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The Coming Air Age
Lovejoy writes "Sixty years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, Igor Sikorsky wrote The Coming Air Age. "Any of us who are alive ten years after this Second World War is won will see and use hundreds of short-run helicopter bus services." He goes on to write about personal helicopters which fit in large garages and that helicopters that are easier to drive than cars, etc.. So, will personal flight ever be viable? Do wildly wrong predictions like this give futurists pause? I think they should."
NO, the helocopter dies, and you autorotate down to the ground. At any decent helo flight school, they will force at least 3 practice autorotations, where they actually shut off the engine. They are no more dangerous then having an engine shut off in a Porsche at 140 mph. It just takes a little more training, which wouldn't be a bad thing for most car drivers.
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Predictions like this were made during and after WW1 as well, for the private use of planes. For a time in the 20s and early 30s, it seemed as if it might be true: small biplanes like the Moth were cheap and easy to fly, and could be stored in the garage and assembled for a trip.
But I don't know why it never took off...maybe the intervention of WW2, cheaper cars, better roads...
Not quite true. When the power goes in a helicopter, there's a lot of angular momentum stored in the rotor, and aerodynamic effects allow you to spin the rotor even faster by angling the blades appropriately as you, er, plummet.
As you approach the ground (probably a lot faster than you'd like), you angle the blades to bite into the air, trading lift for angular momentum. If you do this correctly, you may be able to save your butt.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
That's assuming you have a place to land, the rotors are still in one piece, the rotors are free to auto rotate, the other control surfaces are still functioning. There is plenty of footage of autorotation accidents.
Having an engine shut off at speed in a corner is vicious, suddenly no drive going to braking. When your car is balanced at speed any change in force is a big problem.
Until it's cheap. I want my Silver Surfer fantasy damn it now just hurry up and make it happen.
It won't happen with current tech, too expensive and liable to fail. We need something like anti gravity, ducks the punches thrown by physicists, or something similar that provides oodles of lift for a few cents.
Having surfed, skateboarded, snow boarded I'm all set to flyboard.
According to the NTSB database, there have been about 5100 heli incidents/accidents since 1/1/1980. 879 had at least one fatality.
:)
So, it's not too bad, but compared to the number of general aircraft fatal/nonfatal incident ratio, it's higher.
Of course, that could be due to the higher incident of runway incursions and planes taxiing into other planes causing minor damage, which is included in these numbers. Those kinds of things don't often happen to helicopters, since, well, they don't taxi.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
One thing that most people don't understand is how hard it is to fly a helicopter. It is not as simple as driving a car where you go and take a test to prove you understand the traffic laws and then go out on a road course with a DMV person for 15 to 20 minutes.
It takes years of schooling in order to be granted a helicopter pilots liscense. This is very costly, and requires a lot of time.
It is not uncommon for people to go to college for flight (airplanes), and once successfully passing their flight exams to go on and study helicopter operation.
My little sister is currently studying to be a commerical airline pilot and it will take her 4 years at the number flight school in the USA. Then if she wants to persue helicopters she has to take more classes and spent a lot more time gaining the airtime in a helicopter with an instructor, only then will she receive her helicoptiers liscense from the FAA. The FAA is strick and sometimes tough, and this is for good reason, would you trust any idiot with a piece of machinery like this? If they crash the thing into a crowded area they kill a whole lot people.
Helicopters are not like cars, when you wreck a car, most of the time you can survive, or if you die, you don't kill anyone else. When you crash a helicopiter you are probably automatically dead.
In Sao Paulo, Brazil, there are somewhere around 300 private helicopters that those who can afford them use to avoid traffic and crime. They use them just like the plebes use cars. The best article I found on the topic is at aviation today (here).
Of course, having 300 'copters in a city of unpteen million isn't exactly what the man predicted, but the patter of use is consistent.
The currently designed helicopter will not be the flying car of the future. As master Yoda would say "No, there is another". Meet the cyclogiro, our Navy's latest secret weapon, and one of Russia's finest inventions. ;) They operate on the concept of cycloidal propulsion (see Google), which is mechanically complicated but more efficient and quiter than conventional designs.