Return of the Super Frog?

The Pentagon these days is funding so few notional "X-planes," that it's exciting even to read about an experimental transport aircraft in the works.

Many, many years and a zillion name changes later, the plane formerly known as AMC-X (or earlier, Advanced Theater Transport) is ready for take off. Well, not really, but the Air Force Research Laboratory has now received bids from companies vying to build a prototype, Flight reports:

*Bids to build a composite- airframe cargo X-plane were submitted to the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) last week, with the demonstrator aircraft planned to fly within 17 months of contract award. The $51 million Advanced Composite Cargo Aircraft flight demonstrator will prove materials and processes for production of affordable, lightweight structures for a future short take-off and landing (STOL) transport. *

*The demonstrator will support the Advanced Joint Air Combat System (AJACS) now in requirements definition within the USAF's Air Mobility Command. Formerly called AMC-X, AJACS is envisaged as a future replacement for the Lockheed Martin C-130 tactical transport. Other AFRL efforts are looking at embedded aero-propulsion concepts for extreme STOL capability. *

*Companies that registered interest in bidding for the demonstrator contract include Alenia North America, Lockheed, Piasecki Aircraft and Voyager Aerospace. The latter was formed by Dick Rutan, who says he has been working with brother Burt *[yeah, that Burt Rutan] on a twin-engined light cargo aircraft "for 15-plus years", but could not provide details of the design or its status.

Okay, so note the latest name: the Advanced Joint Air Combat System (AJACS). That's fine, and even sort of a cute pronounceable acronym if they stick with it, but I'm curious what service is "jointly" developing this with the Air Force, since the Army and Marine Corps are nowhere to be seen in this venture.

That leads to another question: Where is the Air Force going to get the money to actually build the aircraft? Money woes already led the service to pull the plug on their most popular strategic lift aircraft, the C-17. (That makes life even rougher for Boeing, which has periodically touted a modified C-17 as an AMC-X candidate.)

But well, the fun of X-planes is never in such mundane details like money and military requirements, but rather, in the VuGraph engineering. My all time favorite VuGraph concept for AMC-X (just 'cause I liked the name), is Boeing's notional "Super Frog" transporter. So named for its lack of a tail and its ability "hop" from runway to runway.