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An Entirely New Class of Aircraft Arrives
fergus07 writes "Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show, which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine. Neither fixed wing nor rotor craft, the D-Dalus uses four mechanically-linked, contra-rotating, cylindrical turbines for its propulsion, and by altering the angle of the blades, it can launch vertically, hover perfectly still, move in any direction, and thrust upwards and hence 'glue down' upon landing, which it can easily do on the deck of a ship, or even a moving vehicle. It's also almost silent, has the dynamic stability to enter buildings, handles rough weather with ease, flies very long distances very quickly and can lift very heavy loads. It accordingly holds immense promise as a platform for personal flight, for military usage, search and rescue, and much more."
This article seriously lacks a video showing how the D-Dalus operates. Now it merely looks like a high-tech fan.
It's an entirely different kind of flying, altogether.
And it will bring us world peace, end hunger and cure cancer.
This shows the value of issuing press releases.
The wikipedia page also has an animation showing how it works.
The issue I see here is this:
Helicopter: engine quits, it can glide (autorotate) to a landing that most of the time is successful, and nearly all of the time doesn't kill anyone.
Fixed wing: engine quits, it can glide to a landing that most of the time is successful and nearly all of the time doesn't kill anyone.
Both small fixed wing and helicopters have simple mechanical controls that are very reliable, and quite often the failure of one of these controls results in a brown-pants moment for the pilot but the aircraft can still be controlled to a landing.
This doesn't look like it has that capability, and in addition requires electronic controls, so any failure = fall out of the sky. Of course, for small aircraft based on this concept, a ballistic full-airframe parachute may be used so in most cases the landing can be survived without serious injury, but ballistic chutes don't really scale all that well. With that it doesn't seem like a disruptive technology - perhaps a disruptive technology for small aircraft that can carry a ballistic chute or unmanned aircraft that don't fly over populated areas, but that's pretty restrictive compared to the different kinds of helicopter you can make, so I don't see helicopters nor fixed wing going away any time soon. That's not to say that if this turns out to be practical it won't be very useful, just that it's not really a disruptive technology if it requires a ballistic chute to not kill anyone if there's a computer or engine failure because this seriously limits the chances of it ever being a certified aircraft by any aviation authority in the world.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"I am now planning aerial machines devoid of sustaining planes, ailerons, propellers, and other external attachments, which will be capable of immense speeds"
"You should not be at all surprised, if some day you see me fly from New York to Colorado Springs in a contrivance which will resemble a gas stove and weigh as much. ... and could, if necessary enter and depart through a window."
"The flying machine of the future -- my flying machine -- will be heavier than air, but it will not be an airplane. It will have no wings. It will be substantial, solid, stable. You cannot have a stable airplane. The gyroscope can never be successfully applied to the airplane, for it would give a stability that would result in the machine being torn to pieces by the wind, just as the unprotected airplane on the ground is torn to pieces by a high wind. My flying machine will have neither wings nor propellers. You might see it on the ground and you would never guess that it was a flying machine. Yet it will be able to move at will through the air in any direction with perfect safety, at higher speeds than have yet been reached, regardless of weather and oblivious of 'holes in the air' or downward currents. It will ascend in such currents if desired. It can remain absolutely stationary in the air even in a wind for great length of time. Its lifting power will not depend upon any such delicate devices as the bird has to employ, but upon positive mechanical action."
-Nikola Tesla
Offtopic, but the link in your signature no longer works. The new URL is http://www.oolite.org/
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
Thirty years ago I was in the Propulsion & Thermodynamics group at Lockheed. One of the guys had a research project on spanwise rotor propulsion - his proof of concept used a beefed up cylindrical hair dryer rotor of the day. Yeah, you can get some net thrust, but at nowhere near the efficiency of conventional designs. There has to be a really strong reason to sacrifice all the extra fuel and weight and safety deficits when compared to better techniques. Perhaps there are niches where the tradeoffs are worth it, but that is not what I'd call "immense promise". Let's see what kind of thrust-to-weight, lift-to-drag, and thrust-specific-fuel-consumption their aircraft can produce first...
It's an entirely different kind of flying. :D
Is it April 1st, or just slashdot mods got bored?
As a pilot and an engineer... the sheer amount of bs in one article stymies the ability to say anything else!
Silent turbines? Do you know how a turbine works? Definitionally it moves amazing amounts of air (and fuel). Air movement = sound. It can't be silent.
It can "hover" into a building? Do you know how the threshold between "Hey we're just outside the window" and "oh now we're 2ft above the 3rd floor" and "yeah now our exhaust has nowhere to go" works?
