CarterCopter: a high-speed, low-cost helicopter

Man has dreamt of personal flight for thousands of years, and attempted to fly for almost as long. Leonardo Da Vinci got it right when he stated, "the bird is a machine that operates according to mathematical law" when designing his ornithopter five centuries ago, but it took another four centuries for us to get the basics handled well enough to break the shackles of gravity.

It is ironic indeed that the technology creating the greatest barrier to mass personal flight is that of the human being - we are too careless, too erratic and make too many mistakes to be given pilot licenses en masse. Though we appear quite accepting of the carnage on the roads, there would be a much greater toll if as many people flew their own planes with the same level of competence as they drive their automobiles.

With a century of powered flight behind us, many futurists regard an era of mass powered personal flight as inevitable within the next century, and some see it as a lot sooner.

NASA's Langley Research Centre has a Personal Air Vehicle Exploration program understanding and nurturing the technologies which will enable the next generation of aircraft and they are predicting mass adoption not much more than a decade from now. Their vision of the future is not that much different to the people who saw the cars of the thirties somehow growing wings - practical everyday four-seaters within the reach of normal people.

NASA's work has many facets, - the American Government regards the aviation industry as its won. Americans invented flight, and has owned a large slice of the aviation and subsequent aerospace industry ever since. But things started to go wrong for aviation a quarter century ago - in 1978 the U.S. General Aviation (GA) industry delivered 17,811 aircraft. In 1993, the number of aircraft delivered had fallen to 954, an all-time low.

Therefore, in 1994, NASA, in partnership with U.S. industry and the Federal Aviation Administration, began a new partnership to rejuvenate the technology base and revitalize the industry. The partnership, together with critical tort reform and an expanding economy, contributed to a bright new future for Aviation and in 1998, there were 2,220 aircraft deliveries accompanied by expanding employment and more student pilots.

The biggest single problem in having the population take to the skies is already well on its way to being overcome - there is no pilot more attentive, more suitable to the assessment of and immediate response to the complexities of flight than the computer, and all the work being done with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles at present is likely to significantly enhance the safety of mass flight. There are of course many barriers to mass flight beyond overcoming human suitability, one of the foremost being that how to get a flying machine into and out of the sky safely.

Launching an aeroplane requires a speed quite unsuitable for public roads, so unless we were to suddenly make room in our overcrowded suburbs for a local landing strip, the only answer is VTOL - vertical take-off- and landing.

Gizmo has looked at several such designs, such as the Moller Skycar and Millenium Jet's XFV, but both are struggling to find commercial success given their unconventional approaches. Great minds and heavenly budgets have been spent pursuing this dream and until now it has eluded all efforts.

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