US Patent Issued to University of Notre Dame du Lac, Government of the United States as Represented by the Secretary of The Air Force on Aug. 11 for "Deployable wings for an aircraft" (Indiana, Ohio Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,703,478, issued on Aug. 11, was assigned to University of Notre Dame du Lac (South Bend, Ind.) and Government of the United States as Represented by the Secretary of The Air Force (Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio).

"Deployable wings for an aircraft" was invented by Mark Plecnik (South Bend, Ind.), Sam Patrick O'Connor (South Bend, Ind.), Aravind Baskar (South Bend, Ind.) and James Joo (Dayton, Ohio).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An apparatus for deploying the wings of a movable-wing aircraft includes a spherical four-bar mechanism. The spherical four-bar mechanism has a first bar to which a first wing is attached, a second bar to which a seco...