It can "glue itself down to a deck of a ship"? How many aircraft have been swept off a deck of a carrier after landing? NONE! Gravity keeps them there. Sure, the engines can generate more than 1G of lift ... but if you need 2G to stick the aircraft to the ground... get a nice tether because you have one really expensive balloon!
Ridiculous.
Is it April 1?
E
Full disclosure: I am a licensed rotorcraft pilot. That means I fly helicopters. They don't have silent counter-rotating turbines (lol) and don't "stick to the deck."
actually one more dimension ought to decrease the possibility of collisions. I see no reason why most of the travel could not be on autopilot on one way routes. I'd trade a no asphalt world for a reasonably low risk of getting a flying car crashing in from the roof.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Don't ban it, just declare it an "airplane" and require a pilots license.
At least not yet. All they have is a proof of concept laboratory prototype.
The current status of D-DALUS
D-DALUS is currently in prototype stage. Over recent weeks IAT21 have conducted extensive constrained flight tests in a specially prepared laboratory near Salzburg, including the transition from vertical to forward flight, and are now ready to move to an open test range for free flight tests. In trials to date D-DALUS has met the performance criteria placed upon it and appears to be scalable, becoming more efficient and less complex as it increases in size. It will therefore be ideally suited for applications that range from maritime search and rescue, through the carriage of freight, to operating alongside and within buildings during fires or, for example, nuclear accidents.
They could probably do a CG presentation, but for those satisfied with that, those couple of images on their site should suffice.
They are apparently also planning "an autonomous pallet-transportation-system" and a small roof-sized power plant based on the underlying technology.
These last two apparently only existing in text form so far.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Here's a marvellous 1930's ref. from Wikipedia...
http://books.google.com/books?id=xSgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA26&dq=Popular+Science+1931+plane&hl=en&ei=5r8JTaa6Ismr8AaNmb2iAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBzgU#v=onepage&q&f=true
So... not exactly new but probably controllable with modern computer avionics.
There is a reason that less than 1/5 of one percent of the US population are pilots. It's not easy, it requires a lot of work, and it's very expensive (40-50 hours in a cheap cessna at $100/hr plus ~$35-45/hr for an instructor). There are even less instrument rated pilots (about 200,000 less) who are certificated to fly in poor weather/visibility. The problem isn't the "autopilotable" part (flying along a route), it's weather, navigation, landing, emergency procedures. Most people simply won't do it, it's far easier to drive a car.
Because its thrust direction depends on the shape of the rotor blades. You'd have to flip the rotor blades upside down to get upwards thrust.
No, just change the AOA of the blades sufficiently. However, you run the risk of the rotors contacting the tail rotor or the boom. They are not designed to flex in that direction.
There are some vids around of R/C helicopters hovering upside down.
Does it run on fossil fuel? If so, then this tech will only last until we run out of this fuel.
I think we need something that can fly on electricity.
You can run airplanes on biodiesel or alcohol if necessary.
See also:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/worlds_first_100_percent_biodiesel_jet_flight.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_202_Ipanema
Um, there's only one "o" in hover.
This is going to be just as disruptive as the Segway. But less disruptive than the Fiat 500.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I'm no aerospace engineer...
and obviously not a student pilot
But I'm imagining what happens if an engine quits during take-off/landing. In a fixed wing aircraft, you're probably still screwed depending on your altitude, but at least you have a chance at restarting and/or ditching in a field
Its not that bad, or it shouldn't be. Early on in training they make you run the math. In summary, with a "long enough" runway there is no dangerous zone at all... Fail early in takeoff and land on the remaining runway in front of you. Fail late in takeoff and you're so high up you can turn around before landing on the runway. If you insist on operating a "2000 foot minimum" aircraft on a 2001 foot long runway then you could be in trouble. Another way to get in trouble is to be indecisive ... I don't wanna declare an emergency because I'll have to fill out a simple one page form, and it might be embarrassing, naah, I'll just stagger along and hope for the best, that kind of attitude kills a lot of pilots. On landing you're in high drag slow flight mode, so when the engine quits drop the nose to optimum glide speed and just glide in. Its traditional to aim for the end of the runway when landing, but if its an extremely long runway you're best bet is somewhere downrange, so if the engine quits you land short, which is the end of the runway instead of a housing development. Again trying to operate a "2000 foot minimum" aircraft on a 2001 foot runway could be bad.
