The company responded with a relatively large, two-man / three-engined design built with a ventrally-positioned, retracting ski component with wingtip supports for stabilizing on the water. The aircraft was given a boat-like hull for on-water operations and could be fully-sealed for submarine work. The cockpit section was stepped and given a small section of canopy for vision and housed two operating crew. The mainplanes were shoulder-mounted with sweepback noted along the leading edges only. The tail unit comprised split horizontal planes and twin vertical tailplanes.
Propulsion was decided on through a pair of turbojet engines for general take-off duties and a single turbofan engine to handle the cruising aspects of the craft when in flight. The aircraft could land under its own power on the surface of the water in the traditional way a flying boat or seaplane would. The take-off jets would provide enough power to raise the fuselage from the surface of the water to which the ventrally-mounted ski component would come into play for skimming. Fuel would be held in a forward and aft fuel store.
Undersea work would require some preparation on the part of the crew to ready the craft. This included sealing the air-breathing jet engines from the corrosive effects of salty sea water, cooling hot components, and reworking the buoyancy of the air frame through fuel / seawater balancing. A primary ballast tank would be backed by an auxiliary ballast tank buried in the bowels of the fuselage. To keep the vessel as streamlined as possible, the wing mainplane members would either fold over or sweep back for a smaller frontal footprint. Propulsion would have to be satisfied by an electric engine driving a propeller at the rear of the fuselage - a battery pack carried to supply the needed power.
The primary danger in all this was to the pilots who were to sit in a pressurized cockpit section - because of the hybrid nature of the aircraft, the section would be made jettisonable and floated by parachute when in flight or floated to the surface when submerged.
With all this in mind, the project persisted to the point that water and wind tunnel work was underway heading into the mid-1960s. However, the program was criticized and ultimately derailed by some in the Senate which saw no value in the novel project to USN capabilities and thus the program was ended in 1965.
With the cancellation of the Submersible Seaplane, the concept fell to the pages of history.
Content ©MilitaryFactory.com; No Reproduction Permitted.