Flying Squirrel FLYING SQUIRREL.
Flying Squirrel in flight mode over a city at sunset
Take-off, hover, and forward cruise as one continuous regime.
The core capability

Flight Mode

Covers take-off, hover, landing, and forward cruise as a single regime. Two fixed-pitch main rotors provide continuous lift; four independently vectored corner fans handle everything else. Quadcopter control logic, helicopter performance class.

How the jobs split

Lift and control, on separate hardware

Two mechanically-driven, fixed-pitch main rotors (≈3.0 m each) do only lift — no swashplate, no cyclic or collective pitch, no mechanical linkage to the flight controls. They just spin and generate lift, the one job a rotor is genuinely efficient at.

All attitude, direction, and forward thrust come from four independently vectored electric ducted fans, each able to tilt roughly ±30–40° on two axes. This is the same differential-thrust control logic a multirotor drone's flight controller uses — just applied to a machine sized and powered for real range and speed.

Two gasoline engines, through a synchronized chain transmission, give the rotors sustained power a battery-only aircraft cannot carry. That is what makes helicopter-class cruise speed and mission range possible, rather than a twenty-minute drone hop.

Flying Squirrel cruising over coastline
Why it matters

Three things this buys

Range and speed of a helicopter

Fixed-pitch rotors sized for sustained lift, driven by gasoline engines, deliver cruise speed and mission range a battery-only multirotor cannot — engine power, not battery capacity, sets the ceiling.

Control of a quadcopter

No swashplate, no cyclic or collective pitch to fly by hand. The same differential- thrust logic that makes drones simple to fly and simple to certify.

Redundancy without autorotation

A single-engine failure is absorbed automatically by the synchronized chain transmission and freewheel clutches — no immediate loss of lift. See Safety for the full failure-mode picture.

Working parameters
Main lift rotors2× fixed-pitch, ≈3.0 m diameter each, ≈14.14 m² combined disk area
Corner fans4× independently two-axis vectored, ±30–40° range, ≈40 kW peak each
Engines2× gasoline ICEs through a synchronized chain transmission
Electrical bus2 motor-generators + battery buffer, ≈60–65 kW continuous

All figures are preliminary engineering targets — see Specs for the full, labeled specification.