Stan Meyer's "Scooper": a warplane that refuels from the sea

At Deer Creek, Ohio, in 1985, Stan Meyer told the room what he had said to the generals at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: "I don't care how sophisticated… airplane you've got sitting out there on our runway. If it has no fuel, you're not going anywhere." Then a prediction: a tactical aircraft "in the full armament" nicknamed "the Scooper", "scooping down and picking up seawater and coming back up and fueling the plane." The scooping is real. Canadair's CL-415 water bombers, nicknamed Super Scoopers, skim a lake or the sea and take on about 1,621 gallons in roughly 12 seconds. The fuel was Stan's part: his Figure 4-13, Jet Engine Retrofit (WFC 423 DA), puts water fuel cell injectors in a turbojet's combustion chamber and afterburner, fed from a water fuel inlet through a compressor pump. Nobody has flown that. But in April 2014 the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory flew a radio-controlled P-51 replica on liquid fuel made from seawater, by pulling carbon dioxide and hydrogen out of it and joining them over a catalyst. So the open question is Stan's own: is water the fuel, or only where the fuel starts?

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
• Stan Meyer · Figure 4-13: Jet Engine Retrofit · WFC 423 DA
• CL-415EAF Super Scooper · US Forest Service, Northern Region · public domain
• Canadair CL-415, Croatian Air Force · Marek Ślusarczyk (Tupungato) · CC BY 3.0
• Super Scooper filling on a lake · US Forest Service, Northern Region · public domain
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 2:16:29 — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, Figure 4-13: Jet Engine Retrofit, WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System — stanslegacy.com
• U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, "Scale Model WWII Craft Takes Flight With Fuel From the Sea Concept", April 2014 — nrl.navy.mil
• CL-415 capacity and scoop time: Plane & Pilot, "Bombardier 415 'Scooper' Amphibian"; US Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin deployment reports
• Photos: US Forest Service Northern Region (public domain); Marek Ślusarczyk (Tupungato), CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons