The self-sustaining Antares 18P, utilizes a valveless Adv AFWE pulse jet engine. AFW stands for Advanced Focused Wave Engine, and it represents the leading edge of a family of jet engines, which can be traced back through more than 60 years of German aviation technology.
Pulse-jet
The engine itself contains no moving parts, and its structure is extremely simple. This yields the ideal self sustainer engine: maximum reliability at minimum cost.
Multi-fuel
The Antares 18P also sets new standards in environmental friendliness. It uses a propane-buthane mixture during startup. Once a steady combustion has been achieved, and compustion chamber temperature starts to rise, the system switches over to a liquid propellant. This propellant is fed through pipelines which run around the combustion chamber. This controls the combustion chamber temperature while at the same time turning the liquid fuel into a highly combustible gas. This allows the Antares 18P to run on anything from Jet A to used cooking and motor oil. This allows for the reuse of what would normally be waste products. An enhanced fuel pump is currently under development, which will allow for the use of maritime bunker oil, reducing the cost of powered flight to an absolute minimum
Performance
The combination of the good aerodynamic qualities of the Antares 18P and the physical properties of the pulse jet allows for an extremely large cross country speed. The integral inner water ballast tanks (2 x 50 l) are equipped with inflatable bladder tanks. This gives the Antares 18P substantial range.
Interface
For propulsion controls, the Antares 18P runs a heavily customized ubuntu linux (8.5 Itchy Imbis) on a mip 520 RISC processor. The deploys a virtualized neural network, which gives the system a certain ability of learning. The result is a system which not only handles intuitively, but which also anticipates your every move. This increases system agility and yields maximum safety. All relevant engine parameters will be projected on a Head-Up-Display (currently in development) mounted on the instrument console. This saves one instrument position on the instrument panel, and allows for the integrated display of FLARM data (optional). The HUD uses a modified monochrome TFT display to project the information.
Antares 18P: Operation rolling thunder can commence!