Leaving aside the travel of a commercial jet, air travel could be weird. Even a regular helicopter ride is different from a jet ride, how about travelling a weird helicopter? Here are some crazy helicopters that you may be (not) interested in.
De Lackner HZ-1
This is perhaps the most dangerous helicopter that you will come across. The American army decades ago realized the need of one-man helicopters. Out of the several developed, De Lackner HZ-1 was the weirdest one. There were a couple of crashes in the testing, luckily no one died. On top of a powerful motor were two oppositely rotating propellers, above it was a small platform for a single person. This was more or less, like a skeleton of a helicopter, to minimize the weight of the machine there wasn’t anything to protect the pilot from falling on the rotor blades!The Army later cancelled the contract, as they did not require such a helicopter any more.
Helicopter with 18 propellers
This is a prototype and the commercial version will be pocket friendly. If all the trials succeed, the helicopter will bring a revolution in air travel. Why 18 propellers are required to take this thing in air? Well, it is an electric helicopter, capable of flying via remote controls. Named Volocopter VC200, it is developed by E-Volo.The commercial helicopters that we see around us, fly at speeds up to 120 knots where as Volocopter will reach a max of 54 knots. This electric helicopter is capable of flying with a little less than 1,000 pounds of weight. This is about one-tenth of the weight carried by commercial helicopters. On the other hand, just think how much fuel will it save and the environmental benefits that follow.
Mil V-12
Image Source : tvd.im
Unfortunately, by the time this massive flying machine was successfully tested, the Russian Airforce rendered the V-12 obsolete and dropped its requirement. The prototypes are still in existence and can be seen at the Russian air museums. The main body or the fuselage of the helicopter is like a normal jet and on top of it is the muscular rotor system of the Mi-6 helicopter. Until date, no helicopter has been able to beat this one in size, even though it was produced in 1967. The first flight of the V-12 was a disaster, the gigantic helicopter lost power and crashed. Despite the up gradations and successful testing by Mil, the helicopter never came into production.
The aviation history is full of experimentation, because of the efforts including the weird ones, we have powerful sexy flying machines today. The weird ones have their contribution in the commercially produced ones.]]>
