Rotor-less helicopter holds promise for rescue missions
Israeli company designed a rotor-less helicopter which should be of great interest to first responders: Because the helicopter does not have a rotor, it can attach itself to a building’s window and have the people inside climb through the window directly into the hovering helicopter outside
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it fall, does it make a sound? If a helicopter does not have a rotor, is it still a helicopter? Lod, Israel-based Urban Aeronautics is about to sign a cooperation agreement with Fort Worth, Texas-based Bell Helicopter Textron to provide the U.S. Navy and, later, the other armed services with rotor-less helicopters. The helicopter was designed by Rafi Yoeli, UrbanAero’s founder, for search and rescue missions. Homeland security and first response units will note this: Because the helicopter does not have a rotor, it can attach itself to a building’s window and have the people inside climb through the window directly into the hovering helicopter outside.
The X-Hawk was completed two years ago and the Herzlia Medical Center in Israel has already ordered one of them. The U.S. Navy has initially allocated $1 million for the project, and the money will be divided equally between UrbanAero and Bell.
In a conventional helicopter, the blades are located above the fuselage, but in the X-Hawk the blades are housed on the sides of the fuselage. The idea of a rotor-less helicopter is not new, but UrbanAero’s proprietary and patent-protected technology has found breakthrough solutions to the two major problems earlier rotor-less designs encountered: The first breakthrough solves the navigation, control, and monitoring problem, while the second breakthrough addresses the question of speed: Earlier models reached a modest speeds of 50 kph, but the X-Hawk offers 250 kph
