Borg-Warner Airoll

The Borg-Warner Airoll was an experimental amphibious test vehicle built to prove a new form of cross-country locomotion. It was developed by the Ingersoll Kalamazoo Division of the Borg-Warner Corporation in Kalamazoo, Michigan, together with the Borg-Warner Research Center at Des Plaines, Illinois, under US Navy Office of Naval Research contract NOnr-2459(00).

Principle

Instead of steel track plates, each side of the vehicle carried an endless chain driven by large sprockets, to which a series of free-running low-pressure tyres was attached. Track tension made the vehicle roll over its own tyres, which thus acted as the suspension as well. In soft mud, swamp, snow or sand the tyres stopped rolling and moved with the chain, behaving like paddles; the same action propelled the vehicle in water.

Test platform

According to Borg-Warner's interim report of April 1960, the Airoll Test Platform was completed in March 1959. It could be set up with track length-to-width ratios of 1:1 or 1.5:1 and was tested with Goodyear Terra Tires of two sizes (16 or 19 per track) and with industrial tyres (32 per track). As built it weighed 19,500 lb, and a weight-saving programme brought this down to about 17,500 lb (some 7,900 kg). The report found its rolling resistance on hard ground comparable with other tracked vehicles, lower than theirs across rough country thanks to the conforming tyres, and its mobility in mud and swamp excellent; smooth tyres slipped on packed snow, and ride quality needed further work. Power-train and sprocket failures interrupted parts of the programme.

A French web history copied into the archive describes this first prototype as Chrysler V8-powered, weighing about 9 tonnes and capable of around 50 km/h on land and 16 km/h in water, reporting that it outperformed any known vehicle in near-liquid mud.

Airoll I

In 1965 Borg-Warner and the US Marine Corps presented a narrower, more refined version, the Airoll I, with 13 tyres per side, mudguards and lights. It was tested over some 15,000 km and performed well on soft ground and in water, though lateral stability and reliability needed improvement. It is also referred to as the LVA-X1, and an example is reported to survive at the Marine Corps museum at Quantico.

Influence

The Airoll principle was taken up in the US Army's XM759 Marginal Terrain Vehicle, the Canadian Canadair-Fisher small ATV, an amphibious forestry dredge and, in the Soviet Union, the ZIL PKTs-1 and the GAZ-47 AMA of A.M. Avenarius, all of which appear in this archive folder.