Originally Posted by
Dave_Jackson
It appears that inventors are a proud people with their own ideas and a fear of divulging them.
Dave
Dave,
Of course, there may be other explanations of equal validity. If you are going to invite the whole world to feast at your table of helicopter design, are the people who are actually capable of designing, building, and flying a helicopter going to want to rub elbows with the guys who want to carve rotor blades out of 2x4's from Home Depot and power it with an Evinrude outboard? Or would they consider that a needless distraction?
Originally Posted by Dave_Jackson
The current industry appears to consist of a few well financed companies, which are perhaps putting their financial statements ahead of their product development, plus a number of very small ventures, which lack financing and technical depth.
Have you ever heard the term 90% finished, 90% to go? It is commonly used in the homebuilding scene, meaning that once the project looks like an aircraft you still have a long way to go to all the way finished. If you consider today's helicopters, I would call them 90% evolved. That last 10%, which would yield the ultimate performance and safety that a helicopter could ever achieve, is a bigger job than what it took to get to where we are today. That 10% is a combination of structural, aerodynamic, powerplant, and weird science (like morphing blades and IBC) which is not quite in the realm of practical yet. Nor may it ever be. We push toward the 91% solution with fault tolerant designs, better crashworthiness, better rotor blades, engines with better SFCs, but it is a long way before we even start working on 92%. But, as these technologies mature to the point where it isn't a pipe dream to implement them, you can bet the big dog companies will jump on the bandwagon. After all, each one of those top 100 CEOs wants to beat the average worker by 8:40 next year, and sooner the year after.
-- IFMU