to-air collisions you would have, in ideal circumstances, time to conduct 2-3 sorties per air craft (3 minutes to load, three minutes to reach the nearest landing site, three minutes to unload, three minute to return for the next load) and space to land 10 aircraft at a time (that is, BTW, around double what an America class LHA can manage and they are 850 feet long). You can reduce the number of air craft required by going to something the V-22, which could manage 30-35 people per trip, but also prices out at ~$72M and would require around 2.5X the space for landing.

tl;dr: Can't be done.
These expenditures of $1 million per helo, or $72 million per V-22... while the city of NY roughly has a budget of $84 Billion, the state of NY at $94 billion, and the Federal govt at a little less than $4 TRILLION... even the $72 million is .1% of just the city of NY's budget, and obviously the state would contribute and the Federal govt would chip in probably 70-95% of the cost anyways. If it isn't in billions does anyone really care nowadays? At least budgetwise. I dont see the cost being prohibitive, at least not with hindsight of the human cost. I suppose the real question would be- why wasn't this in a POST-911 world mandated for new construction starting with WTC 1 (nicknamed Freedom Tower) and the other buildings rebuilt at the WTC.
 

CalBear

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The Bolded part is likely to be the closest thing to impossible to get right, without a very large and expensive training program, that likely far exceeds the cost of the equipment itself, let alone the infrastructure needed to implement this idea, and wasn't something I even thought a moment about, darn it.


Ouch! So $70 million just for the choppers, and then their training and upkeep, plus everything else. And there is no telling what a much more specialized (and far less mass produced) craft like my posited Improved WASP would cost, so...

Hmmm. I also had not thought even a little bit about the above bolded part, and that also would reduce the number of sorties that each craft could attempt, as they orbit around the burning towers, helplessly watching while the other craft load as quickly as they can and clear out for the next ones, knowing that time is growing short.

As far as the "hot-pad status" goes, I would think that normal fire house staffing would take care of the pilot part, and for the craft to be useful at all in such a time sensitive mission type, I would assume that a portion of each stations wing would indeed have to be kept 'hot around the clock', which in turn would increase the costs, and reduce the life span of the craft, meaning earlier replacements would need to be figured into the program, once again increasing the costs.




So, with all of the above, could any such plan, with whatever type of craft, be workable? For instance, the big high rises are big cash cows for their owners, could a "Vertical tax", shared among all the tall buildings, provide all the funding needed? Or would this fall very short of the mark?
Almost anything is workable if you throw enough money at it and make enough compromises (See: F-35).

If you have bottomless barrel of money the problem then becomes the practical. Using WTC 1 as an example the roof of the building was square 208 feet on a side. That would allow (assuming the refueling is done off site (only an utter lunatic would store several thousands of gallons of jet fuel on the roof of an occupied building) a maximum of 8 landing spots (50') or less depending on exactly the sort of aircraft being used. This can be partly overcome if you go BIG (CH-53E can carry 55 passengers, and allows better use of space, of course they cost around $30M each), so each roof load allows 220 people to be evaced letting you lift 880-1,350 in the first hour, more in the 2nd and 3rd hours, after which the aircraft will need to refuel, which should be a 30-40 minute evolution, depending on the refueling location's distance from the target and the number of aircraft that can be fueled.

The problem here is that a building the size of WTC 1 had a HUGE workday population. The WTC 1 daytime workforce was around 50K, with 2x-3x that many visitors/clients cycling through daily (people don't realize how much of bullet was dodged on 9/11 because of the timing of the attacks, had they strikes happened at 11:00 instead of 9:00 the death toll would have easily exceeded 75,000). If you are able to pull 1,250 people off the roof an hour, it will take a day to evac the workforce trapped above the height of the tallest ladder truck. If you have a fire it will be out inside of 8 hours unless it is similar to the 9/11 incident with a virtually unfightable fire. If you get anything close to a max fire everyone above the fire floor will die of smoke inhalation or heat stroke long before you can pull them out.

Next compromise:That means the building have to get smaller, a LOT smaller, maybe 35 floor max, probably closer to 25. They will be far more costly to build because you will need to have a roof structure that can handle 60-70,000 pounds of helicopter on the roof and 5-6,000 pound of people. There isn't enough room in the major city centers to drop the building size by 2/3. That is why the builders went up in height in the first place (WTC 1 had 10 MILLION square feet of office space). The city centers will need to expand radically in order to house the necessary office space. That will drive land values through the roof (yet another compromise).

So you wind up increasing costs by billions of dollars, reducing efficiency, and increasing urban sprawl for the once a decade chance that you will need to evac a few thousand people. Best be a really big barrel of money.
 

CalBear

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Monthly Donor
These expenditures of $1 million per helo, or $72 million per V-22... while the city of NY roughly has a budget of $84 Billion, the state of NY at $94 billion, and the Federal govt at a little less than $4 TRILLION... even the $72 million is .1% of just the city of NY's budget, and obviously the state would contribute and the Federal govt would chip in probably 70-95% of the cost anyways. If it isn't in billions does anyone really care nowadays? At least budgetwise. I dont see the cost being prohibitive, at least not with hindsight of the human cost. I suppose the real question would be- why wasn't this in a POST-911 world mandated for new construction starting with WTC 1 (nicknamed Freedom Tower) and the other buildings rebuilt at the WTC.
The other practical reasons as I noted above.

Mainly it would be doable if you needed to pull a few hundred people out in the scenario (leaving cost to the side), but it isn't a few hundred. It is thousands, or tens of thousands.
 
2336_l.jpg

Where were the landing pads supposed to be?
 
How many buildings in the NYC area would have to have had such 'Hangars' on their roofs, were such a law enacted? If a rooftop fire station was required for every "X" tall buildings, and these needed to house/base say 12 WASPs, how many WASPs could NYC have mustered on 9-11?
Better to have parachutes or these http://freshome.com/2014/09/23/life...workers-escape-burning-skyscrapers-evacuator/

Some cool ideas here http://www.skyscraperdefense.com/rescue.html
 

CalBear

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I'll repeat what I mentioned above. Potential evacuation number exceeds 30,000.

The sort of things shown on the attachment would work for a few people, maybe as many as 100, maybe only half that. If you have 50 people in a office, which four (or 10) get to use the system? Which floor get the system (the cables for one floor will negate any floor below being able to safely use the same side of the building.
 
It might be interesting if someone wanted to make an ATL, that looks into high-rise air evacuation plans and building codes, not to mention rooftop fire departments flying to the rescue.
 
Maintaining ziplines would be more practical, and fun too.
I was thinking that, and perhaps something like crane/evacuation tubes that could be connected between buildings in an emergency, but these require the buildings to be quite close to each other, and would only be as good as the shorter building was tall. What about a ski-lift type of thing?
 

Archibald

Banned
I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in "True Lies" so I know it's real

You realizes that true lies is a movie ? no way on Earth an AV-8B could resist the bad treatments happened in the movie. There is no magical stabilization system.

As for helicopters, flying over the burning towers would be like flying into a volcano plume.
 
You realizes that true lies is a movie ?

Really!!! When they took out the Keys bridge with Mavericks, I suspected something wasn't quite right. They attacked Madison Square Garden with Mavericks in Godzilla. I've always wondered if Godzilla was cold-blooded too, because they "locked-on" IR missiles, probably tone deaf. I'll check my facts on Wiki.
 
Impact and fire resistant stairwells should do the trick. As it was, had the South Tower been evacuated after North Tower and both towers been considered unsafe for NYFD entry, it would seem most would have survived the day.

wtcs1.jpg
 
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