A Novel Non-Polluting VTOL Hybrid Airplane

Abstract

It is getting more and more a significant problem for governments, industrials and the eco-system itself that known transportation systems do not provide the market between fast airplanes with small payloads and slow ships with weighty payloads. Without affecting the eco-system with harbors, rails, highways, runways and exhaust gases actual and future transportation needs seem to be impossible. Conventional airships are very sensitive towards weather, fly slowly and mostly necessitate a ground-crew while take off and landing due to its large surface. The proposed aircraft concerns a VTOL hybrid airplane with the synergetic advantage, that every component which is necessary for a rotation symmetric VTOL, also can be used for a mirror symmetric cruise, whilst during take-off, cruise-flight and landing the demanded lift will be generated in a hybrid way using dynamic lift and static buoyancy. At the same time the potential capacities of lighter-thanair constructions to lift heavy payloads are exploited optimal through a lenticular shell. Two wings with fully symmetric airfoils are mounted marginally while both, the front and the back of the airfoils, can be flapped in a definite angle. It is consequently possible to adopt an axially symmetric configuration (helicopter) as well as a mirror-symmetrical configuration (airplane). The power supply consists of non-polluting fuel and solar cells. This paper presents the functionality, the short-term plans for research and development of such a small scale slowly flying autonomous observation drone and plans to the long-run realization of the introduced hybrid airplane for the described middle market gap.