How fast does a lynx helicopter fly

To make the revived helicopter fly more efficiently at high speeds, specialists in aerodynamics turned to computer-aided design tools to craft the airfoils, rotors, and fuselage. The modeling software indicated that this rotor would have significantly less drag and more lift than what was used in the XHA. Then there was the problem of the jet engines. Simply adding jet engines to the helicopter does speed it up, but they are noisy and fuel hungry.

So the X2 design team decided to use a variable-pitch pusher propeller at the aft end of the fuselage to provide forward thrust when needed. That propeller is good not only for acceleration but also for rapid deceleration. Another critical advance was in the controls. The XHA had used a mechanical flight control system that was both heavy and extremely complex. It commanded six hydraulic servoactuators to change the pitch of the rotors three actuators per rotor , operated the rudders, and controlled the two auxiliary jet engines.

The system contains three redundant flight-control computers just to be safe. If one of them fails, it instantly shuts down, allowing the aircraft to fly normally on the remaining two computers. The different sensors on which the flight-control system relies are also installed in triplicate.

The engine Sikorsky ended up choosing for the X2, an LHTEC T turboshaft, is a modern, state-of-the-art design that might well serve for a production vehicle. The rotors, propeller, and engine are coupled together with gearboxes and shafts. The X2 prototype made its first test hop on 27 August , in Elmira, N. Several more low-speed flight tests also went off without a hitch.

To venture to higher speeds, Sikorsky sent the test team to its flight center in West Palm Beach, Fla. On the day of that flight, in August of this year, the test team got started at the crack of dawn. To ensure that the pilots would be flying in smooth air, the crew had to be on site by a. The crew rolled the aircraft out onto the runway, where a dozen safety officers in bright orange jumpsuits and noise-canceling headsets were on patrol.

Two chase vehicles were there to observe the test flight—another helicopter and a fixed-wing turboprop. The latter would be needed to keep up with the X2 as it accelerated to higher speeds. The test team was on high alert as it orchestrated flight activities to keep the three vehicles a safe distance apart. Cheers and applause broke out on the ground. The pilot slowed the X2, turned it around, and flew back to land on the runway. Everyone involved was jubilant, but most of all relieved—especially the pilot.

The real X2 has only about 14 flight hours on it, but its engineers and pilots have spent hundreds of hours flying the simulator. Assuming all goes well, Sikorsky engineers are planning to adopt some of the technologies used on the X2 for the new helicopters they have on the drawing board.

So expect some dramatic shifts in the way helicopters are designed. Thomas Lawrence, a technical fellow at Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. First he helped design an airship lifted by four conjoined helicopters. Next came the XHA, a futile effort to break the helicopter speed record. He then focused on the X-Wing, an aircraft that could take off like a helicopter but switched midair to fly like a fixed-wing airplane.

None succeeded. See the Back story on this article. Craig S. China has taken another step toward semiconductor independence with Alibaba announcing the design of a 5-nanometer technology server chip that is based on Arm Ltd.

But, impressive as that feat is, an even more significant chip design development by the Chinese tech giant may be making available the source code to a RISC-V CPU core its own engineers designed. This means other companies can use it in their own processor designs—and escape architecture license fees. The company made both announcements at its annual cloud convention in its home city of Hangzhou last month. The Chinese government is funding a lot of startups that are designing a variety of chips.

The number of newly registered Chinese chip-related companies more than tripled in the first five months of from the same period a year ago. And the biggest Chinese technology companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei are developing their own chips rather than banking on those from Intel, Nvidia, and other United States-based companies. China is intent on developing semiconductor independence, both in design and manufacture of state-of-the-art chips.

The urgency for doing so has been helped along by U. The sanctions extend to any Huawei suppliers that use U. The United States, alarmed at China's campaign to bring Taiwan under its control, has also begun an ambitious program to 'reshore' its semiconductor manufacturing after allowing much of it to migrate to Taiwan. Around 80 percent of the world's semiconductor production capacity is in Asia, and nearly all the most advanced logic chip production is in Taiwan.

No Chinese semiconductor foundry has yet achieved the 5-nanometer processing needed to make Alibaba's new ARM-based chip, so it is still beholden to Taiwan for manufacturing. But the implications of Alibaba's general choice of Arm and RISC-V instruction set architectures is perhaps more consequential for the long term. An instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the language in which software talks to hardware, and thus determines the kind of software that can run on a particular chip.

Most servers use CPUs based on Intel's x86 instruction set architecture. But UK-based Arm, which licenses its instruction set architecture to chip designers, has been gaining a foothold in this market.

RISC-V, which refers to the fifth generation of an open-source reduced instruction set computer architecture created by U. This past June, China hosted the fourth annual RISC-V summit, bringing together industry, academia, and government to talk about the future of the architecture. In the wake of the U. Unable to buy Intel chips because of the sanctions, Huawei most recently sold its x86 server unit to a company owned by China's Henan province.

From the beginning, the company indicated that it intended to open the CPU's source code—the hardware description language that describes the structure and behavior of the CPU core's electronic circuits. It has now done so… with little fanfare. Its Yitian server system on a chip SoC , manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC, will have a total of Arm-based cores, with 60 billion integrated transistors and a top clock speed of 3.

Alibaba said it is the first server processor compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture. Alibaba said the SoC achieved a score of in SPECint a standard benchmark for measuring CPU integer processing power , surpassing that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor based on Armv8 by 20 percent in performance and 50 percent in energy efficiency.

The Lynx featured new technologies, including the British Experimental Rotor Programme BERP blades, which made it possible to increase maximum speed and enhance lifting capabilities and the blades were later adopted for all Lynx and Super Lynx variants and for the AW helicopters.

The award was established in by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers IMechE to recognise pioneering engineering artefacts, locations, collections and landmarks. The October edition of the Telespazio and e-GEOS calendar, Love Planet Earth , brings us to the Svalbard Islands, in the Arctic Ocean, through satellite shots and National Geographic photos, to help us understand the fundamental role of satellites in the protection of the Arctic and the delicate balance on which it stands.

G-Lynx: 35 years of an unrivalled speed record 11 August More than two dozen compound helicopters have flown since the s, when the helicopter was first invented. What exactly is a "compound helicopter"? Well, according to Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics by Prof. Gordon Leishman Cambridge University Press, :. A compound helicopter involves a lifting wing in addition to the main rotor lift compounding or the addition of a separate source of thrust for propulsion thrust compounding The idea is to enhance the basic performance metrics of the helicopter, such as lift-to-drag ratio, propulsive efficiency, and maneuverability.

The general benefit can be an expansion of the flight envelope compared to a conventional helicopter.