Just a Neat Concept or the Future of Helicopter Design?
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Parent Category: News
Category: 6 Blog
Created on Saturday, 21 April 2012 16:22
Written by Brian Zwahr

Aviation Week posted an article about a new concept for aircraft design which has been awarded the Lindberg Prize for Innovation. Part of the design provides extra safety, but most of the design is strange (in a good way!).

The VC1 is a single-seat aircraft with 16 top-mounted battery powered propellers (like a helicopter) mounted on four arms. The design is certainly strange, but the number of configuration of propellers adds safety to the craft, and with current battery technology the craft can fly for approximately 20 minutes.

Although the VC1 is currently the only one which has been actually built and flown, designs for the Volocopter, a two-seat helicopter with a similar multi-proppeller array design, have been worked on. It will be interesting to see if this idea and new design takes off (pun intended).

For more information, I highly recommend the source article below. Be aware that at the time of this writing, the link is taking some time to load, so please be patient.

Source: Aviation Week

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