One of the projects currently being developed by the Aeronautics Competency of the Defence, Peace, Safety and Security unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is a modular transonic research platform (MTRP). A preliminary feasibility study has been completed and is now being studied.

“The MTRP is primarily aimed at being a research vehicle,” explains postgraduate student at the CSIR Radeshan Moodley. “The aim is to eventually replace the instrumented Hawk (currently used in South Africa) as a primary test platform.” The plan is that the new design will be an unmanned air vehicle (UAV).

The proposed MTRP will undertake research into flight dynamics, weapons integration, stores release, electronic warfare payloads, flutter and aeroelasticity and gas turbine engine development. The design can even be modified to act as a target.

The MTRP is to be modular in design in order to be able to fulfill such a wide range of research and test missions. The concept is to have a core fuselage with different modular wing options. Three alternative core fuselage designs have been developed.

“Basically, we took a systems design approach,” states post-graduate student at the CSIR Sambharthan Cooppan. “The key internal system is the internal bay, sized to hold a Mark (Mk) 81 bomb.” (The Mk 81 is a 113 kg unguided free-fall bomb; the terminology is American in origin but is now used worldwide.)

Core fuselage design 1 has one internal bay. Core fuselage design 2 has two internal bays and core fuselage design 3 has three internal bays. For each core fuselage design, there are six different wing configurations, for a total of 18 versions of the concept.

One of the requirements for the design of the MTRP was that it must be able to carry six external stores on the wings or four such stores and two wing-tip stores. All 18 concepts have been analysed according to various key criteria, including weight, payload, flexibility and performance. Only a minority of the configurations can meet the external stores carriage requirement.

The study has been focused on the development of a full-size aircraft. The next step is the development of a scaled model. The plan is to subject this to wind tunnel tests. A sub-scale flying demonstrator can be developed and flown within two to three years. There is currently no timescale for the development of a full-scale MTRP.

The idea behind the MTRP project was to see if something could be done in South Africa, within a reasonable time, to develop a new flight test platform. The project will form part of a larger feasibility study which will also look at other options, including converting an existing manned platform into an unmanned platform – an approach long applied by the US.

Cooppan and Moodley reported the project to the recent International Aerospace Symposium of South Africa. The symposium took place at the CSIR International Conference Centre in Pretoria.