It IS pretty easy to end up in a unrecoverable scenario, and most of the unrecoverable scenarios are unfortunately picturesque (low and slow sightseeing / showing off to friends on the ground, etc). Another traditional way to end up unrecoverable is to have emergency procedure training get a bit out of hand, simulating an engine failure is not funny when the engine doesn't restart, even if you pass spin recovery 99% of the time you only get to fail spin recovery exactly one time in your life, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The patent for the device is covered in US patent 7735773. It does indeed appear to be a variant of a Voith Schneider Propeller. The claim for autorotation is interesting, and possibly quite valid, as is the claim about flying close to buildings or vertical surfaces, based on the proposed flow mechanics of the 'turbines' (quotes on purpose). My biggest issue is with the "additional power units" to support high speed cruise, which are not shown, and not well described.
Basically, I'll believe it when I see it fly. Until then, it's a Voith Schneider quadcopter demonstration mule. I'm waiting for a person to be transported.
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
a. It isn't a new kind of engine. It is using a standard piston engine. It is a new kind of impeller, rotor,
b. Propeller engines can't hover? What? I guess you have never seen a helicopter? Or any 3d model aircraft? Or ever been to an air show and seen a and Extra hang on it's prop? With a high enough power to weight ratio yes they can and do. And of course the V-22 Osprey does it on a regular basis.
c. Trusting up? Talk about being of very limited value. Just going to zero lift on landing is usually good enough. Using engine power to pin the craft to the ground has very limited utility.
Over all this is mildly interesting and could be really good for drones that need to fly in areas too tight for rotors. The claims of high lift and other claims are really out there. The performance is rather unspectacular. Here is a home built aircraft you can buy that has less then half the HP and carries a much bigger payload. http://www.innovator.mosquito.net.nz/mbbs2/specs.asp
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There is a reason that less than 1/5 of one percent of the US population are pilots. It's not easy...
But that is because of the nature of fixed wing aircraft: they have to be moving forward at considerable speed to maintain their lift hence landing is hard because you cannot take it nice and slow. This is what makes poor visibility very difficult to cope with too: you would not drive a car at 100 km/h if you can only see 20m ahead of you but with an aircraft you have no choice because if you slow down you fall out of the sky.
This technology will not make all of the problems magically disappear but it will make it far, far easier to be a pilot since you can always slow down.
If you go the less formal route, and if a new shiny plane isn't important for your training, you can actually find planes in the $60-$80/hr range with instructors running around $30. Keep in mind, most instructors are lucky to make $20-$25/hr through a company.
Also, with the advent of the light sport category, you can significantly reduce the number of hours to obtain your license. Private pilot requires an average of 70 hours. Light sport requires an average of mid 30-ish hours. After which, once proficiency is obtained, you can usually get your private pilot in an additional ten hours or so while flying until you decide to get it. And planes such as a Piper Cub qualify under light sport regulations.
Getting your license nor owning a plane need be extremely expensive. And given the loan terms, you can frequently get a used plane, on the lower end of the scale, with payments comparable to a nice bass boat or second car.
The average private pilot makes roughly $40k/yr. The average private plane owner makes less than $80k/yr.
Now if only we could get the FAA to allow free market competition and shoot all lawyers, we could all own a nice Cessna/Piper-ish for roughly the cost of a nice sports cars, but with payment terms over 10-25 years. Meaning they would be broadly affordable.
This is seriously unimpressive. Assuming this is a even a novel design, and not just an aero-adapted Voith Schneider propeller, they are missing a key design constraint of thrust-based aircraft. Thrust is produced through air volume and velocity. Traditional helicopter use very large rotors to produce high air volume. Ducted fans and other small propellers rely on air velocity, and energy needs are proportional to energy squared. As such, the power requirements for such propulsion systems go through the roof. The lifting capacities of the F-35 and CH-53 are roughly equivalent at around 35-40k lbs. The CH-53 has plenty of extra power with only 8k shp, while the F-35 struggles to take off at over 30k shp.
The article claims this could be a disruptive innovation in the aerospace industry comparable to the gas turbine engine. In reality, it really doesn't provide any functional advantage over pivot-able ducted fans. When scaled up to carry people, it's going to require a gas turbine to run it, or at least a very highly tuned reciprocating engine. Cargo and range is going to be limited. Downwash is going to prevent its use among population and ground clutter. This really doesn't change any of the limitations of previous craft.
Yep, and they're getting all kinds of bad publicity now, because most the comments here and on gizmag are "I don't believe it exists I need to see a video". Ouch, press release fail guys, you say like our new product and we say what new product. With the press you have one good chance to get your foot in the door, it will be that much harder next time even if they do have a video. That said I'm done with gizmag, every week they have another BS article of something that doesn't exist but sounds amazing. Last week it was the 200mph motorcycle helicopter that's never even been off the ground.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone