Under the hood
Explore the technology
Five pages, one airframe — from how it flies to how it lands when something goes wrong.
Multirotor drones are simple to fly but battery-limited to short range. Helicopters have the range and speed, but only through a mechanically complex, hard-to-fly rotor system. Flying Squirrel is built to take the better half of each.
Fixed-pitch main rotors, driven by gasoline engines through a synchronized chain transmission, deliver sustained cruise power a battery-only aircraft cannot carry.
No swashplate, no cyclic or collective pitch to fly by hand. Attitude and direction come from four independently vectored fans — the same logic a drone flight controller uses.
A permanent flexible skirt turns the same airframe into an air-cushion vehicle over water, wetland, or snow — a bonus capability, not the core pitch.
A single-engine failure is absorbed automatically by the synchronized transmission. A whole-aircraft ballistic parachute is the last-resort answer to a dual-engine failure.
Simpler flight controls and a two-engine gasoline powertrain target a cost class closer to a personal aircraft than a certified helicopter.
Every performance figure on this site is labeled for what it is — a working target or a validated result — never blurred together.
"A helicopter rotor does two jobs at once — lift and control — and that's exactly what makes it expensive, complex, and hard to fly. Split those jobs onto separate hardware, and each one gets simpler."
"Fixed-pitch rotors only need to spin and lift. Vectored fans only need to point and push. Neither one needs a swashplate, and neither one needs a pilot with a thousand hours of autorotation practice."
Five pages, one airframe — from how it flies to how it lands when something goes wrong.
Every cruise speed, range, and power figure in this concept is a working engineering target, not a validated result. The 300 km long-range objective, for example, reflects a deliberately conservative fuel-consumption assumption adopted after an earlier, more optimistic estimate was walked back.
See the full specification| MTOW | ≈ 700 kg (target) |
|---|---|
| Normal cruise | ≈ 140–150 km/h (preliminary) |
| Standard mission range | ≈ 180–220 km (working estimate) |
| Long-range objective | ≈ 300 km |
| Surface (auxiliary) cruise | ≈ 30–50 km/h |
We're looking for partners who want to help take Flying Squirrel from concept to validated hardware.
