An Austrian unmanned air systems entrepreneur with a novel take on the problem of combining vertical lift with fast horizontal flight has unveiled a fully automated air taxi concept that promises fly-anywhere capability and 6-10h endurance from a heavy fuel engine.
According to Johannes Reiter – an agricultural and later aerospace engineer who founded aerospace firm Aerie in 2011 – the JETI manned concept (pictured) could be suitable for home-to-office travel.
Whether a vehicle with no pilot, no elbow room and a lying down riding position with a direct view of the ground below would actually find favour with passengers or regulators remains to be seen, although Reiter says there are “discussions” of the idea.
JETI is a 200kg (440lb) payload version of Reiter’s basic concept, which in a 10kg maximum take-off weight variant has been selected for a German government cartography project titled Frole, which has ordered six aircraft for 2014 delivery.
Reiter claims his concept consumes just one-third as much fuel as other VTOL designs, and thus can bring fixed-wing endurance to vertical lift aircraft. The machines hover up from any flat surface and transition to the horizontal with a swoop down that ends in level flight. At take-off or landing, different versions sit tripod-style, either on the nose or tail and the tips of what in level flight become forward-swept canards or a V tail.
Propulsion – for vertical lift and horizontal thrust – can be by propellers on fixed wings, or by spinning the variable-pitch wings, rotorcraft style, with the downwash over the canards preventing rotation.
Reiter started work on a 25kg version in August 2011 and managed a lift-off to demonstrate thrust-to-weight efficiency, but found stability problems to be “expensive” to resolve. A 2kg demonstrator has been more successful, leading to the Frole contract, although he says he would like to resume work on the larger model, which needs about 18 months in development and promises 24h endurance.
From an efficiency perspective, he adds, the concept is scalable. The passenger-carrying JETI may not get off the ground, but a 200kg version for more standard UAS purposes, which Reiter calls Kestrel, could also provide 24h flight times with a heavy load of sensors.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
