Rethinking rotorcraft: Airbus aims for speedy helicopter

Helicopters are sometimes seen as the poor relation of the aerospace sector. While attention is lavished on fast jets and commercial airliners, helicopters clatter along, fulfilling their role as workhorses of the military and emergency services, pretty much taken for granted. Certainly, The Engineer has not covered helicopters in as much detail as other types of aircraft over the past decade.

This perception is, of course, wrong. Possibly the most complex of flying machines – at least in terms of their mechanics and aerodynamics, not to mention the difficulty of actually flying them – helicopters are subject to just as much development and innovation as any other aircraft. An ambitious project by Airbus to make a fast helicopter demonstrates differences and similarities between rotorcraft – as they are called in the sector – and conventional fixed-wing aircraft.

The new craft, whose design was frozen last summer ahead of its construction phase starting this year, is intended as a “mission demonstrator”: roughly one step ahead of a prototype but not yet a model for a production aircraft. It was designed as part of Airbus’s commitment to Clean Sky 2: a major European Union project to develop aircraft with reduced impact on the environment in terms of their fuel consumption, carbon emissions (these two are, of course, linked) and noise. Because of this, it is generally known simply as the Clean Sky 2 rotorcraft.