Helicopters are great. They're manoeuvrable in very tight spaces, they haul heavy things relative to their small sizes -- and, very importantly, they take off and land vertically, removing the need for a big airstrip or aircraft-carrier deck. That function is so important to the military that the US designed fixed-wing aircraft to do the same thing, like the Marines' iconic Harrier jet or their weird tilt-rotor Osprey.
Yet none of them are any good, according to the Pentagon's blue-sky researchers at Darpa, who are launching an effort to blow up and re-imagine helicopters, jump jets and tilt-rotors. It's time to make these "VTOL" aircraft -- the collective term for Vertical Take-Off and Landing -- much, much faster, without sacrificing their ability to hover or other functionality.
By: Spencer Ackerman, Edited by: David Cornish
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/26/rethinking-the-helicopter
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