Business
off or land. It’s fully autonomous. It has a flexible, self-con- tained expeditionary system, designed to launch from a pneumatic/hydraulic rail launcher and recover into a net system, sort of a point-and-launch system. It incorporates both an electronic fuel-injection engine and heavy fuel-variant, which runs on a variant of JP-8, the most widely used fuel variant within the U.S. military. Rick notes that the Bat is a little larger than
the Killer Bee. “The Bat family product line currently features either a 10 foot- or 12 foot- wingspan variant, with a 20-foot wingspan de- sign under development.” Under the command and control of its
scalable, IP-based Ground Control Station, Northrop Grumman has successfully flown multiple payloads on multiple flights with both the 10- and 12-foot Bats. Ideally suited to an irregular warfare environment, the Bat offers real-time ISR (intelligence, surveillance and re- connaissance), communications and strike ca- pabilities in a system that is affordable and persistent. It can be autonomously launched and retrieved on land, in the air, or on the water.
Leaving on a Jet Plane But there were more than Bats and Bees in
the works for Swift. In 2007, Swift Engineering had been commissioned to design and build a single engine business jet in 200 days to first
In 2007, Swift Engineering had been com- missioned to design and build a single engine business jet in 200 days from concept to first flight, This is a scale model of the sleek, V-tailed Eclipse Concept Jet.
Blowing in the Wind Part of what makes Swift’s aerospace and
racing development possible is the company’s virtual wind tunnel. Swift’s primary business was designing race cars at its facility on the hill overlooking Avenida Pico, back in the 1990s. The company plant housed a 15,000-square- foot wind tunnel with a 500-watt motor. De- signed to test parts and vehicles at speeds up to 140 mph, the machine was massively expensive to run and maintain. The old wind tunnel–now dismantled to make space for new autoclaves and rooms to manufacture and cure composites for military planes–required tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture each indi- vidual part of a race car. In an earlier interview, Mark Paige, then
Chief Scientist for the company recalled the original testing process. “Basically, we start the test with a bucket of parts,” he said. “The flow is so complicated around race cars, we try everything we can think of.” Only about one in 50 of those parts made
it into the car’s design. Now, thanks to a new computer system,
The Bat UAS.
flight. This included conceptual design, sizing, vehicle creation, analysis (CFD, FEA), detailed design, and wind-tunnel testing. All of the de- sign, including interiors, was completed at Swift’s state of the art design studio in San Clemente. All the composite tooling and parts were also fabricated and assembled in San Clemente at Swift’s Advanced Composite Manufacturing Center. From blank page to flight test took just 23 weeks for the sleek V- tailed Eclipse Concept Jet. Swift’s most recent foray into the aeronau-
tical drone world is the X Blade. This drone is one of the most maneuverable of the UAVs built so far. It has the capacity for vertical take- off and landings, and horizontal flight. It boasts over two hours of continuous flight ca- pability, with wireless charging and an inter- changeable payload bay. It is also completely collapsible for transport to any place a commer- cial airline can fly.
Swift can eliminate the expense of fabricating every test part. Engineers instead load the hy- pothetical part’s dimensions into their virtual wind tunnel. Using Computational Fluid Dy- namics or CFD software, the program meas- ures aerodynamics with virtual air in a four-dimensional grid divided into tens of mil- lions of tiny cubes, some as small as the head of a pin. It’s accurate, whether it’s for military tech or race cars, and it has revolutionized the process for Swift. And if there’s a need for ac- tual wind testing, there are still working wind tunnels that can be contracted out.
And the Winner is… Swift Engineering has received many acco-
lades for its unique innovative design work. In 2012, the company received the prestigious JEC Americas Award for its autoclave process. Also in 2012, Northrup Grumman named Swift as the “Small Business of the Year”, out of 1500 suppliers. In 2013, Aviation Week Magazine marked them as the “Best In Class” A & D Company to Watch. Michael Andretti would understand.
CSO Rick Heis, with one of the Formula One race cars designed by Swift. "Wine-Trail" $1,650,000.00
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