Description
Sikorsky (A Lockheed Martin company) released a request for proposal as a student competition to design a rotorcraft capable of traveling 450 knots at an altitude of 20,000 ft, among many other challenging requirements. The 450 knots speed requirement in particular presents an especially difficult challenge since there exists no other helicopter that has ever flown faster than 320 knots. Our group took a novel approach to the problem leveraging existing and revolutionary ideas and configurations, which not only satisfies the required speed, threat avoidance, and payload capacity among other things, but delivers a vehicle that would be an invaluable asset to the warfighter.