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The Pelikan tail is an experimental tail design for fighter jets. It was originally conceived by Ralph Pelikan, who was hired by
McDonnell Aircraft The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation was an American aerospace manufacturer based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company was founded on July 6, 1939, by James Smith McDonnell, and was best known for its military fighters, including the F-4 Phantom I ...
, later worked for
McDonnell Douglas McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing in 1997, it produ ...
after the merger of McDonnell with Douglas and, after another merger, retired from
Boeing The Boeing Company () is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product ...
. The concept was used in the
Northrop YF-23 The Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23 is an American single-seat, twin-engine stealth fighter aircraft technology demonstrator designed for the United States Air Force (USAF). The design was a finalist in the USAF's Advanced Tactical Fighter ( ...
fighter. However, it has been considered or included in design specifications in the McDonnell Douglas BAE Joint Strike fighter (JSF) design which was eliminated before prototype stage


Advantages and disadvantages

The Pelikan design differs from the typical layout of
flight control surfaces Aircraft flight control surfaces are aerodynamic devices allowing a pilot to adjust and control the aircraft's flight attitude. Development of an effective set of flight control surfaces was a critical advance in the development of aircraft. Ea ...
and
empennage The empennage ( or ), also known as the tail or tail assembly, is a structure at the rear of an aircraft that provides stability during flight, in a way similar to the feathers on an arrow.Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms, third ed ...
(incorporating
aileron An aileron (French for "little wing" or "fin") is a hinged flight control surface usually forming part of the trailing edge of each wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. Ailerons are used in pairs to control the aircraft in roll (or movement around ...
s on the wing, a
horizontal stabilizer A tailplane, also known as a horizontal stabiliser, is a small lifting surface located on the tail (empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed-wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyroplan ...
with
elevators An elevator or lift is a cable-assisted, hydraulic cylinder-assisted, or roller-track assisted machine that vertically transports people or freight between floors, levels, or decks of a building, vessel, or other structure. They are ...
and a
vertical stabilizer A vertical stabilizer or tail fin is the static part of the vertical tail of an aircraft. The term is commonly applied to the assembly of both this fixed surface and one or more movable rudders hinged to it. Their role is to provide control, sta ...
with a
rudder A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (generally aircraft, air or watercraft, water). On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to ...
), in that it uses only two moveable surfaces in order to achieve control of pitch, yaw and roll. When evaluated by Boeing engineers in October 1998 while designing what became the X-32, they found advantages of greater pitch control at high angles of attack and that two tail surfaces would have a lower radar signature than the four surfaces eventually adopted. However, they also found that using two larger control surfaces instead of four might actually make the aircraft heavier. The bigger hydraulic pumps and cylinders needed to operate the larger surfaces would add of weight to the design. This and other factors made them use a four-surface tail instead.


Tests by Virginia Tech students

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also ...
students built a model aircraft with a Pelikan tail and got positive results for its viability using a
wind tunnel Wind tunnels are large tubes with air blowing through them which are used to replicate the interaction between air and an object flying through the air or moving along the ground. Researchers use wind tunnels to learn more about how an aircraft ...
.Paper on the 42nd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit explaining the construction of a Pelikan tail model
 The analysis by the students found several advantages Virginia Tech on building An Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle for the Navy
(explains technical details of the Pelikan tail)


See also

*
Cruciform tail __NOTOC__ The cruciform tail is an aircraft empennage configuration which, when viewed from the aircraft's front or rear, looks much like a cross. The usual arrangement is to have the horizontal stabilizer intersect the vertical tail somewhere ...
*
T-tail A T-tail is an empennage configuration in which the tailplane is mounted to the top of the fin. The arrangement looks like the capital letter T, hence the name. The T-tail differs from the standard configuration in which the tailplane is ...
*
Twin tail A twin tail is a specific type of vertical stabilizer arrangement found on the empennage of some aircraft. Two vertical stabilizers—often smaller on their own than a single conventional tail would be—are mounted at the outside of the aircra ...
*
V-tail The V-tail or ''Vee-tail'' (sometimes called a butterfly tail or Rudlicki's V-tailGudmundsson S. (2013). "General Aviation Aircraft Design: Applied Methods and Procedures" (Reprint). Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 489. , 9780123973290) of an aircraft ...


References

{{Virginia Tech Virginia Tech Aircraft tail configurations