The American company Bell Textron has shown three concepts of high-speed aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing. The devices will be able to hover in one place, like a helicopter, while their range and speed will be airplane-like. As reported by The Drive, the propellers on the wingtips of the aircraft will be folded, which will significantly reduce the drag.
The US Special Operations Forces last year announced that they were going to replace the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor planes with new aircraft with vertical take-off and landing. The requirements of the military are still quite abstract. They want a promising device to fly at the speed of jet planes.
Bell showed three variants of a promising high-speed aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing. It will be able to hover in one place, like a helicopter, and at the same time fly at a jet cruising speed of more than 700 kilometers per hour. The aircraft will weigh from 1.8 to 45.4 tons.
In all three concepts, the screws on the wingtips are folded, reducing drag during flight. Bell previously patented a similar solution for a new-generation tiltrotor.
The concept of a new-generation Bell tiltrotor
Image source: United States Patent and Trademark Office
The first two Bell concepts represent manned aircraft, and the third, most likely, is unmanned. Otherwise, they differ from each other in small details, such as the location of the engine air intake.
In the future, high-speed aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing Bell can replace the American military CV-22 Osprey. To replace the latter, the company also creates the V-280 tiltrotor, which we wrote about earlier. But the US special Operations forces are not interested in buying it yet.
Vasilisa Chernyavtseva
