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The Fastest Helicopter on Earth

spectrum.ieee.org

31–33 of 33 posts

Re: The Fastest Helicopter on Earth

#31
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The X2 is not a production model, it is an experimental aircraft. According to the article, the technology used in the X2 will eventually be used in production models that will presumably "go fast and do something meaningful." Otherwise nobody would buy them ;)

Well there's still plenty of uses for a fast and helicopter. Patrol missions for one. But hopefully they'll be able to scale this up to bigger sizes. Does anyone know if that would be much harder? I.e. is it inherently harder to make heavier helicopters go faster? Or do you just have to scale up the fabrication.

I imagine like everything in aerospace, 'just scaling up' isn't as simple as it is. Drag increases non-linearly as you scale up for one thing, and with something as tricky as the rotors of helicopter, you probably have to do all sorts of nuts stuff to get it to work. For one thing, you can't just make the rotor span larger (with same rotation speed), cause then your increasing the velocity of the rotor tips which could cause all sorts of problems.

Re: The Fastest Helicopter on Earth

#32
post #19

The article really should have mentioned the BA-609 tiltrotor aircraft. It's the civilian version of the V-22, and nearly ready for production. The BA-609, with the speed and range of an airplane, has tremendous potential, and is the reason why Sikorsky started resealching faster helicopters.

The V-22 should make for a very interesting engineering story when all of the history comes out. Tiltrotors inherently have a lot of moving parts, plus a very complicated aerodynamic profile as they transition from helicopter mode to airplane mode. It took decades to develop it, at least one fatal accident, and a lot of technology risk throughout, and all the while it was a prime candidate for cancellation. The only…

To be fair, initial stealth technology wasn't even THAT expensive. The initial development of 'true' stealth (Pave Blue/F-117) cost about 2 Billion USD in R&D and a total of about 7 Billion for all the planes and everything else.

Furthermore, it wasn't even that implausible. Some Soviet physicist already wrote the paper telling us how to calculate Radar Cross Sections. The initial prototyping was a huge success (pretty much matched up exactly what their expected/calculated values).

Now, the B2. That's a different story. It's very hard to justify 2 Billion dollar bombers, no matter how you spin it.

Linkie here: http://www.ausairpower.net/Profile-F-117A.html and also Ben Rich's excellent (though somewhat biased) book Skunk Works.

Re: The Fastest Helicopter on Earth

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The V-22 should make for a very interesting engineering story when all of the history comes out. Tiltrotors inherently have a lot of moving parts, plus a very complicated aerodynamic profile as they transition from helicopter mode to airplane mode. It took decades to develop it, at least one fatal accident, and a lot of technology risk throughout, and all the while it was a prime candidate for cancellation. The only…

To be fair, initial stealth technology wasn't even THAT expensive. The initial development of 'true' stealth (Pave Blue/F-117) cost about 2 Billion USD in R&D and a total of about 7 Billion for all the planes and everything else. Furthermore, it wasn't even that implausible. Some Soviet physicist already wrote the paper telling us how to calculate Radar Cross Sections. The initial prototyping was a huge success (pret…

The 2 billion dollar price tag is misleading, though--the design cost was supposed to be amortized over a much larger order of planes.
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