Vaimanika Shastra - Structure and Content

Structure and Content

Unlike modern treatises on aeronautics that begin by discussing the general principles of flight before detailing concepts of aircraft design, the Vaimanika Shastra straightaway gets into quantitative description, as though a particular aircraft is being described. The topics covered include, "definition of an airplane, a pilot, aerial routes, food, clothing, metals, metal production, mirrors and their uses in wars, varieties of machinery and yantras, planes like ‘mantrik’, ‘tantrik’, and ‘kritak’" and four planes called Shakuna, Sundara, Rukma, and Tripura are described in greater detail. The extant text is claimed to be only a small (one-fortieth) part of a larger work Yantra Sarvaswa ("All about machines") composed by Maharishi Bharadwaj and other sages for the "benefit of all mankind".

In 1991, the English portion and the illustrations from the Josyer book were reprinted by David Hatcher Childress in Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India & Atlantis as part of the Lost Science Series. According to Childress, the 8 chapters treat the following:

1. The secrets of constructing aeroplanes, which will not break, which cannot be cut, will not catch fire, and cannot be destroyed.
2. The secret of making planes motionless.
3. The secret of making planes invisible.
4. The secret of hearing conversations and other sounds in enemy places.
5. The secret of retrieving photographs of the interior of enemy planes
6. The secret of ascertaining the direction of enemy planes approach.
7. The secret of making persons in enemy planes lose consciousness.
8. The secret of destroying enemy planes.

The propulsion of the Vimanas according to Kanjilal (1985) is by a "Mercury Vortex Engines", apparently a concept similar to electric propulsion. Childress finds evidence for this "mercury vortex engine" in the Samarangana Sutradhara, an 11th-century treatise on architecture.

J. B. Hare of the Internet Sacred Text Archive in 2005 compiled an online edition of Josyer's 1973 book, in the site's "UFOs" section. In his introduction, Hare writes

The Vymanika Shastra was first committed to writing between 1918 and 1923, and nobody is claiming that it came from some mysterious antique manuscript. The fact is, there are no manuscripts of this text prior to 1918, and nobody is claiming that there are. So on one level, this is not a hoax. You just have to buy into the assumption that 'channeling' works. ... there is no exposition of the theory of aviation (let alone antigravity). In plain terms, the VS never directly explains how Vimanas get up in the air. The text is top-heavy with long lists of often bizarre ingredients used to construct various subsystems. ... There is nothing here which Jules Verne couldn't have dreamed up, no mention of exotic elements or advanced construction techniques. The 1923 technical illustration based on the text ... are absurdly un-aerodynamic. They look like brutalist wedding cakes, with minarets, huge ornithopter wings and dinky propellers. In other words, they look like typical early 20th century fantasy flying machines with an Indian twist.

A 1974 study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore found that the heavier-than-air aircraft that the Vaimanika Shastra described were aeronautically unfeasible. The authors remarked that the discussion of the principles of flight in the text were largely perfunctory and incorrect, in some cases violating Newton's laws of motion. The study concluded:

Any reader by now would have concluded the obvious – that the planes described above are the best poor concoctions, rather than expressions of something real. None of the planes has properties or capabilities of being flown; the geometries are unimaginably horrendous from the point of view of flying; and the principles of propulsion make them resist rather than assist flying. The text and the drawings do not correlate with each other even thematically. The drawings definitely point to a knowledge of modern machinery. This can be explained on the basis of the fact that Shri Ellappa who made the drawings was in a local engineering college and was thus familiar with names and details of some machinery. Of course the text retains a structure in language and content from which its 'recent nature' cannot be asserted. We must hasten to point out that this does not imply an oriental nature of the text at all. All that may be said is that thematically the drawings ought to be ruled out of discussion. And the text, as it stands, is incomplete and ambiguous by itself and incorrect at many places.

The authors expressed puzzlement at the contradiction and errors in the Vaimanika Shastra text, especially since its compilers supposedly had access to publications that did not make such errors (such as, Dayanand Saraswati's commentary on the Rigveda published in 1878 or earlier).