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Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph
Zothecula writes: As one of the contenders in the race to win a $100 billion contract from the U.S. government for the next generation of attack helicopter in the Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program, AVX Aircraft Company has conceived a futuristic machine kitted out with coaxial rotors, ducted fans and a retractable undercarriage that could hit speeds of over 270 mph (435 km/h).
And piloted by a young rebel, with a cranky old sidekick as a navigator. They should make this into a TV show.
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One hundred *billion* dollars? Enough to buy about 5000 Apache attack helicopters (I would not like to be on the wrong end of those). Why do I think this program will end up with a tiny, tiny fraction of that?
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While a simpler and more conservative design, a helicopter like this already exists: The Eurocopter (now Airbus) X3.
Not yet in production but several functioning machines that already reached speeds of 472 km/h.
Of course this is a civillian design, not military, and has far less transport capacity, but the technology is working already. This is beyond prototype stage and ramped up for commercial prodcution right now.
Eurocopter also planned to compete in the FVL program, but since the US would have claimed IP in this case, a civilian production would not have been possible without paying licence fees to the US (despite the US not contributing any development ressources or IP).
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The V-22 Osprey performs a similar role for the Navy/Marine Corps. Why develop a new platform that will cost billions of dollars and many years of research and testing? The V-22 can be adapted to this new role much faster and for a lot less.
Not! This is a figment in AVX's collective mind. The real helicopter doesn't move at all except for CGI on a computer monitor. Not to say they couldn't build it but a bit premature to say much about it. "It could reach speeds of a billion light-years per fortnight." Hey, maybe it'll do the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.
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The Kamov series have co-axial rotors. The Ka-52 can already hit 240+mph without any ducted fans, and there is also improved manoeuvrability. Tail rotors just waste energy from the engines.
There's going 300MPH and there's going 275MPH with a four man crew and 14 grunts onboard, a Bugatti Veyron can go 254MPH but you can't tow a boat with it.
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More importantly, a pair of counter-rotating rotors gets around the pesky roll issue caused by rotor stall on the retreating side at high speed. The rotor may still stall, but it doesn't matter nearly as much since you're still balanced.
Yeah. Quadcopters are far less efficient than single-rotor aircraft, and multicopters (hexa, octa) are even less efficient.
The reason people go to hexas and octas is that scaling a quadcopter up to the payload sizes of some of the octas/hexas starts causing issues with blade inertia - an octacopter is more stable.
The main reason quadcopters are doing so well for small aircraft is that at that size class, the mechanical complexity (tail rotor with transmission and collective pitch, plus collective and cyclic pitch control for the main rotor) of a single rotor or dual-rotor aircraft adds a LOT of cost. (The only flight controls of quadcopters are motor speed, with a few exceptions of quads with collective pitch which is still FAR simpler than cyclic pitch control) Once you get to a fullsize helo - it turns out that the quadcopter approach becomes more expensive than a single-rotor AND it's far less efficient.
Kind of similar to how LEDs dominated the flashlight industry for years but only recently became feasible for residential/commercial lighting - incandescent bulbs suffer significantly reduced efficiency and bulb lifetime when scaled down to flashlight sizes.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?