This company looks to be making good progress in VTOL.
Excellent 3d animation and borrowing the NASA wing leading edge propulsion research.
Cirrus_Man wrote:
Excellent 3d animation
It amazes me, with how little actual engineering companies can impress people. 3d animations are completely irrelevant. Give me numbers I can punch in and verify. I won’t put any money into any project that isn’t able to provide sufficient data to verify their claims. 3d animations aren’t data.
Flying helicopters you better be trained well, and fly a lot to remain current. You really want to keep that ventilator above you spinning in case of an engine failure and that means reacting appropriately within seconds after the engine quits. Of course you can fly a helicopter like an aircraft, flying from airfield to airfield taking off and landing similarly to an fixed-wing aircraft. Then the risks are quite similar to fixed wing flying I’d say. But the fun of a helicopter obviously is going into tighter places and hover somewhere relatively low..
I haven’t looked at the statistics (prefer to keep my head in the sand 
) but I assume the casualty rate of helicopters is seriously worse. Well, at least the insurance premium is a multiple of that of a fixed-wing aircraft so that says a lot..
aart wrote:
I assume the casualty rate of helicopters is seriously worse
It probably is. And it would probably depend on what you fly. Robinsons for one have a bad reputation. I don’t find them aesthetically pleasing so I’m not keen on finding out whether it’s warranted or not. And the fact is the used rotor system does you no favors. From talking with some instructors, the worst offenders seem to be experienced fixed wing drivers. They tend to revert to what they learned on a plank which can be fatal. On the safety side an advantage is that you can autorotate into places you couldn’t land in with a fixed wing so you have more forced landing site options.
The idea is that those vehicles do not have helicopter characteristics, even in vertical mode. This is achieved by having multiple rotors, more than what is required to maintain altitude and attitude control.
This will require sophisticated computer control systems, just like modern fighter jets cannot be stabilized manually.
achimha wrote:
This will require sophisticated computer control systems
While I agree, in practice, such system would make the aircraft very expensive to certify. It would take ages to get to market. And would be expensive as a result. Unless there is a major change in the certification process.
just like modern fighter jets cannot be stabilized manually
You still might be able to fly it manually, it would just be too much work (and might not be pretty).
Regulation is only going to be an issue in some countries rather than a fundamental physical limit on what is possible. If I were a regulator, I’d open up something like the SSDR option for light aircraft so that people, if they wished, could build and perhaps even sell (or sell parts, control systems… for) VTOL single-person aircraft. That way you would only kill one consenting participant at a time and not find yourself locked out of the market when they finally start to mature. If they play it wrong, the big aerospace countries (USA, UK, other European countries…) could lose out in a big way here.
