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Human-Powered Helicopter Team Sets New Records For Altitude and Flight Duration
First time accepted submitter daltec writes "The $250,000 American Helicopter Society Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition prize, unclaimed since 1980, is now within Gamera II's reach. On Thursday, the University of Maryland's Clark School of Engineering team unofficially satisfied two of the three American Helicopter Society Sikorsky Prize requirements. The giant craft flew for 65 seconds, stayed within a 10 square meter area and hovered at two feet of altitude. New unofficial U.S. and world flight duration records were also set. The team expects to make their next attempt Saturday." That's today!
The requirement they accomplished is a 10 meter square, not 10 square meters.
The aircraft was damaged Thursday evening after another attempt at altitude. The team has repaired the craft though and resumed testing just a few minutes ago. The flights are taking place at the Prince George's Sports and Learning Complex, 8001 Sheriff Road, Landover, MD 20785, if you want to see their latest attempts!
We have to eat happy eggs from happy chickens.
To be a real helicopter, it needs to be able to fly out of ground effect.
This would be at least a height equal to the diameter of the propellor, or 40 meters height about with the current prop.
Under this height, it gains significant advantage from being next to the ground - it's behaving like a hovercraft, not a helicopter.
See the nice graph at http://www.copters.com/aero/ground_effect.html - two thirds of the way down.
At 1/4 (10m altitude for the above device) the thrust is 20% better than at altitude.
You could in principle make a free-flight helicopter by bolting two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Daedalus 's to a light spar, so it's in principle possible.
http://www.agrc.umd.edu/gamera/index.html