Aerovel Flexrotor UAV first transition - August 2011

Aerovel has released this video of the Aug 11, 2011, transition between vertical and horizontal flight by its Flexrotor vertical take-off and landing small unmanned aircraft. The flight included a hover and vertical recovery. Flexrotor has been designed by the same people who developed the Insitu ScanEagle long-endurance small UAV and is designed for fully automatic vertcial take-off and recovery and an edurance of more than 36 hours. Launch and retrieval is from a portable fold-out rig with widely spaced parallel bars to support the wings.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• aerospace
• aviation
• aircraft
• unmanned
• UAV
• VTOL
• Flexrotor

[GreenAce92]

Why would they use the big rotors for forward flight? They could feather them and use the outboard motors by cross-linking by a common drive shaft to the main gas engine.

[GreenAce92]

The v-tail design is excellent, how ingenius!

[zorrolizhi]

This reminds me the German Heinkel Lerche VTOL interceptor at the end of WW2

[elviocorna]

AMAZING !!!!

[briansmobile1]

This is a winning design. Very versatile, somewhat simple, and efficient.

[fireengineer]

WOW the thing is talking away, announcing every parameter of its manuvers, awesome. SciFi becomes SciFa!!

[blondecrazygaijin]

Great vid. The voice-over of your narrator featured variable sound quality --the mouth position might ave been moving excessively.

[1BustedMyth]

I really look forward to your videos, they always make my day, BIG thankyou

[stratosjoebar]

cool