The fuselage has a lightweight, stretchable skin made of fiber-enhanced, polyurethane-coated Lycra (think of BMW’s GINA concept car). The flexible fabric enables a retractable forward wing that is deployed to increase lift at high altitude.
The fabric is covered in bendable pentacene thin-film transistor displays that project dynamic, real-time images of the helicopter’s environment on to the fuselage skin to provide active camouflage.
An active noise-cancellation system using flexible, transparent loudspeakers made with thin-film carbon nanotubes and applied to the fabric and blades would reduce noise and vibration to improve comfort and reliability, Pankl says.
The drive train has two interleaved main rotors and two ducted rotors for propulsion, all electrically driven by a redundant hydrogen-oxygen fuel-cell engine. This layout eliminates both geaboxes and tailrotor, the company says.
The main rotor blades are unusually short, to reduce noise, and have sinusoidally scalloped leading edges – inspired by the humpback whale’s flippers – that increase rotor maximum lift by delaying blade stall, Pankl says.
