Shape of things to comeU.K. start-up to demo serious flying robo-saucer in 2009
Innovative British company will demonstrate a robotic flying saucer next year; the hovering craft is based on the Coanda effect, and will be of help to soldiers and first responders in urban settings
A year ago, on 14 September 2007, HS Daily Wire ran a story about the British start-up developing a flying saucer. We should pay the company, GFS Projects of Peterborough, a visit to see what has happened since. The small company is developing a unique form of hovering aircraft, and it says it will soon demonstrate a new and much more serious version of its technology. GFS Projects was registered in 2002, following early efforts by former hovercraft engineer Geoff Hatton to develop a working flying saucer aircraft based on the Coandă effect (see below). GFS, by the way, stands for Geoff’s Flying Saucers. The Register spoke to GFS marketing chief Mark Broughton the other day, and he offered a run-through on the “Fenstar 50” autonomous unmanned saucer which the company hopes to have flying in the first half of next year.
The Fenstar 50 will be the first GFS saucer to use an internal combustion engine. Previous craft have been electrically powered, and have suffered from very short endurance. The current electric saucer, which formed part of Team MIRA at the recent Ministry of Defense (MoD) Grand Challenge ambush-sniffing tech contest (see HS Daily Wire 22 August 2008 story), can normally stay up for just two and a half minutes. The new Fenstar 50 is expected to manage up to an hour, carrying a payload of 5 kg — a quarter of its all-up weight. GFS aims to keep the total weight under 20 kg, as this is the most that the CAA allows under model aircraft rules. Any more would take the company into the hugely more onerous certification regime for full-sized aircraft.
Even at 20 kg, however, the Fenstar 50 will be significantly bigger and more capable than one of its main rivals, the Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) from Honeywell. The MAV uses a ducted fan rather than a GFS-style Coanda surface, but this offers similar advantages — neither vehicle has projecting helicopter-style rotors. Both of them can thus fly about happily in between buildings, and perhaps in and out of doors and windows, etc. Both could be very useful as reconnaissance machines for soldiers and first responders, especially in dangerous urban combat — indeed Honeywell’s machine has already seen action in Iraq. The MAV runs on a two-stroke petrol engine like the Fenstar, and offers similar endurance, though it weighs just 7.25 kg
