The plane is the perfect means of transportation for long distances, thanks to its speed and the fact that it does not require any infrastructure in the air. On the ground, things are different: any airport needs runways several kilometers long, tens of thousands of square meters of maneuvering space and cumbersome terminals. For this reason, for shorter distances, the train or the road is usually used, but the question is: why not take advantage of the air transport over short distances, but without its drawbacks?
The helicopter is the almost immediate answer, since it is relatively fast (a few hundred km/h), it travels in a straight line regardless of landforms, and its landing and take-off operations are much simpler than those of airplanes. But then another question arises: if they are so good, why don’t we use them?
There are many variants, but the main one is the physics of our planet. And it is that, as he remembers in a BBC information, it is difficult to manufacture medium-sized devices, which can carry dozens of people in a single trip.
The first attempt to solve this for the Rotodyne, a helicopter with a giant rotor and a pair of small wings, which was also powered by a jet, with a capacity for 40 people. The problem is that his noise was bestial.
Fifty years after this first attempt, the civil aviation industry seems ready to borrow from the military the concept of the convertible aircraft, a propeller plane that, to land and take off, points its rotors towards the sky.
Many options
That’s just what Boeing’s V-22, which has been in service with both the US Marine Corps and the US Navy for years, does.
And it is precisely what the helicopter manufacturer AugustaWestland (now renamed Leonardo) intends, with its Next Generation Civil Tilt Rotor (NGCTR). In its preliminary design it will be a ship with a capacity for 20 people, a maximum speed of 483 kilometers per hour and whose first flight is expected for 2021.
However, experts believe that the future of vertical takeoff air transport cannot go through devices whose rotors are huge (they must be to support the ship in the air when it is not moving horizontally).
Two options have already been proposed to solve these deficiencies. One, called DiscRotor, is the work of Boeing and proposes that the helicopter mount a huge disc on its upper part, and under it the blades. Everything works like a conventional helicopter, except that as the ship gains horizontal speed, the blades become expendable… and therefore hide inside the disc.
The other alternative is from Boeing, and just ignores the propeller rotors. In its place, the A350H has reactors under the fuselage that are responsible, as in the F-35 fighters, for providing vertical thrust. The problem with this is that it hardly goes beyond the design concept. As throughout the history of aviation, we will have to wait until the engines are even more powerful, and the materials even lighter, to make the dream of traveling everywhere from the center of the city come true.
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